In our “Build Better Cities” episode of Campaigns & Coffee, we talked about how to make your city real and lived in. This time around, we’re ignoring all that advice, and looking at a bunch of random generators you can use to spawn instant cities (aka insta-cities) for your role-playing games.
Watch to the Episode
Instant City Generators
Watabou City Generator
Watabou creates great-looking city and town maps. After generating a map, right-click on it to reveal map-specfic options & spawn a new one. Need a insta-building or dungeon? They have those too.
The interface isn’t entirely intuitive, but you can get to everything by right clicking or using the menu in the upper right hand corner.
If you want to create a new town or city, click generate, and it gives you options. Like inner citadel, walls, greens, and city size.
Stuff we like:
- Labeled districts! (How’s that for insta-history?)
- Ability to create with or without walls
- Usually has interesting geography
- Easy to export.
Donjon Fantasy Town Generator
Donjon: Fantasy Town Generator lets you create small-to-very-large settlements based on numerous cultures and geographies.
Stuff we like:
- Lots of styles based on a real-world civilizations.
- Ability to create cities from very small to very large.
- Can alter the setting (snow, plains, etc.)
- Random features created include:
- Population
- Government
- Notable places
- Several non-player characters
Oskarstalberg City Generator
The Oskarstalberg City Generator loads in your browser as a blank page. Clicking on the page creates a city, with roads racing outward, large & small buildings popping into existence, and groves of trees sprouting throughout the map.
Stuff we like:
- It’s pretty.
- It’s fun to watch it grow.
- You can quickly morph it by clicking again, or change sections by clicking into them.
- Best used for modern or science fiction cities.
Fantasy Town Generator
Fantasy Town Generator has an impressive (overwhelming?) number of options.
It will create towns ranging from hamlet to metropolis. Configuration options include:
- governments
- factions
- religions
- guilds
- NPCs
But wait, it doesn’t just create a few NPCs: It creates NPCs for every location in the town, events associated with the NPCs, and even moves them around town based on the time of day.
Stuff we like:
- Super detailed.
- Maybe a little too detailed.
This City Does Not Exist
This City Does Not Exist – aka the Nightmare City Generator (at least that’s how I think of it) – creates aerial views of fake cities based on real city images it took from Google Earth.
Stuff we like:
- Realistic looking.
- Perfect for creating orbital views for your modern or sci-fi games.
- Creates a wide variety – coastal, river-based, land-locked, etc.
- Occasionally very weird
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