The Cities Book is an 90 page Game’s Masters aid for running city adventures. It is system independent and while designed for fantasy role playing games it’s usable wherever human population centers are found. Cities is composed of 4 different sections as listed below.

City Encounters (27 pages):

The Encounter Tables serve to add variety and richness to the streets of your bustling city. Four different master Encounter Tables, one for towns and 3 for cities, index into 23 pages of detailed tables, providing an outline and small backstory to each potential encounter. Encounters for towns are rolled dependent on time of day (day, evening or night) while encounters for cities are different, depending on the area (Poor Quarter, Wealthy Quarter, or Merchant Quarter), time of day (day, evening or night) and whether the encounter is on a Main or Lesser/Alley Streets There are plenty of adventure hooks embedded in the tables that the GM and characters can use, but most of the encounters are intentionally notable but actually mundane occurrences (not everybody who bumps into a character is a pickpocket…).

Populating your cities and towns (24 pages):

Now that you have defined your city’s concept and have drawn or generated the city’s map, you’re still stuck with the hard task of populating each individual building in a realistic manner. These tables can help.

For Villages there is a table defining what buildings/occupations are present based on the number total buildings. There are additional tables for determining information on the village’s Open Market.

For Cities and Towns there are tables and guides for determining what kind and how many buildings/businesses are in your city and where they should appear.

City Catchup - a solo adventure (24 pages):

The City Catchup section is a useful tool for both the GM and players; it answers the question of what did adventurers do between adventures.

The GM can use it to keep multiple bands of adventurers in time sync and to involve characters in the longer term social and political currents of this city.

Each Player can treat this section as a solo adventure: making friends, contacts and enemies, learning new skills, joining a cult or the military, making investments, becoming a person of interest of the secret police, and more … Each turn is one week.

Appendixes (7 pages):

The following appendixes are included to augment the other sections and used as a resource by the GM.

• Missions: Defines missions for Goods, People, and Places
  
• Taverns / Inns / Hotels: Tavern Level Description, Prices, Number and type of Customer
  
• Occupational Backgrounds: Plebian Skills, Artisan Skills, Noble Skills
  
• Street Traffic Density: By time of day and part of town
  
• Die Conversion Tables: d% to 3d6 and d% to 2d6
  
• The Midkemian Calendar: An alternate calendar
  
• Stables: Type of stock, boarding costs, what’s available to buy
  
• Basic Price List: Typical base prices for common items found in a large port city