(Generic Fantasy City Book PDF) Viable Product?

[Ben Lehman]

I'm planning a book somewhat similar to this.  While I don't have much to add, really, I would be very interested to see how this goes (obviously).  Please keep me updated.

The one thing that I can say is don't shy away from a certain degree of specificity.  You cannot make a generic city, and so it is best to accept that you are designing setting, and focus on making it good, useful setting, rather than trying to avoid the presence of setting at all.

yrs--
--Ben

[smokewolf]

I would have to add, that if its a city you want to build then build it. Add whatever you think should be in the city in it. If you think there should be elves, then add elves to it. Have a clear design in your head and follow it. If its good people will use it.

Remember the adage:

You can always cut rope to fit, but you can not add to it.

[greedo1379]

Splitting it up would be an awesome idea!  And definately, releasing five "books", one per month for $5 would be better than releasing a single large book once for $20.  You keep it it the "New Releases" area and end up with more money.

If you didn't want to split it up into geographic sections you could also do it by relative "power level".  Like I said before, my characters would have to do a lot of little jobs for the cobbler and money lender before the king sends them out.  You could just do Books 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 where 1 is the basic introduction to the city.  Two is the inn and main shops adventurers would want to go (getting all the adventure hooks) and so on until you get to Five with the super high level stuff.

I think Geographic would actually be preferable for me but just as an alternative.

[greedo1379]

Another potential trouble with a generic city is what assumptions do you make about the settings it will be used in? To get the most potential buyers it should have a D&D feel, but then the existence of a dwarven quarter might turn off someone who's into Acrana Unearthed. And of course if it doesn't have a bizarre mayan or asian look, I might have a hard time using it in a Tekumel campaign.

I've got to confess that I'm not familiar with Tekumel or Arcana Unearthed.  With that out of the way, I can assume that Arcana Unearthed doesn't have dwarves or has special dwarves and Tekumel is an asian/mayan type setting.

In cases like this it would be up to the GM to either replace dwarves with a more appropriate race (swapping out "Dwarf" for "Human" and "The Stonecutter's District" or "Metalworker's District" rather than Dwarftown for example) or remove that section of the city entirely.  Regarding the "look" it would be up to the GM to just show different pictures of the city and NPCs.

Personally I am most interested in Privateer Press's Iron Kingdoms setting so I would probably replace the elves and half elves with humans, halflings with gobbers, and half orcs with trollkin and ogrun.  The magic shop would end up being a mekanika shop.  And so on.  The core of the setting would remain intact though.  Just the window dressing would change.

I think this is an important point though.  I don't think it would be a bad idea to explain this is in the introduction or somewhere like that.

And actually... supplying a book just of line drawings in different genres could be a useful thing...