... now with 35% more arrogance!

Monday, February 25, 2019

Town and City Block Tool

The Sketchbox Dice Tool for creating impromptu towns has a very primitive method for generating town and city blocks: roll a d6. The pips or dots represent buildings in a block, while the arrangement of those dots represent their position in the block. It's serviceable, but provides little variety with only six arrangements.

I have better ideas I'm working on for the updated dice tool. As yet another temporary measure until then, I've whipped up a PDF for the Town and City Block Tool. It's a table that uses 2d6 for 36 possible block arrangements. Roll the dice, read the first die as the row and the second die as the column. Or, if you prefer, drop one die on the sheet and use the block type it lands on.
  • Dark grey shapes = buildings
  • Medium grey rectangles = courtyards
  • Light regions enclosed by black lines = walled gardens
Courtyards can contain tables, benches or other seating, or features like statues or fountains. Gardens may contain trees, bushes, flowers, or a vegetable patch, as well as other features. The main difference is that gardens are private, while courtyards are publicly accessible and may even contain merchant stalls.

No details like gates, doors, windows, trellises, or balconies are shown. These crude "maps" are mainly to show the positions of streets and alleys.

Edit: I left off some details about using the tool, but as I started to edit this post, I realized this might take longer than expected. Follow-up post tomorrow.

6 comments:

  1. Do the dots in this version - e.g. those in row 2- have any meaning?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Those are trees. Not meant to be a requirement, just a suggestion. Really, they are there to help reinforce the idea that those are walled gardens.

      Delete
  2. Oh very nice. Will bookmark for city & town exploration tools.

    With the impending Google Plus, i realize I've been rediscovering blogs like yours. Nice to visit once more.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's a new post scheduled for tomorrow. It will be about defining major streets in a city.

      Delete
  3. Really like this. However, you need to put that legend on the pdf.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. By the legend, do you mean the part about what each shaded shape means?

      Delete