I have been using the Town and City builder obsessively since I got it. It's VERY easy AND Super FUN to use. If you're the kind of person who spends 6 hrs staging everything in the sims for a sim you only play for 20 mins before wandering off, THIS IS YOUR GAME FILE.

I've been mixing it with The Infinate City generator to make a solo mapping game and it is AWESOME. I also mixed it with the Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City to expand the city into a multi session campaign setting. You can use this with ANYTHING to detail out an existing setting that just needs more stops or to make you own from scratch. It was so good I got both the Town and City Builder updates and then gave in and bought his core rpg game (really cheap, also good, highly recommended for play groups that like minutia as much as big drama) off the strength of how much fun and value this has added to my setting creating life

This guide is so so for generating settlements. It's very unrelaistic if ones wants to use it for European settlements of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. It's nicely creative and if ones does not care about realism at all could be used well to generate distinct settlements on the fly. I wanted to give it four starts but just could not bring myself to do so.

The best thing about this product is the random name generator for taverns on pages 53 to 56. -even if I payed for this product I would be happen to have done it for it's tavern name generator. It woulkd taken any gamemaster a week or more to create such a table and then not likely to be as good as the one in this product.

This is a good tool for creating settlements from villages to huge cities for a mostly medieval, low-magic setting. It's mostly system-neutral.

It was written for the Raven of the Scythe Fantasy Role Playing Game, which I've never played. However, only two elements are specific to that game system: the prices (what's an SE?) and various modifiers, such as a -2 penalty when trying to get information from the locals in one type of district. I've stopped tracking coin totals in my games, so I don't care about the price lists. If you care about the costs, you'll have to convert 45 SE for a longsword (for example) to something comparable for your setting. The various modifiers should be easy to use directly or to convert for your game system of choice.

The vast majority of the content isn't tied to any particular RPG system.

It's mostly medieval, but it also includes some Renaissance or even post-Renaissance features, such as public art galleries and separate posh neighborhoods for the upper class. Conversely, a lot of material could work for an ancient setting as well. It's somewhat Eurocentric (churches and cathedrals, for example), but minor reskinning should be enough for other settings.

The magic is limited. You'll find alchemist shops and witches' huts, but no magic shops or wizards. You could create your own "Magic District" by using other districts as a template. It doesn't mention any non-human races. If you want to create a dwarf city or a halfling village, it's on you to customize or reskin what you get.

A big strength of the tool is that you can mix and match to give each settlement a distinct character. There are tables to select the number and type of districts according to the settlement size. You can roll them up randomly or pick and choose to create what you want. Even if you roll randomly, it's basically "guided randomness" instead of completely arbitrary randomness. The place will still ring true instead of being a random mess.

Each district makes good sense. You get a paragraph of general description, a list of the specific places you'd expect to find there, and a list of tables for what else might be there. If you roll up an armorer's district, for example, you automatically get an armorer's workshop, and then the other tables for that districut put other sorts of shops nearby. If you don't roll up an armorer's district, some other district might still have an armorer's shop tucked in.

Every shop type (even the things that aren't "shops," strictly speaking) gets a brief description and a price list.

The encounter lists are good about saying who or what you encounter and how they're likely to act toward PCs. They're specific to each district type, instead of having a one-size-fits-all encounter table.

A nice touch is that some districts have role-playing features. For example, gleaning info from the locals might be easy in an arts district or tougher in a high-end brothel district. Another nice touch is the name tables for districts and taverns. Especially for district names, you could come up with an interesting backstory to explain why a district is named Queen's Hill or Stag Court, especially if it has no obvious connection to the district's purpose.

This isn't a mapping tool. The settlement is defined by its districts. It's up to you to lay out the city to show where the districts are in relation to each other.

The table of contents is helpful, but it leaves out a few headings. At least one entry is out of order.

There are some disappointing omissions:

• No mercantile districts. There are market districts where you'll find individual shops, but nothing for the big trading houses you'd find in major trading hubs.
• There are no wells, gatehouses, towers, monuments, bridges, lighthouses, arenas, menageries, fountains, canals, clock towers, graveyards, or bathhouses.
• There are no embassies, military features (other than the citadel), orphanages (or foundling homes), enclaves for foreign populations, or ghettos for oppressed populations.
• There's no mention of trade guilds or merchant guilds, although the lodges listed in various districts may cover that.
• It makes no mention of where the lower classes live. In a rural village, field laborers would have simple homes. If a commoner practiced a trade or provided a service, they lived where they worked and they worked where they lived. The lord of the village lived in a manor house.
• Towns and cities might or might not wind up with a "Housing (Middle)" district for "the more affluent citizens," but it doesn't say where these people live if there's not a housing district for them. Most likely, they live and work in the same place, or they have homes near where they work (no zoning laws).
• Similarly, cities might or might not wind up with a "Housing (Upper)" district for the wealthy and nobles. It doesn't say where they live in the absence of a posh housing district. A noble probably has a home in the district where they draw their revenue (more on this below), or possibly a wall tower or gatehouse to call their own.
• There's no mention of how nobles earn their income. This matters for RPG purposes because it provides hooks for involving NPC nobles. A rural lord collects rents and payment in kind from his peasants. A town or city noble might have a share of particular tolls, such as entry fees at a city gate, or trade tolls at the docks. A noble who presides over matters of justice gets a share of the fines. A noble might be compensated for staffing the garrison, or for providing (and leading) troops for the king's military campaigns. In short, the noble has a role or a grant that involves them in the city's daily life and operations.

There are some wording mistakes. A maker of bows is a bowyer, not a bower. A bower (rhymes with tower) is "a lady's private apartment in a medieval hall or castle" or "a leafy arbor." The boundary between realms is a border, not a boarder. A gallery, in medieval usage, is a roofed promenade or balcony, not an art museum.

Despite the omissions and the occasional mistakes, it's still a solid product for creating useful, varied settlements of various sizes.

This is a really good product. While I do not currently play the RPG System it was designed for it works really well as a system agnostic generator for Settlements. The different districts and shops as well as random encounters are evocative enough to serve as inspiration for any GM out there.

At the time of this review the PDF has some minor mistakes, for example blacksmith is written as two words in several places. Also I applaud this product for having propper pdf bookmarks but at least the one for Market (Town, Primary) is missing, but that did not detract from my enjoyment of the product.

If I could wish for an update then I would wish for some more differentiated shops per district (so that the lists of possible shops does not seem too much like the one for another district) and perhaps some added details for districts that currently have only a description. The sewer district for example could have a table for certain features, like an outflow to the nearby river or loose grates in front of the entryways. I would also love to see more options for district names as well, something like the names for the tavern, where there are several different variations.

I think the Town and City Builder is well worth 5-10 bucks, easily.