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City Creation Worksheet

Whether you're setting up an entirely fictional town like Stephen King's Derry, Maine, or putting your own spin on a neighborhood you could hop in the car and visit, you're going to need to know where to begin and how to best use your time.  Setting up useful and interesting details about a building is one thing, but defining a larger swath of humanity calls for special consideration so you create places that inspire you and your players.  While there are books and articles that give a Storyteller plenty of food for thought, I could not find a resource that offered what I was looking for.  To aid myself and others, I have put together a worksheet for creating locations, generally towns and cities, but it could also be used for neighborhoods or other, larger gatherings of people. 

Download the Location Worksheet in PDF
Customize the Worksheet as a DOC
(I don't have the means to make editable PDFs yet, but if you do, lemme know.)

Besides basic information like the name of the place, my worksheet starts with theme and mood because they do so much for a location.  Mood plays into many things, like the colors and styles you choose to focus on, as well as the non player characters and services in the area.  The area's mood will also play into its overall demeanor and reputation.  How does the neighborhood receive outsiders?  Do locals think of that part of town as spoiled, haughty, or cruel?  If we think of a gathering of people as a single character, we can assign a city an overall attitude and trace its relationships.  (You can also apply many of the 50 Things People Want from Damnation City, page 137-140, to places.)  This added layer of interaction with neighboring places (and reputation) can make a place seem even more alive and real.

Having a predominant theme for a place will make it stand out from all the others and give it a function of some sort.  The neighborhood that hosts the city's records and historical societies might also have more historical buildings and problems.  It'll be the place that player characters go when their internet databases give way to hard copies, or when they track a vampire back to its well-established lair, or when a special exhibit sparks strange rumors.  With supernatural and magical possibilities, themes can get more outlandish, but they don't have to be outrageous to be intriguing.

Assigning a virtue and vice to a place can give insight into the actions and urges that define it.  A neighborhood might have a hidden virtue, like the charity that it offers off the books and out of the press.  A city might have a hidden vice, like the greed that allows drug traffickers to operate freely, so long as the locals get kickbacks. But a place's public virtue and vice usually figure into its reputation with other towns and neighborhoods.  People know Vegas as the place where secrets go to live and be buried, for instance; it's an exciting stage for visitors to enact their fantasies, but it's ultimately temporary.  But for the people who live there, you could portray Vegas as the whorehouse in the daylight: a place where fantasies fade into stark reality and someone has to take out some very unsavory trash.  You can sum these impressions up in the timeless sins and virtues.

It can also be helpful to sum up the way a place looks in a few lines.  That way, the Storyteller has something to work from when they're in the middle of running, and something to jog their memory if the characters haven't been there in a while.  You'll want to focus on unique things that catch the eye the most: particularly impressive buildings, landmarks, predominant colors, shapes, and types of architecture.  This information is particularly good to write down when the PCs travel to different cities a lot and you want to make sure they don't all sound the same.  It is also easy to forget the impression you wanted an area to have when you haven't run the place in several months, and the PCs go back for a visit.

I have a whole section in my worksheet about a place's inhabitants, starting with notes about the population.  In a World of Darkness setting, this could be where Storytellers estimate the resident population, figure out the racial breakdown, and decide how many supernatural types live there.  Hard figures might not be necessary or even desired by some Storytellers, but they can be a good place to start.  It's not always a big deal to talk about the local government, either, particularly when most places in a country are run by the same kinds of apparatus.  But if you're running a political game, or if the real power structure varies from what's on the surface, then government and its leaders become key.  And for just about any location, it's good to keep track of the NPCs that are most valuable to the Storyteller and the PCs.

The next major section of my worksheet deals with the place as a physical thing.  Location, climate, and local features tend to affect an area in some way and can lead to nuanced stories.  The next section covers commercial interests like imports, or the things that an area produces.  This information might seem dry at first but it can guide you when creating NPCs or story hooks, so it shouldn't be overlooked.  Even if you don't fill out everything at first, it's likely that fleshing out these kinds of details as you go on will help build a sense of distinctness and verisimilitude.  

Social aspects fill a decent portion of the worksheet.  It starts with inside information, like a place's history, scandals, local heroes, and institutions.  But it also considers the way that an area interacts with other places.  Since towns share proximity, resources, people, and other things, they eventually have to interact with each other.  Judgments are made and reputations are born, and these things influence the people who live there.  And if things are threatening to become dull, consider writing down three things that foster unity and three things that foster strife.  If a city has ongoing troubles with funding, gangs, and corrupt practices, those things could spawn problems for the PCs at any time.  If the same city is held together by religion, blue collar work, and the diligence of local werewolves, then those elements could also result in complications for the PCs.  (You could also use spin stories out of the Ambience section of Damnation City, page 161 to 162).

The combat section focuses on groups of combatants rather than individual people.  This part is dedicated not only to lawful combat, as in military bases or police operations, but also unlawful menace, like criminal syndicates.  The final section is simply called "Other," and it's for information that the Storyteller wants to keep track of that doesn't fit well elsewhere.  If you're so inclined, this is where you can record the place ratings that are used in Damnation City (Access, Awareness, Stability, and so forth); see pages 251-253.  These ratings can be dead useful when players decide they want their characters to own a building, since they set the baseline attributes for the neighborhood.

As an example of how the sheet can work out, I've included a filled out version below.  I was happy to start getting more ideas as I used the worksheet, and I hope it helps others, too.