Today is something of a double-feature! I wanted to introduce to you all a wonderful tool I found recently, Watabou’s Procgen Arcana. It’s incredibly useful for generating maps for caves, dungeons, cities, and even full realms!
You can try it out the city generator here: https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator Let me shout out some of the awesome parts: it’s customizable, it’s easy, and it’s COMPLETELY FREE! Stick around and I’ll show you what I’ve made with it already!
I recently needed maps for two of the cities in The Final Hero: Gansmead and Sonmore. The former is a port town, densely packed with buildings and a large trading plaza. Sonmore, on the other hand, is a ramshackle city that was forcefully enacted as the “capital” for a region by a corrupt judicial/political force, the Knights of the Alliance.
Originally, I was going to draft up the cities myself, but I knew the best attempt I could make is a blob thrown together in paint.net (a tool I’ll talk about in a later article). In fact, I still have the original attempt on Sonmore, as seen below.
It worked well enough.
But I wanted something more. Something that I could show to my readers, or even players of a campaign in this world, that I could be proud of. That’s when I stumbled across Procgen Arcana. And with a few minutes of work, I generated this:
Go ahead, look at it. It’s wonderful. It’s stylized. It has individual buildings, rivers, roads, the whole shebang. Is it exactly what I had scribbled before? No. Do the buildings make a ton of sense when you look at them really closely? Not exactly.
But it took me minutes. And the incredible part is that you can change most of it. Any line, road, twist, or turn you can shift around and edit until it’s the perfect size. You can change fonts, and colors, and even the types of roofs the buildings has!
There are of course some places this won’t work with. One of the cities in my world, Rakuken, is made up of thick stone pillars that surround the top of a mountain. Pretty weird. Procgen Arcana is excellent at making cities that could actually exist. Rakuken is…unrealistic in a world without magic.
Next is Gansmead!
I loved this one. If you want to try Procgen Arcana’s citybuilder out with the settings I used for this one, follow this link! You have complete control over names, areas, and I just regenerated the city a few times (hit Enter) until I got a city that had the ocean on the right side. (The black boxes were because I didn’t turn off the Solids option under Roofs.)
You can make all sorts of things, and I encourage you to give it a try. Don’t be daunted by a city you want to make. Use Procgen Arcana to get an idea, then jump off from there! It’s especially useful if you’re running a campaign and you want a quick house or cave map.
And this is just the city maker. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the other generators Watabou offers, but I wanted to share this one with all of you. Cheers!
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