Now that I’ve determined how big the city is (8,000 population) we know that there will be 80 “blocks” in the city, each 500 feet on a side. For the map I’m drawing I’m using a scale of 1,000 feet to the inch, so each “block” will be a half-inch square. Using City Works, the next step would be to determine the divisions of blocks within the city.

A roll of 99 makes Cruar’s Cove a “Fading City”. Business is poor for this city, as its reliable industries have hit a serious slump. Many laborers are unemployed, and those few families who can afford to have left for greener pastures. Normally this has 5% of the non-residential space as dock space, where a port city has 10%. What I’ll do here is turn Industrial down from 20% to 15%, and add 5% ruins to the city, and have the ruins as the old unreppaired and collapsing docks.

The distribution of blocks goes as follows (80 blocks total – 40 residential, 40 industrial)

Industrial Blocks (40 total)

* 5% Ruins (2 blocks)
* 5% Docks (2 blocks)
* 10% Entertainment (4 blocks)
* 10% Government (4 blocks)
* 15% Industrial (6 blocks)
* 15% Markets (6 blocks)
* 5% Military (2 blocks)
* 5% Parks (2 blocks)
* 5% Temples (2 blocks)
* 10% Travel (4 blocks)
* 5% University (2 blocks)
* 10% Warehouses (4 blocks)

Residential Blocks (40 total)

* 5% Upper Class (2 blocks)
* 10% Middle Class (4 blocks)
* 65% Lower Class (26 blocks)
* 20% Slums (8 blocks)

Now it’s time to draw the basic environment for the city – keeping in mind that it needs room for 80 blocks (so roughly 4.5 inches by 4.5 inches on my map). A roll on Table 3 (City Shape and Layout) sticks to the standard Radial layout. It has 1d3 walls (one of which is an outer wall, and any remaining walls being ones the city outgrew). In this case we get two walls, the outer walls and an inner wall. 20% of the city is within the inner wall, 60% within the outer wall, and the remaining 20% will be outside of the walls. 2d4 major roads run into the city (from the farms and fishing villages scattered across the Hill Islands). I roll 5 roads. Half run directly from the outer wall through the inner walls to the center of town.

Time to break out the tracing paper and the terrain map from yesterday and lay down the grid I’ll be using for the city. I lay out an area roughly the size I need and then draw in the city walls (in pencil for now – I’ll add them as a new layer in pen once the blocks have been assigned). I also haven’t put the major roads in yet in this scan – we’ll see them once I start assigning blocks.