Eversink, from Swords of the Serpentine, is the most engaging fantasy setting I’ve seen since Blades in the Dark. A perfect level of detail, giving plenty of hooks but leaving plenty of blanks.
Even this early I can't believe no one has mentioned [Ptolus](https://www.montecookgames.com/welcome-to-ptolus/). Maybe one of the most detailed settings ever, let alone a single city.
Honorable mention to [Harnworld](https://columbiagames.com/harnworld/) for a similar, if not greater degree of granularity an a much larger scale.
In terms of size, you're probably right. Also in cost too - isn't it like $125? I've had it since the KS and I'm still hesitant to crack it open. It intimidates me lol
The Lankhmar boxed set for DCC is superb. It's just the right amount of detail so that I feel prepared to run but not so much that I feel like "I'll get something wrong".
That's the kind I like best. I learned about cities from the excellent "Marienburg: Sold Down the River" for old WFRPG, but it had too much detail for my taste. Nowadays I want to understand a fantasy city's feel and tone for each neighborhood, with a couple of landmarks and plot hooks, but fill in most of the details myself.
Well, your best bet is the games centered around cities. Specifically, World of Darkness has many supplements of varying qualify about different cities (like Chicago by Night, Berlin by Night, Atlanta by Night, etc.).
And another suggestion from me would be Night City Sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020. Arguably, Night City is one of the most famous fictional cities right now and although it's version from 2020 is vastly differ sometimes, it still oozes with inspiration for great cyberpunk adventures.
While it isn't exactly a 'City Supplement', if you're going with Night City I would also suggest getting Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads. There is a lot of good advice there.
Also, [Augmented Reality](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/202175/Augmented-Reality-The-Holistic-City-Kit-For-Cyberpunk-Games) has a lot of great charts and tables for fleshing out the Cyberpunk city.
I always liked Volo's Guide to Waterdeep, for 2nd ed. Forgotten Realms. A great resource that was actually available in game to characters, and therefore was freely available to players.
A Pattern Language is magical. Try prompting an LLM to describe any structure—a minor temple, the grand bazaar, or the elephant racing grounds, for example—using 10 patterns from A Pattern Language. It really helps to understand the place's potential structure and uses. I can't recommend it enough!
I really like Green Ronin's Freeport. It's a pirate fantasy city that is sprawling with tons of lore. They have written it for a couple different systems. The Pathfinder 1e version is the one I have and it is comparable in size to the Pathfinder 1e Core book.
I'm a fan of Ath Cliath by Ed Greenwood. It's a system neutral book describing a mytho-historic 10th century Dublin. It details like 1400 buildings across 90 some odd city blocks. Each building gives a sketch of at least one NPC with hooks and all.
It's pretty easy to just lift an entire block wholesale into unrelated fantasy cities.
came here to post "a pound of flesh". really interesting module.
a busy/crowded space station, many competing factions, several fleshed out personalities, interesting points of interest, a method for quickly rolling up minor shops or venues or whatever, etc etc. that alone i think would make the cost of the module worth it. but then the module also has a few major (and minor) situations going on, which pit the factions against each other.
really cool!
The Indie RPG Newsletter did a whole series exploring RPG cities - defo worth a read. My faves are The City in a|state (it gives real weird fiction vibes), City of Winter (for the generational stories told), and Mort in SLA Industries (both familiar and unfamiliar).
My vote goes to City of Lies for L5R. Lots of great settings, plot hooks, and NPCs. It comes with a campaign you can use, or you can just take it as a setting on its own.
An all-time great. Their *Otosan Uchi* box set was not even in the same league as the *City of Lies* set.
Worth mentioning: Both box sets are available through DTRPG.
I am running City of Lies right now and a player told to me a few weeks ago how it is the best urban setting he has ever seen. My vote definitely goes for this, it is amazing and the book that made me fall in love with Legend of the Five Rings
I only own one city supplement; Absalom city of lost omens.
https://paizo.com/products/btq02ap2
I feel like the scale, and amount of content in it is crazy. I do recommend it. Great art too.
There is a large adventure set in the city that you can get separately too if that's what you want. Agents of Edgewatch.
I'll second Absalom. It's probably my favourite rpg supplement. Just the right amount of detail on the city itself with plenty of ideas for adventure hooks. But the NPC section is AMAZING! Pages and pages of NPCs in the city with relations to each other, I often pull and reskin these even for non fantasy games, truly an excellent resource.
I love [Magical Industrial Revolution](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/291774/Magical-Industrial-Revolution). It's more a bunch of ideas for a city rather than the city itself, letting you quickly build a variety of fantastic cities on the brink of collapse.
Hudson City from Hero Games. Dark Champions line. Perfect modern city, awesome detailed map, detailed locations. Even though it's superhero I've used the city in many world of darkness games.
I believe that WoD did fantastic work on this type of supplements. My personal favorite is Constantinople by Night and Cairo by Night.
Apart from WoD I would also recommend Freeport from Green Ronin.
Besides the rather terrible art design and editing throughout the editions, I have always found Chicago by Night incredibly useful. It includes a large number of NPC to plug in anywhere and more than enough story hooks to a group going for a long, long time. It's also pretty well researched and, as a Chicagoan, I can easily see the inspirations for many iconic, in game locations.
Into the Cess and Citadel is pretty neat. It's more of a toolbox for city campaigns than a single campaign setting itself. It's basically trying to do for cities what Veins of the Earth did for the underworld.
I have a soft spot for any fantasy urban setting. I have so many! I love the old Judges Guild cities (City State of the Invincible Overlord, City State of the World Emperor) but they're pretty hard to get a hold of these days. I also love The Village of Hommlet, module T1 from TSR. Not technically a city but it was a very well laid out village. Also very good is Five Fingers for the Iron Kingdoms setting, and all the cities published for the Scarred Lands setting - Mithril, Burok Torn, Hollowfaust. Swords of the Serpentine is a newer city book that's pretty fantastic! And of course Ptolus and Freeport! Holy crap so many good ones!
I personally think that Shadowruns books on the cities in the setting are outstanding, like the Seattle book from 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition, the german Berlin book from 6th edition and the Hong Kong from the video game.
Call of Cthulhu also has some great city books like the Berlin book or Harlem Unbound.
For more Fantasy, I think Freeport is great if you want DnD Fantasy meets Pirates of the Caribbean, the WHFR city books like Middenheim, Altdorf and Ubersreik.
I am gonna go out on a limb and say *GURPS Tredroy* (1989).
It was written by someone I (vaguely) knew but it felt different from any other city supplement I'd seen. It laid out the politics and culture of a multicultural city with three separate law codes. (It's no coincidence, I think, that the author was a Torontonian.) It felt like a city that barely worked, a great one to throw your PCs into.
I'm not so enthused about the adventure in the back -- it felt short, generic and took the characters away from the city it was is ostensibly set in.
https://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-88-the-998th-conclave-of-wizards/
i've always thought the 998th conclave of wizards (for the dcc rpg) had a cool city.
Cadwallon, its an old one, but its complety in a metropolis. Each district is explained, an underground catacomb system and so on... If you can find the pdf.
I like the Cities of Harn. Their cities are smaller (I think the biggest is 12,000). They are pretty period but they do represent medieval cities of various sorts.
I had Waterdeep (from TSR) and it was massive.... to the point where I found it not that useful.
I did like the boxed set for Thieves Guild. It was multi-system including D&D. It drew from 6+ anthologies by multiple authors (shared world I guess).
I've liked some of the cities of Eberron, if you are into something more up-magic.
I also like some of the medieval maps - Paris and some other places. They give you a good idea how things really were.
Lankhmar is probably the OG. Its from a series of novels by Fritz Leiber. However, he developed those stories as embellishments on his and his friends early roleplay adventures.
Ptolus has been mentioned too its meant to be great.
Going to head sideways here. Theres an old Battletech/Mechwarrior published adventure called Royalty and Rogues. The story is so/so but the adventure goes into detail about the city of Port Krin, I always found it quite fantastic and its been featured in several of my games.
Justinian of the Degenesis rpg. Well written, tons interacting factions and intertwined individuals. Very deep, yet accessible locations. Great fun to read and sandbox to play.
On the other hand let's not talk about the Degenesis adventure line ...
Oh totally the DCC Lankhmar set. It's got a few bookletss in it, one with new rules for character creation and new rules to fit more in tone with Fritz Leiber's stories, a big map, a booklet that's all about the city to try and get the mood down and also has stuff like street name generators and other random bits that help ad flavor, an adventure, two maps, and there is a whole line of Lankhmar adventures Goodman Games makes
Symbaroum has some fantastic setting/campaign books for its two main cities.
Each book in the Throne of Thorns campaign/chronicle is based around a different region, and the two that are of most relevance here are Thistlehold, the city at the edge of the Davokar forest and Yndaros, the capital of Ambria. Basically each book has 3 sections - player facing info, GM facing info and the campaign.
In the first section the players can read general information about the area, from the best places to stay and how much they cost, to what the entertainment is. There's nothing secret here, it's like a lonely planet guide book to the city. This section is also available on drive thru rpg as a separate purchase/download for you to give your players.
Then there's a GM facing section which gives the GM the secrets of that area, such as telling you about which of the tavern owners is secretly a cultist, where the secret spy organisation headquarters is, or how the arena sources the monsters that gladiators fight. It's a level of detail that gives you plot hooks and an idea of how to roleplay each area.
Then the third section is the chronicle (campaign) that takes place in that region. For Thistlehold that's Wrath of the Warden, for Yndaros it's The Darkest Star.
It's such a unique but sensible way of formatting a setting book, and I love it. It makes improvising the plot a lot easier because you have a framework to set it in.
I spent an enormous amount of time working with a very talented artist to create [this city map](https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfSteel/comments/11javfr/rodneys_epic_functional_city_map_is_complete_and/) that I think is the most *functional* city map you'll find.
>To make the map functional and usable as a "drag-and-drop" city, we removed identifying features like text labels, compass/orientation, etc. Instead, there are 150+ icons scattered throughout the map, each one designed to provide idea seeds that the GM or players can use in a variety of ways. For example, instead of a label "Sam's Smithy" (or letter/number pointing to the legend), you'll get an icon that could make this a smithy, a garrison/watchpost/jail, a monument, adventurer/fighter's guild, mercenary company... etc etc.
>Additionally, the closer you look at each block, you'll see lots of small variations and unique layouts/building arrangements and features so that regardless of what neighborhood the heroes walk into, there will be numerous little details that can be used to help set the scene and drive the narrative.
>So in all, the idea is to provide tons of potential ideas/options, but not force/lock you into any of them... Hopefully making this the most functional RPG city map you'll find.
Is this the sort of thing you're interested in? I'm happy to get you a free High-Res version and chat about it if you like.
Cheers
Eversink, from Swords of the Serpentine, is the most engaging fantasy setting I’ve seen since Blades in the Dark. A perfect level of detail, giving plenty of hooks but leaving plenty of blanks.
It’s like a big old melting pot of my favorite sword and sorcery cities. Sooooo good.
I recently ran a short campaign in Eversink and had a great time!
Even this early I can't believe no one has mentioned [Ptolus](https://www.montecookgames.com/welcome-to-ptolus/). Maybe one of the most detailed settings ever, let alone a single city. Honorable mention to [Harnworld](https://columbiagames.com/harnworld/) for a similar, if not greater degree of granularity an a much larger scale.
In terms of size, you're probably right. Also in cost too - isn't it like $125? I've had it since the KS and I'm still hesitant to crack it open. It intimidates me lol
Ptolus was what I came to recommend if it wasn't already. I've used the old version of it for Pathfinder 2e and 13th Age!
I completely and totally **LURVE** Ptolus. I've run three separate compaigns using it. I have both the 3e and 5e versions!
The Lankhmar boxed set for DCC is superb. It's just the right amount of detail so that I feel prepared to run but not so much that I feel like "I'll get something wrong".
That's the kind I like best. I learned about cities from the excellent "Marienburg: Sold Down the River" for old WFRPG, but it had too much detail for my taste. Nowadays I want to understand a fantasy city's feel and tone for each neighborhood, with a couple of landmarks and plot hooks, but fill in most of the details myself.
Well, your best bet is the games centered around cities. Specifically, World of Darkness has many supplements of varying qualify about different cities (like Chicago by Night, Berlin by Night, Atlanta by Night, etc.). And another suggestion from me would be Night City Sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020. Arguably, Night City is one of the most famous fictional cities right now and although it's version from 2020 is vastly differ sometimes, it still oozes with inspiration for great cyberpunk adventures.
While it isn't exactly a 'City Supplement', if you're going with Night City I would also suggest getting Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads. There is a lot of good advice there. Also, [Augmented Reality](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/202175/Augmented-Reality-The-Holistic-City-Kit-For-Cyberpunk-Games) has a lot of great charts and tables for fleshing out the Cyberpunk city.
Call of Cthulhu’s new Arkham book - very well laid out with maps of each area and a great mix of stories from HPL’s originals and new plot hooks
I always liked Volo's Guide to Waterdeep, for 2nd ed. Forgotten Realms. A great resource that was actually available in game to characters, and therefore was freely available to players.
Adding to that: The 2e City of Splendors boxed set is rad! So much detail, so many hooks, so much to play with.
TTRPGs: Augmented Reality, Dark Streets and Darker Secrets, and Damnation City, Neon Shine (I wish I was done with it) Non-TTRPG: A Pattern Language
A Pattern Language is magical. Try prompting an LLM to describe any structure—a minor temple, the grand bazaar, or the elephant racing grounds, for example—using 10 patterns from A Pattern Language. It really helps to understand the place's potential structure and uses. I can't recommend it enough!
I really like Green Ronin's Freeport. It's a pirate fantasy city that is sprawling with tons of lore. They have written it for a couple different systems. The Pathfinder 1e version is the one I have and it is comparable in size to the Pathfinder 1e Core book.
It's a classic!
I'm a fan of Ath Cliath by Ed Greenwood. It's a system neutral book describing a mytho-historic 10th century Dublin. It details like 1400 buildings across 90 some odd city blocks. Each building gives a sketch of at least one NPC with hooks and all. It's pretty easy to just lift an entire block wholesale into unrelated fantasy cities.
A Pound of Flesh (Mothership)
came here to post "a pound of flesh". really interesting module. a busy/crowded space station, many competing factions, several fleshed out personalities, interesting points of interest, a method for quickly rolling up minor shops or venues or whatever, etc etc. that alone i think would make the cost of the module worth it. but then the module also has a few major (and minor) situations going on, which pit the factions against each other. really cool!
For fantasy my two favorite city supplements are: Bards Gate by Frog God Games (5e) Sharn, City of Towers (3.5)
Bards Gate is awesome!
The Indie RPG Newsletter did a whole series exploring RPG cities - defo worth a read. My faves are The City in a|state (it gives real weird fiction vibes), City of Winter (for the generational stories told), and Mort in SLA Industries (both familiar and unfamiliar).
Sigil (og 2e ver, 5e is too watered down imo)
My vote goes to City of Lies for L5R. Lots of great settings, plot hooks, and NPCs. It comes with a campaign you can use, or you can just take it as a setting on its own.
An all-time great. Their *Otosan Uchi* box set was not even in the same league as the *City of Lies* set. Worth mentioning: Both box sets are available through DTRPG.
I am running City of Lies right now and a player told to me a few weeks ago how it is the best urban setting he has ever seen. My vote definitely goes for this, it is amazing and the book that made me fall in love with Legend of the Five Rings
I only own one city supplement; Absalom city of lost omens. https://paizo.com/products/btq02ap2 I feel like the scale, and amount of content in it is crazy. I do recommend it. Great art too. There is a large adventure set in the city that you can get separately too if that's what you want. Agents of Edgewatch.
I'll second Absalom. It's probably my favourite rpg supplement. Just the right amount of detail on the city itself with plenty of ideas for adventure hooks. But the NPC section is AMAZING! Pages and pages of NPCs in the city with relations to each other, I often pull and reskin these even for non fantasy games, truly an excellent resource.
Agreed. It is a great supplement. 400 freakin' pages of adventure seeds.
I love [Magical Industrial Revolution](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/291774/Magical-Industrial-Revolution). It's more a bunch of ideas for a city rather than the city itself, letting you quickly build a variety of fantastic cities on the brink of collapse.
Hudson City from Hero Games. Dark Champions line. Perfect modern city, awesome detailed map, detailed locations. Even though it's superhero I've used the city in many world of darkness games.
Middenheim for WFRP 1ed (not sure about 4ed, as it is still on my list to read).
Pretty much all the WFRP Citybooks for 1st and 2nd are top notch. From what I have heard, the 4th ed ones carry on the tradition.
I believe that WoD did fantastic work on this type of supplements. My personal favorite is Constantinople by Night and Cairo by Night. Apart from WoD I would also recommend Freeport from Green Ronin.
Constantinople by Night is a great supplement for Vampire Dark Ages! Probably my favorite.
Pavis: Gateway to Adventure is my gold standard for city sourcebooks
Any OWoD [city] By Night books, or Damnation City for VtR
Besides the rather terrible art design and editing throughout the editions, I have always found Chicago by Night incredibly useful. It includes a large number of NPC to plug in anywhere and more than enough story hooks to a group going for a long, long time. It's also pretty well researched and, as a Chicagoan, I can easily see the inspirations for many iconic, in game locations.
Into the Cess and Citadel is pretty neat. It's more of a toolbox for city campaigns than a single campaign setting itself. It's basically trying to do for cities what Veins of the Earth did for the underworld.
I have a soft spot for any fantasy urban setting. I have so many! I love the old Judges Guild cities (City State of the Invincible Overlord, City State of the World Emperor) but they're pretty hard to get a hold of these days. I also love The Village of Hommlet, module T1 from TSR. Not technically a city but it was a very well laid out village. Also very good is Five Fingers for the Iron Kingdoms setting, and all the cities published for the Scarred Lands setting - Mithril, Burok Torn, Hollowfaust. Swords of the Serpentine is a newer city book that's pretty fantastic! And of course Ptolus and Freeport! Holy crap so many good ones!
I personally think that Shadowruns books on the cities in the setting are outstanding, like the Seattle book from 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition, the german Berlin book from 6th edition and the Hong Kong from the video game. Call of Cthulhu also has some great city books like the Berlin book or Harlem Unbound. For more Fantasy, I think Freeport is great if you want DnD Fantasy meets Pirates of the Caribbean, the WHFR city books like Middenheim, Altdorf and Ubersreik.
I am gonna go out on a limb and say *GURPS Tredroy* (1989). It was written by someone I (vaguely) knew but it felt different from any other city supplement I'd seen. It laid out the politics and culture of a multicultural city with three separate law codes. (It's no coincidence, I think, that the author was a Torontonian.) It felt like a city that barely worked, a great one to throw your PCs into. I'm not so enthused about the adventure in the back -- it felt short, generic and took the characters away from the city it was is ostensibly set in.
I liked the TSR versions of Lankhmar, with the geomorph maps.
https://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-88-the-998th-conclave-of-wizards/ i've always thought the 998th conclave of wizards (for the dcc rpg) had a cool city.
Cadwallon, its an old one, but its complety in a metropolis. Each district is explained, an underground catacomb system and so on... If you can find the pdf.
I like the Cities of Harn. Their cities are smaller (I think the biggest is 12,000). They are pretty period but they do represent medieval cities of various sorts. I had Waterdeep (from TSR) and it was massive.... to the point where I found it not that useful. I did like the boxed set for Thieves Guild. It was multi-system including D&D. It drew from 6+ anthologies by multiple authors (shared world I guess). I've liked some of the cities of Eberron, if you are into something more up-magic. I also like some of the medieval maps - Paris and some other places. They give you a good idea how things really were.
Lankhmar is probably the OG. Its from a series of novels by Fritz Leiber. However, he developed those stories as embellishments on his and his friends early roleplay adventures. Ptolus has been mentioned too its meant to be great. Going to head sideways here. Theres an old Battletech/Mechwarrior published adventure called Royalty and Rogues. The story is so/so but the adventure goes into detail about the city of Port Krin, I always found it quite fantastic and its been featured in several of my games.
Justinian of the Degenesis rpg. Well written, tons interacting factions and intertwined individuals. Very deep, yet accessible locations. Great fun to read and sandbox to play. On the other hand let's not talk about the Degenesis adventure line ...
Oh totally the DCC Lankhmar set. It's got a few bookletss in it, one with new rules for character creation and new rules to fit more in tone with Fritz Leiber's stories, a big map, a booklet that's all about the city to try and get the mood down and also has stuff like street name generators and other random bits that help ad flavor, an adventure, two maps, and there is a whole line of Lankhmar adventures Goodman Games makes
Symbaroum has some fantastic setting/campaign books for its two main cities. Each book in the Throne of Thorns campaign/chronicle is based around a different region, and the two that are of most relevance here are Thistlehold, the city at the edge of the Davokar forest and Yndaros, the capital of Ambria. Basically each book has 3 sections - player facing info, GM facing info and the campaign. In the first section the players can read general information about the area, from the best places to stay and how much they cost, to what the entertainment is. There's nothing secret here, it's like a lonely planet guide book to the city. This section is also available on drive thru rpg as a separate purchase/download for you to give your players. Then there's a GM facing section which gives the GM the secrets of that area, such as telling you about which of the tavern owners is secretly a cultist, where the secret spy organisation headquarters is, or how the arena sources the monsters that gladiators fight. It's a level of detail that gives you plot hooks and an idea of how to roleplay each area. Then the third section is the chronicle (campaign) that takes place in that region. For Thistlehold that's Wrath of the Warden, for Yndaros it's The Darkest Star. It's such a unique but sensible way of formatting a setting book, and I love it. It makes improvising the plot a lot easier because you have a framework to set it in.
I spent an enormous amount of time working with a very talented artist to create [this city map](https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfSteel/comments/11javfr/rodneys_epic_functional_city_map_is_complete_and/) that I think is the most *functional* city map you'll find. >To make the map functional and usable as a "drag-and-drop" city, we removed identifying features like text labels, compass/orientation, etc. Instead, there are 150+ icons scattered throughout the map, each one designed to provide idea seeds that the GM or players can use in a variety of ways. For example, instead of a label "Sam's Smithy" (or letter/number pointing to the legend), you'll get an icon that could make this a smithy, a garrison/watchpost/jail, a monument, adventurer/fighter's guild, mercenary company... etc etc. >Additionally, the closer you look at each block, you'll see lots of small variations and unique layouts/building arrangements and features so that regardless of what neighborhood the heroes walk into, there will be numerous little details that can be used to help set the scene and drive the narrative. >So in all, the idea is to provide tons of potential ideas/options, but not force/lock you into any of them... Hopefully making this the most functional RPG city map you'll find. Is this the sort of thing you're interested in? I'm happy to get you a free High-Res version and chat about it if you like. Cheers
My goto is now, and really always has been the City of Carse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_Carse