What's In the City?

[Demonsozen]

Everything, in my opinion, is relative. So, if you have a big town, you need a big market. Small town, small market.

(I'm not much of a military guy) so I don't know about the Garrison. I had a teacher named Mr Garrison. But thats about it.

[thebax2k]

Aval, that's a tricky question to answer. I would start by going to this site: http://www.rpglibrary.org/utils/meddemog/ and looking at the bottom where all of the businesses are listed. Obviously your city does not need all of them, but if it is based on the middle ages, than it will have many of them. I would say that no city, at a bare minimum, based on history would be without merchants/a market, taverns, inns, and restaurants, a blacksmith, a temple, a well/wells and or water source, and a government structure (such as the keep). The keep/garrison will be located on the most defensible land feature in or near the city--so if there is a hill, then the keep/castle will be built on top of that. Or, if waterways and the coastline form a peninsula, the keep would likely be on the peninsula for the greatest defensability. If the area is completely flat without any natural features that would aid in defensability, then the keep/castle will likely have been built on a massive scale with multiple curtain walls and towers to command the area around it. Although its fantasy based, take a look on Dragonsfoot.org in the map section, there is an excellent map of the kind of castle that would be built in an area with few natural defenses.

Another good answer to your question is: what do you need for your characters to further their adventures and have a place to blow off steam? A city in a game or story is ultimately a backdrop or setting for the pcs/characters within that game/story. So, make sure you have an inn/tavern, a thieves guild (and requisite sewer tunnels with nasties), a mages guild or a mages tower or towers, and plenty of locales for plot/adventure hooks. Take a look at the Citybook series from Flying Buffalo or the X Quarter series (Temple, Arcane, etc.) from the Game Mechanics. Both have loads of locales that while not necessarily mandatory for a city, provide plenty of adventure potential.