My NaNo this year took place entirely inside one city. I didn't have the time or the inclination during the month to figure out many details of the city, but I want to continue playing in this world and city because I fell in love with it and the characters. So has anyone else tried to do detailed world building for a city, and do you have any tips for me?

This also include government; one of the quirks of this city is that it's actually two cities; one during the day and the other during the night. I know that I want the laws and governing authorities to be different, but I never really managed to work out just how they were different.

How does the whole one gov in the day and one gov in the night work out? *is curious*

Night and government always makes me think of mobsters, loan sharks, thieves, and secret societies. I am curious to see how the two halves of the world interact with each other. Are there some strictly day citizens and some strictly night?

Inesdar: Thanks for the tips! I'll have to think about those questions.

Aratrea: That's probably one of the things I need to work out in more detail. Effectively, once you hit "curfew" and it switches from one city to the other, who's in charge and which laws matter change with it. Traffic lights might just turn off in the night, if the City of Night doesn't use them. Maybe in the City of Day you can get arrested if you stand on a street corner for too long, but as soon as it becomes the City of Night, it doesn't matter because they don't care.

Rin: Originally, they interacted frequently and really weren't that different. Over time they grew apart, and now people are definitely either Daytimers or Nighttimers. To the extent that apparently in the City of Day, you can get arrested just for being a Nighttimer. (Although technically, it's probably for not having the correct, government-issued ID.) At this point, they avoid interacting.

So when did this night/day phase thing start, and why don't the two govs try to make war with each other?

*hopes Leandra doesn't mind me asking all these questions*

Nah, questions are good.

I believe the day/night thing has been like that from the beginning. It's the way the city was made. And that's probably at least part of why the governments don't declare war on each other or anything; there's a few thousand years of tradition keeping them from even thinking about taking over from the other. (I hadn't even thought of that possibility, to be honest. So I think we'll just say that it's as unthinkable to them as it was to me. )

This is a cool idea, Leandra.

Thanks!

I absolutely love these ideas, Leandra. Very creative and original. I'm fascinated already.

*wakes a sleeping thread*

No tips, but I've always been fascinated by the premise behind the city-planets from Star Wars. I read a Star Wars book which took place on Coruscant, and it was really interesting to see the physical layout of the city. Coruscant is a city which covers the entire surface of the planet, and it has so many people that it is stacked in levels. The highest towers are for the rich, the main levels are the middle class, and as you go lower and lower it gets more sinister.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Coruscant

This day/night idea slightly reminds me of a manga series about a school with day and night classes, Vampire Knight. The night class consists of vampires, though I'm pretty sure the day class doesn't know it. Two day class students function as guardians, making sure the secret stays safe and none of the vampires get the munchies. I'm not positive but I think the whole purpose of the night class was some kind of public-relations attempt to live peacefully with humans? (I only read a few of the books and it was years ago so my memory is sketchy.)

I do a lot of “city building”.

On the one hand, my “pay the bills” Job is in Architecture and Urban Design, so I have more than a little experience building real cities. On the other hand, most of my writing is related to Play By Post (PbP) games so I am often required to create a settlement on short notice.

Some general advice:

1. Only worry about what matters. If all of the action will take place in two or three city blocks, then you do not need a detailed plan for a city of 20,000 people. You only need a couple of blocks.

2. People are people and multiple studies have shown that in all times people congregate into communities of about 200 up to about 500 people. Any settlement of over 500 people will split into “neighborhoods” of about 500 people. Each neighborhood is an opportunity to create a slightly different distinctive characteristic. Using NYC as an example, you have China Town, Little Italy, Black Harlem, Spanish Harlem and the Garment District each as a neighborhood with a specific geographic area and a distinct character.

3. Cities grow in unpredictable ways in response to natural features and historic events. The fastest and easiest way to synthesize this is to start with a real city or town in the same general climate, geography and ecological community (forest, farmland, plains, etc) as the imaginary settlement. Then note the streets and important features (city hall) and the general layout of shops, factories and houses. This gives you a rough blueprint for your fantasy city. Research into the character of neighborhoods (wealthy, poor) and the history of the city can help inspire why your fantasy city grew the way it did.

I hope that offers some ideas to other writers.

Thanks atpollard! I am in the process of designing a small, independent city-sized kingdom. I think the hardest thing at the moment is that I have no idea how many people would be necessary to sustain that sort of culture. Do you know where the proper place would be to work out world building issues? And, to get back to the original topic, the concept of two cities in one is absolutely fascinating!

Post a thread about it in this "room" of the Holy Worlds forum, or one of the other rooms if it seems a better fit For your specific issue, I'd echo atpollard's recommendation to find a historical example to model yours on, and in this case take its demography rather than (or in addition to) its street layout as your starting point. If, like many fantasy authors, you're basing your world's culture etc. on Europe in the Middle Ages, there's a fascinating "medieval population calculator" out on the Web somewhere (I have the link buried in my bookmarks somewhere, but not to hand, I'm sorry to say) that could be very helpful for your exact question; if you're wanting a different base milieu, you should still be able to find information about what historians think life was like in that historical period. (Which you may need to adjust to fit your world, if something you've added would have ripple effects on the demography, like centaurs needing to eat twice as much as a human being does, and so needing proportionally more farm laborers.)

Do you mean this one? http://www.d20srd.org/fantasy/demographics/

Those are great ideas! The calculator gives a great starting point to help envision what an "average" medieval city would have. Between that and studying real life cities, I may be able to get the kinks worked out myself. I'll keep the forum in mind, though, if everything gets mangled in hopeless knots! :-)

I don't think so, since I think the one I remember was aimed more at writers and worldbuilders in general than at RPG campaign designers (let alone focusing on one specific system). But the source it cites is the same source as the one I remember was based on, so it should give at least approximately the same results