How to Make your Fantasy Cities Pop

It begins as nothing more than a ripple in the still waters. As the morning sun begins to filter through the fog, turning the air all golden and heavy, first one ripple and then the other splashes quietly against your hull. The less experienced in the crew are unsure as to what to expect: everyone sees Great Okh’aratoa through fresh eyes. They watch from the rigging as the vapours curl around a shadow before your prow, growing larger and larger. Your ship creaks as you turn to port and sail in its slip, as the City of Ships passes you by on its southward journey. 

Welcome, adventurers, to another Red Quills tutorial. Today, we’re revisiting fantasy towns and cities. My name is Ryan and I will be taking you through the process step by step, discussing some important points to keep in mind and flesh out your world.

I’ve already spoken at length in my first post about creating towns and cities about the actual practicality of town planning. For that, I used a stylised map of a real-world city, Liverpool in England, to show how you can apply the principles of real-world towns to your fantasy world and create something that felt solid and real. 

If you haven't seen the initial post, you can read it here: How to Draw a Fantasy City

If you want to watch this tutorial in video form, check out our YouTube channel here: The Red Quills

Introduction to Towns in Fantasy

Today, we’re going to focus on the fantastical side of fantasy towns, and so we’re going to create a wonder of the world: on the carapace of the giant crab Great Okh’aratoa, the pirates of the Goldhunter Sea have made their stronghold and their capital. Roughly six hundred pirates live here, on the carapace itself or in the tethered ships pulled along by Okh’aratoa as it swims leisurely from cove to cove. And on its peak is the tower that is the home of the Court of Corsairs, the pirate council. 

Fun, right? Let’s get into it. 

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As always, I’ve started by ruling out a one-inch border, sketching the shape of the crab quickly and then adding in the shapes of the various trailing ships. For the Okh’aratoa, I’ve shown not only the shell, which is the only really mappable part - as every other part of the crab will move relative to the town - but also the claws and the back legs. 

Note that I’ve made the back legs flat and fin-shaped, to assist the crab in swimming. 

Once I’ve sketched it out, including where I’m going to add the main title, and labelled everything, I will watercolour the waterline, ink in the coast, and then draw the individual buildings, add details, and shade. 

That’s the main process, so now I’ll break it down into worldbuilding elements, and the steps that you can take in making not just a fantasy city, but a fantastical city. 

Step 1: Choose your Prompt

If you’re creating a fairly normal, sedate, run-of-the-mill fantasy town, without too much that really differentiates it from the standard medieval or renaissance settlement other than the fact that you’ve got wizards running around, then check out my other video. It deals with a lot of the practicalities of town planning. 

But if you want a town that could never exist in our world, something with an overridingly strange landmark or a secret woven into its very foundations, then we need to iron out the details and make it work. 

So the first step is to take a look at your plans for the town and what your prompt is. 

I talk about themes a lot on this channel. I know, I have become the very English teacher I swore to destroy. But the fact of the matter is that as much as it hurt to admit it, they were right. Themes are extremely important when you’re creating your world. In this case, the theme that you choose for your city is the basis from which we’ll unpack and unfold the unique aesthetic that we’ll commit to. 

So let’s go into different kinds of themes and how you can use them as prompts: 

Archaic vs Industrial

The first of the dichotomies that I’ll discuss for this, the divide between the traditional and the innovative is the centrepoint of both of these prompts. The question is really quite simple. In your world, and in this city in particular, do you think that true wisdom lies in the future, or in the past? 

If wisdom lies in the past, then your world will be marked with ruins that tell the story of a once-great civilisation, now lost to time as people gradually diminish. If it lies in the future, then innovation and exploration are at the forefront of your stories, as people continually discover new inventions, new lands, and new resources. 

Both of these will express themselves by having a representative landmark shape your fantasy city. And they can do it in remarkably similar ways: an archaic world can have the city towed on the back of a kind and ancient creature that tries to protect the children it carries, while an industrial world will have the city propelled by a new and exciting engine, that nonetheless requires arcane fuels to power it. 

Symbiotic vs Exploitative

Another dichotomy, the balance between symbiotic societies versus exploitative societies marks a lot of our own world history. But while the real life struggles are marked with things like slavery and apartheid against democracy and civil rights, you can be a little more mythic in your worlds. 

If the city is pulled or powered by magical creatures, are they there by choice or held captive? Does the enormous tree in the centre of the city grow each year, or is it continually pruned and diminished to fulfil the designs of the townsfolk? An idealistic world has all creatures able and willing to work together under the right circumstances, but a grittier world will deal in exchange at best and exploitation at worst. 

For both of these, you need two kinds of living creatures in your town: they can both be kind of people - slaves and free citizens, for instance, or something more inbuilt - or they can be people and another kind of lifeform. Like a giant crab, for instance. 

Individualistic vs Social

This one is a little more subtle, and it’s one that no doubt a great many people have a lot to say about. But the struggle between the needs of the few and the needs of the many is not a new one, and it’s not one that is going to go away any time soon. If it’s something that you feel passionately about as a worldbuilder, here’s your chance to explore it. 

If the society in the city is individualistic, then each person is entitled to their own powers and the relative strength that comes therein. Strict social classes will emerge, based on birth, power, merit, or any other kind of divide you care to poke a stick at. Divisions within the city will reflect this. If a town is social, focusing on addressing the needs of the many, then there will need to be a mix of resources, less social strata, but a great deal of oversight and bureaucracy in order to try to overcome peoples’ natural instinct to self-centredness. And bureaucracy comes with its own issues. 

In your town, these can express themselves in the town planning, the division of the population, or something more obvious. A wizard’s tower is an individualistic landmark, whereas a public hospital is social. Floating islands can be the different districts that divide social classes, or a healing river can be the uniting factor.

Incorporating it

In my case here, I’ve used the pirate city to explore my thoughts on what it is that pirates express: neither the idealised quest for freedom, nor the black-hearted ruthlessness perpetrated by propaganda, but something more complex. They found an advantage, the giant crab, and though it is beginning to approach the end of its days, they try to maintain it - admittedly with brutal methods - by feeding it captives and renegades. They have a society, trade and brawl with one another, and try to keep themselves separate from the world, avoiding sovereign borders.

It’s fantastical, but it examines what I want to look at in pirates. 

Step 2: Balance Practicality with Unreality

Alright, now we have our theme, and we can start to create the rest of the town. As always, I will insist that you have at least some semblance of practicality in your settlements. Magic doesn’t solve everything - and nor should it. But that being said, we should combine magic with what we know of practicality, so that the two can work in tandem. 

To that end, you need to iron out what it is that you want to be magical in your town - apart from the individual’s day-to-day use - and pull it in as seamlessly as you can. So, what’s the unreality here?

Unreal Foci

As we talked about above, if you want your fantasy cities to really stand out, you should have a major, foundational magical focus for your city. Something large, unignorable, that has only a magical or mythological explanation. It can be a great tree, a massive creature supporting the settlement on its back, or a deep well leading to a different plane. But this magical focus will set the tone for the rest of the town. 

Let’s talk about blending it into day to day life, and to that end, here’s a few questions to consider when creating your fantasy town that will allow you to flesh out your worldbuilding with some texture.

Ask yourself:

• What is the first thing that travellers notice when they enter or see the city for the first time? This is generally your unreal focus, the largest, most unignorable aspect of your fantasy city. It has a lot to do with the prompt that you chose above, and can evolve over time as your themes develop. An arcane factory can expand and expand as its owners discover more and more power, perhaps until its collapses under its own weight. A giant tree in the centre of the city will flower in the spring, and its enormous leaves will fall in the autumn. 
• What are the most inconvenient parts of living in the city? A large proportion of day-to-day life in any city are the many tiny rituals and courtesies that we adhere to in order to limit the unpleasant realities of the inconvenience of other people. When you’re dealing with the arcane, how do your townsfolk deal with that in convenience? When a well reaches into a circle of hell, how do they avoid that? How do they celebrate it? How - most importantly - do they ignore it so that they can live in peace? 
• What are the benefits available to these townsfolk that they won’t normally have access to? A large city has a great deal more culture than a small town, more public works, more infrastructure. There are benefits like sanitation, security, and diversity of business. But in a fantasy city, those benefits can extend into the supernatural. If, for instance, a city that holds a celestial gate promises that anyone who lives in the city is protected from the forces of evil, that’s a huge benefit. Definitely worth paying taxes for. 

Magical Landmarks

So those are the biggest sites of power in the city - they form the basis of your thematic exploration. But there can be any number of sacred or arcane sites that utilise and express magic in fantasy cities. Let’s go through a list of real buildings, and link them to fantasy as a basis of comparison. 

I’ve already discussed a list of buildings and areas that you can find in villages, towns and cities. The secret, if you haven’t watched that video, is that every town is a few villages crammed together, and every city is a couple of towns pushed together. Once you know that, you can fill out the neighbourhoods and districts of your cities as easily as you like. 

But generally, because magic is an expression of power and power cannot be commonplace by its definition, only the largest and most important buildings will be inherently magical. Or, at least, have a truly impressive level of magic. 

So, some large buildings and the fantasy implications, in no particular order:

Positive Places

• Hospitals and Sanitations. I’ll start with these because of their implication for social wellbeing and compassion. Generally, these are considered to be good things: caring for the frail and injured is morally commendable. There is a lot to examine in the parallel between the concept of purity and the concept of health. In a fantasy world, this can express itself in the people who work there, the tools that they use to clean and cure: working as avatars of goodness and light, using blessed water and holy silver.
• Academies and Factories. Innovation happens whether magic exists or not: it is the fundamental rule of all living things that we adapt to changing situations, or we don’t stick around for very long. So even in a fantastical world, there will be a place for study and exploration of concepts. Its entirely up to you whether that place is dedicated to exploring uncharted territory, as it were, or unveiling forgotten lore. But any place of learning must have rules of investigation to make sure that everyone’s findings are compatible, and that’s the rub: what are the rules of study? Do they apply logic, or the scientific formula? 

Negative Places

• Gaols. In modern society, we lean more and more towards surveillance as the primary deterrent of crime. But for most of history, where surveillance was impossible, capital punishment was the major deterrent. The punishment massively outweighed the crime because it was supposed to act as a terrifying moral to a cruel story. "If you are caught, you will pay a hundredfold what your crime deserved." This is a darker side to a city, but consider punishment through a fantastical lens. How can magical, religion, or mythical creatures extend or deepen the suffering of criminals to deter their comrades?
• Castles and Defenses. Magic is impressive, and what’s impressive is also intimidating. The best defense is one that never has to be used. All it needs to do is look good. In your fantasy town, how does the town ensure that it does not need to be concerned about invasion? But when you can turn to magic as well, how does that express itself? When you are only limited by your imagination, how do you set your enemies’ nightmares on fire? 

Living in Fantasy

So that’s sorted out your major foci, the big points of interest when people go to the city. But a magical world has all sorts of arcane expressions of power. The less powerful they are, the more commonplace they become. The ability to make a tiny wisp of light that remains constant could be something that the average person can replicate. Doing so will mean that your city does not need torches or gas lanterns to remain lit. 

Have a think about all of the commonplace necessities: not food or water or shelter, which are all easy enough to secure without magic that they are a waste of power. But other, more complicated or expensive necessities. Like, for instance:

• Light. As I mentioned, removing the requirement to employ a legion of lamplighters is a huge boon to any government. The air becomes cleaner, the streets become lighter, the nights safer, and the material costs massively decrease. 
• Locks. The ability to lock one’s doors and windows is not to be understated as a benefit to peace of mind, but a lock is also an extremely fiddly thing to make. If one can be made by magic, and only opened by magic, that removes a large piece of the problem. 
• Storage. Everyone needs more storage space, but also temperature controlled storage space. Being able to refrigerate food has revolutionised the world.
• Communication. We’re used to being able to send a message to anyone anywhere in the world near-instantly. But even the ability to send a message from one side of town to the other within a minute is life-changing.

Details to Include

Alright, now we’ve got everything we need to create your fantasy city, and you’ve got all the details to make it distinct and impressive. So here’s a list of a few more pieces of information to ensure that you’ve got everything you need: 

Town Map Essentials

What we’ve been discussing so far is how to make your town different than all the others. That should not come at the expense of what every map of a town needs to have. Make sure that you add in the navigational essentials like the compass (unless your city moves), the scale, and any legend that you need. You want to mark out your neighbourhoods and districts. Label each major road in the districts and each major street in the neighbourhoods. Mark how your people get into and out of the city, and how they navigate through it. 

Cultural Details

I’m filling this map with a plethora of details about the history of Smug Rock, and you can too. That’s the benefit of a town map: the map is only one small part. What you’re navigating is as much the townsfolk as the town itself. Add in details about festivals, customs, commerce, and religion. 

Political Structures

It’s important information in any map, and it’s worth noting if you haven’t written it already. Who controls the city, and how? It will be reflected in the way that the city is designed. Where are their major centres, and their outposts? 

Connection to the Campaign

Now we’re beginning to see the shape of this particular town: Smug Rock, the capital of the Court of Corsairs. On the back of Great Okh’aratoa, it swims through the Goldhunter Sea from secluded cove to secluded cove. It steers away from the prying eyes and eager swords of their enemies. It’s called the City of Ships, and all of the pirates of the Goldhunter Sea know it. Each year, the captains that answer to the Court come together to pay tribute and conduct business. The captains that refuse are captured and fed to Great Okh’aratoa. 

From last episode

If you sail on the Goldhunter's Sea with any precious cargo, you will be met by the pirates that answer to the Court. Your items - and possibly your lives - will be forfeit to them and to the City of Ships. 

For those following this video from our previous, you will be sailing in search of the fabled hoard of Amador Smoke-Eye. Be warned that if you are boarded and the map is found, it will be taken directly to the Court. While Amador’s map records Smug Rock’s location as being far to the northwest, it has since moved. It now floats off the southwest coast of the Builders, near Llaguval Island.

Setting up conflict 

The Court is desperately interested in Smoke-Eye’s map, and seeks his treasure for themselves. Their power is far-reaching, their greed is all-consuming, and they make formidable enemies. Anyone attempting to treat with them must have their wits about them. 

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Alright, let’s take a look at the map as a whole now. A guide to the City of Ships, Smug Rock. It contains not only a comprehensive map, but also a great deal of information about the town and its inhabitants. It can be used as a handout to prepare your players, hung on your wall to spruce up a gaming room. Or just as a prompt for your own worldbuilding.