Five Capital Cities for Five Dollars

Back in the old days I used to build one city at a time for my D&D games. I’d spend six weeks on it, name every innkeeper, draw a map with a compass rose, and then watch my players walk straight past it toward the swamp because someone heard there might be a crocodile who’d swallowed a clock.

This time I built five. For nothing. And each is a wonder of detail and variety.

Here's how.

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Where did the five capital cities start?

The world is Eard, and Eard sits on the bones of M.T. Black's Iskandar setting. I spent the first five dollars of my twenty-five dollar annual budget on his Iskandar City Sourcebook, as per my last blog entry. The island already had its five kingdoms.

This gives me history, religions, pantheons, and a population of people who feel like they existed before the players showed up.

Then, as per last time, I loved the little island of Eard with its five kingdoms.

Which meant that now I needed five capitals. Five capitals that feel different from each other, five different cultures. We want the players to feel the difference, not the usual ‘ho hum, here is a sketchy tavern, a run-down inn with the greedy innkeeper, and over there is a big burly blacksmith’.

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Why use free city previews as campaign supplements?

Here is the thing publishers do not advertise loudly enough. When a company puts out a big beautiful city book, they very often release a preview PDF to prove it's worth buying. Those previews are not two pages and a shopping list. Some of them are over a hundred pages of maps, NPCs, districts, guilds, laws, and rumours.

You are meant to read them and get excited. I read them and do exactly that. But for this campaign, I have held my horses and downloaded all the free previews of each product.

Each of my five capitals is built on a different publisher's free preview. Different flavours, different design instincts, different obsessions. That's the whole reason the cities feel distinct. I didn't create five urban personalities. I borrowed five personalities from five teams who were already very good at this. Here is how I integrated them:

Nightstone: the Ptolus preview

Source: A Player's Guide to Ptolus

This is the one I have used the most because it was closest to my starting village adventure.

Nightstone is a ruin that refuses to admit it.

I decided that roughly sixty years ago something mysterious happened here (and I am being deliberately vague about what because my players will quickly screw up all my carefully planned campaign arc anyway so why kill myself.)

The result is a capital city that is about eighty percent destroyed and one hundred percent still open for business. There are still rulers. There are still shops. There are absolutely still ruins, danger and intrigue, because collapsing cities (and societies) produce more of it, not less.

The Ptolus preview carries this easily. Districts, power groups, an Under City market, an actual street with actual shops on it, and a rundown of what daily life costs and looks like. It even includes rules for city crime, which matters more than you'd think, because a distressing number of players cannot distinguish between killing a monster in a dungeon and killing a barkeep in a capital.

The party will hit Nightstone somewhat soonish. They will find rubble, and people living in the rubble, and a functioning government pretending the rubble is temporary.

Shadowford: the Deveros preview

Source: Deveros in a Nutshell

Shadowford is Roman by way of Italian, and it is buried in paperwork.

The Deveros preview runs a hundred and thirteen pages and it is genuinely rule-heavy, which I'm treating as a feature. Shadowford is bureaucratic. There are forms. There are social classes. There is a documented dress code, because the preview actually details clothing by station. Getting anything done here requires knowing which of nine officials to bribe and in what order. It also ships with a half-decent adventure, plus district breakdowns, city politics, and a stack of NPCs.

And then there's my one addition. The ruler of Shadowford is a werewolf.

Havillah: the City of Arches preview

Source: City of Arches preview

Havillah is the only one of the five that isn't on the coast. It's a mountain city, and it gets Mike Shea's City of Arches preview.

Shea, better known as Sly Flourish, writes for DMs first. So this forty-two page preview reads a bit differently from the others. Less "here is our beautiful setting," more "here is how you run this at a table on a Tuesday." It comes with tips on bolting the city into a campaign already in progress, which is exactly what I'm doing to it.

The arches of the title are portals from other lands. I loved this because one of my players has as her cleric’s god the ‘Traveller’ so I am going to make the Arches her Grand Central Temple.

Stormleigh: the Languard previews

Source: Raging Swan Press free downloads

Stormleigh sits at the northern tip of the island and the map is doing me a favour here. It's mountainous. It looks dry. There is no serious farmland anywhere near it. It is, however, sitting directly on the ocean.

A capital that can't feed itself but can move cargo is not a mystery. It's a smuggling economy with a flag. So Stormleigh got the pirate treatment and became the beating heart of the island's black market.

Raging Swan's Languard previews carry it, and note the plural. There's a preview for the city proper and then separate previews for individual districts, each one loaded with shops, locals, rulers, notable NPCs, and power groups. There's an upper city and a lower city, a harbour, services, and a pile of unresolved mysteries a party can pull on.

Cinderwood: the Fateforge Encyclopedia preview

Source: Fateforge Encyclopedia preview

Cinderwood is isolated, at least by the geography of the island, and its preview is the prettiest book of the lot. The Fateforge Encyclopedia preview runs forty-two pages and some of the maps are still in the original French, which I consider a feature rather than a flaw.

The ruler keeps a harem of men and women. Now, before you roll your eyes, this is not the throwaway fantasy harem from a ’70s Conan movie. This harem is composed of ambassadors from the other four kingdoms, guild representatives, and delegates from the smaller regions inside Cinderwood itself. Every single member has lobbied to be there for political reasons. They're currying favour, building alliances, and playing a very long game, and the ruler knows it, and the ruler is playing back. That's not a set piece. That's an entire season of court intrigue with a guest list.

The preview also covers customs, how various peoples are regarded, district breakdowns, and the fact that the city is absolutely crawling with cats.

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What did five distinct capitals actually cost?

Five capitals. Five distinct feels: a ruin, a bureaucracy, a mountain hold, a smuggler's port, and a court of professional flatterers. Budget spent to date: five dollars of twenty-five. Everything in this instalment cost nothing in cash and maybe 20-30 minutes each skimming for notes and ideas. Bam!

Here is the key point going back to the theme:

Aside from Nightstone (Ptolus) I am not sure the characters are ever going to go to any of these capital cities. So I am not going to spend hundreds of dollars and many hours prepping each of them. I have scanned each preview, jotted down some notes and ideas. I have enough to give some background info to any native NPC they meet and that is enough.

But remember there is roughly two hundred and fifty pages of usable professional material. The heavy lifting is done. The cities are already different from each other. I get to pull NPCs with real backgrounds, real home regions, and real reasons to have opinions about the other four kingdoms.

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Frequently Asked Questions

The five capitals come from five different publishers' previews, each chosen for a different urban personality. The campaign's five-dollar spend bought the Iskandar foundation earlier; the city material in this instalment added no cash cost. The aim is enough detail for play, without preparing every street before the party arrives.

Did the five capitals cost five dollars or nothing?

The campaign has cost five dollars of its twenty-five-dollar annual budget so far. That purchase was the Iskandar City Sourcebook covered in the previous post. The five capitals in this instalment use free previews and added nothing to the cash total.

Which previews did you use for the five capital cities?

Nightstone uses the Ptolus preview; Shadowford uses Deveros; Havillah uses City of Arches; Stormleigh uses Raging Swan Press's Languard previews; and Cinderwood uses the Fateforge Encyclopedia preview. Each supplies a different personality, from a ruined city to a court full of political intrigue.

Do I need the full books to follow this approach?

I own the full versions of these books, but I didn't use them for this challenge. The city material came from the free previews. I skimmed each for notes and ideas, then adapted the details to the kingdoms of Eard.

How much preparation did each capital need?

For this instalment, I spent maybe 20-30 minutes per city skimming for notes and ideas. Aside from Nightstone, I am not sure the characters will visit the capitals. For now, enough background to give an NPC a home region and a reason to have opinions is enough.

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Next up: Session Zero

Next time we're doing Session Zero. Not the polite version where you hand out safety tools and pick a day of the week, though do that too. The version where you sit across from your players, ask a few carefully chosen questions, and quietly harvest their answers into your campaign outline. They do the work. You get the credit.

Stick with me like gum on a Velcro sidewalk.

Roll high, spend low.

— The Two Dollar DM

P.S. To be perfectly clear, I have bought the full versions of Ptolus, City of Arches, the Fateforge books, Deveros and Languard, but I didn’t use any of those for this challenge and video.