Historical "fantasy" to help develop cities

[Bishop Odo]

Historical Fantasy maps, I know it’s a bit of an oxymoron, but has anyone ever approached a fantasy city mapping project using an urban devolvement, and time, as a starting point. For instance most fantasy settings have cities that are thousands of years old, In Shadow World there are active cites that are 10,000 years old, taking clue historical and archeological sources, there are a number of events that happens to most cities, fires, flood, wars, technology changes and failures and soil accumulation all have a tendency to change a city over time. Harn for example, is the only setting, where I have seen a harbor silted in and rendered unusable.

While, I have a tendency to over think things, and my skill set with CC3 is developing, I was curious if anyone has ever approached a project with that methodology. To a certain degree its fluff and background, yet there could be some unique qualities to map done in this way. From a gaming point of view, it’s the unique properties of a map that spark my imagination as a GM and player.

There is a TV show, and I forgot that name, that visited ancient underground sites. Roman Aqueducts, Istanbul cisterns, and London tube network talking about what was out there? I have also looked for various gaming resources to help, old White Dwarf issues have some good stuff, as well as a few Dragons. However, the current trend in RPG gaming is less history and bigger swords so I have been generally disappointed in finding more historic information.

So if anyone has any suggestion, I would appreciate it. Products like Magical Medieval Society, Cityscape and City works are quite generic and a good place to start ultimately you just have to take and educated guess.

While I’m still working on the CC3 tutorials, I have been thinking of reworking map of my favorite Shadow World city. Generally I’m looking for some type self imposed curriculum to advance my skills, by working on a few of favorite location.

A little food for thought.