Create the Medieval D&D City of Your Dreams

I'm the kind of person who thinks about tabletop roleplaying games a lot, and while I enjoy the rules, the monsters, and the complicated backstories of evil villains, the thing that really gets me excited is designing space. One of my earliest memories of Dungeons & Dragons was reading through the module "The Village of Hommlet." Less an adventure and more of a sandbox for players to wander around in, it sparked my love of how tabletop games give game masters the ability to carve out a little world and set players loose in it.

This is why I think that Medieval Fantasy City Generator from Oleg Dolya is such an interesting tool. It does exactly what you might think it does based on the title: It generates small or large cities and towns. It's a simple, one-button operation, and there's no ability to fiddle with the size of buildings or where the castle is positioned in relation to the town or city. It's a simple greyscale operation, and there's no environment or set of social relations or really any of the other information that is supposedly necessary to create the perfect fantasy setting for your roleplaying game.

For those reasons, the MFCG is perfect. It's the kind of tool that you can use in a pinch when your players need to plan an ambush, or when the last session ended with them making a radical right turn into a neighboring kingdom that the game master never thought about. From the other side, I can just as easily imagine generating one of these cities before starting a campaign and passing it around to each of my players to tell me who lives in the city, what structures they might make, and what the surrounding fields and forests looked like.

While I think that story hooks, in-character motivations, and modular tilemaps are great, content-agnostic tools like this city generator are some of the most helpful for creating interesting tabletop gaming experiences.