Product: Campaign Builder – Cities & Towns (PDF)
Author: Richard Green, Tim Hitchcock, Sarah Madsen, Sebastian Rombach
Publisher: Kobold Press
System: Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition (5e)
Summary: Campaign Builder: Cities & Towns provides a complete toolkit to create, expand, and enhance the cities and towns in your 5th Edition game, whether running an established setting or working with an original or homebrew setting. From guilds to temples, and from useful NPCs to wild tables of plots and rumors, this 256 page tome strengthens and expands your game’s world immediately.
Snap Judgement for Busy Wyverns: An incredibly detailed textbook and toolkit to help you design a fantasy city, from the smallest settlement up to a large metropolis. This is not a quick generator, this does not have lots of pre-made options, this is not a book of lore or adventures. This is a textbook for worldbuilders, and it is very good at that. But building realistic cities takes a large time investment. This is for worldbuilders only, and is best used for locales where your players will spend a lot of time.

What is it?
This 256-page book is divided into 5 chapters and an Appendix:
Chapter 1 – City Planning
This chapter walks you through some Big Questions around your city – as in, how big is it? How old is it? What its primary function? There’s also a lengthy discussion of magic and how magic would affect the growth and operation of a city.
Chapter 2 – Anatomy of a City
Here the book examines the physical aspects of a city – where it is, geographically, and how geography would affect its layout and development. City districts and their operations are discussed at length.
Chapter 3 – City Inhabitants
City rulers, factions, guilds, families, cults and more are all discussed here. How they may interact with each other is also considered.
Chapter 4 – City Campaigns
A lengthy examination of how to set up a city campaign, types of encounters and adventures, themes and rewards to consider.
Chapter 5 – City Heroes
This section is the most 5e specific, though you could use the flavors as inspiration for character builds in other system. Backgrounds, new subclasses, spells and items are here, as well as a look at what it would mean for characters to own property and earn titles in the power structure of the city.
Appendix
In a very useful appendix, you get naming tables, encounter tables and examples of cities growing over time. There’s even some urban battle maps and a “character sheet” of sorts for your city!

What makes it good?
Let’s again remind ourselves of what this book is not – it is not a quick city generator for you to drop into your world, nor is it a collection of towns and cities for you to pick up whole cloth.

As for what it is, this is a world builders textbook, and it’s a VERY thorough and good one at that. If you have an idea for a city and you want to bring it to the table as a living, breathing entity – this is the book. There is a LOT of game design wisdom in here. There are whole sections and discussions about things we’d never have imagined or thought about when building a city. There are TONS of random tables sprinkled throughout to help you be inspired or to fill in gaps where you just have no idea what you should do. There’s a number of helpful examples too, so that you can follow an outline if you’re lost.

After going through the chapters and steps here, even if you’re doing it procedurally in between sessions, you’re going to want the players and the characters to inhabit this city for a long time. It’s definitely best used to set up a central location in your campaign – maybe as THE location of the campaign. If you look at Monte Cook’s Ptolus and say, “I want to do that, but with my own city…” – then this really is the book for you.

We want to give a special callout to the art in this book too, it’s as good as you’d expect from Kobold Press. The art alone could inspire a number of NPCs, adventures or locations.

How do I use it?
Sit down. Start reading. Take notes. Answer the questions it asks you, roll on tables if you need to. Take more notes and document your progress. This is a textbook. If the thought of world building excites you – it won’t feel like work, it will feel like directed play. It’s not something you can finish in a sitting, or even a few sittings – this could be the road map for an ongoing city building process. I did not find this book pleasurable to read, not in the same way as reading an adventure or campaign setting. It was deep and thoughtful, it did inspire creativity – but at it’s heart it really is a textbook.

Downsides
The biggest downside would be the one we’ve been trying to warn you of all along – it’s not a quick city generator. This isn’t a “lazy” product. This is a full-fledged world-building and game design book. If you want to get into nuts and bolts of city building for a fantasy world – this book is incredible. If you just want a city for your players to visit for a session or two – look elsewhere. If you’re running in an existing city (such as Waterdeep, or Baldur’s Gate, etc) this book could help you flesh out different districts, help you craft encounters and adventures, etc. It would be an excellent companion piece for a city sourcebook. But it will not do everything for you – it will require some real prep work.

Final Thoughts
This isn’t really a book we’d normally get at this stage in our RPG journey. Our detailed worldbuilding days are mostly in the past, and these days we just paint with broad strokes and then improv or appropriate the rest. A sourcebook like this is useful to a point, but we don’t intend to sit down and build an entire city. That could change one day though, and we’re glad to have this in the library. It’s a high quality book with a very specific use – and that’s not a bad thing. The designers and contributors have done some really, really good work in this one.

Recommend or not?
Highly Conditional Recommend. If you want to build a city campaign, this is a great book. If you’re running a city campaign, this is a great secondary resource. If you aren’t much of a worldbuilder, or if your game is not city-centric, this isn’t a book that will get much use for you. By all means grab it if you just like reading about world building, fantasy cities and the like, but it will be an intellectual pursuit more than a practical one for you. Really good book, very specific use case. We deeply respect the work that went into this book and hope all the world builders out there give it a good look.