For my all flesh must be eaten game I had an idea to put the players on an island with a city, couple small towns and few bunches of houses and lone houses....
I wanted the city to be of a nice size, but i dont want it too big or too small, was thinking of a population of 10,000ish other people said should be 20,000's atleast...so was thinking somewhere in between...but still dotn really know
would like the city to have a college, a port, 1 hospital, 1 good sized mall, maybe a stripmall or 2, and an army base...also maybe an airport but cant decide....dont really want any buildings over 4-5 stories....
was thinking something along the lines of these maps
http://members.tripod.com/~Jeppan/innsmouth.html
http://members.tripod.com/~Jeppan/NBH.html
with alittle bot of changeing around i can easly find places for the buildings I want...
But i have several questions...
How big would the blocks be (i mean I have seen ones with a couple large buildings, to a block that just has enough space for 1 small building...)
I was thinking of having a central section for the larger buildings, city hall, Library, other city works buildings and such..and then go smaller further away (such as a block would house smaller buildings like appartemnt buildings which would have 2 appartments on each floor, maybe larger houses and such and then go further down to where a block has 4 or so houses on it and such)...I have not been to many cities so dont really know how their designed...and i always hear larger city blocks are much bigger then smaller city blocks and such...
Also would one police station be enough (about what would the ratio to stations to population be, and cops to population).
What about fire stations and firemen?
how many gun shops would there be, and or gun and pawn....
from the area i know, the city has one college that has a assload of property, then frat houses surround that and the school security polices that area (yes the city gave those college security people a big chunk to patrol because it has pretty much became a college town)...had one police station with only a couple cops (city got in trouble for that and was almost declaired a state of emergency) the town also goes through like 2 counties, and the mall is in the next town over...thanks for any help and advice given
If you are trying to capture a modern, American style small city you should try to think of how it developed over time. If it's older than 50 years than only the downtown would actually be in traditional blocks. Size 10,000 would probably have a maximum of 4 blocks of "downtown" style business/commercial/industrial. Everything post-1950ish would be built around arterial roads rather than on a grid of streets. You could explore how each area of the city was built differently because they were built at different time periods.
The original core would have a grid of narrower streets with rows of 2-3 story buildings. Some residential areas from the same time period would have multi-story houses on very small lots. Once you get in the 60's to '70's things spread out. Most commercial buildings are one story, and on big lots seperated from other buildings. Residential areas have more ranch style houses (though these go out of fashion later) and curvy streets and cul-de-sacs.
Looking at some cities with Google Earth might give you a feel for how the densities look. They can be misleading though, because you can't see how tall the buildings are.
Why not choose an existing city that fits your criteria, change some names and port a map of it into your setting?
http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2005-51,GGLR:en&q=small+town+maps
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&safe=active&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2005-51,GGLR:en&q=building+floor+plans&spell=1
Lots of good maps, right there in Google.
The Dubrovnik maps are sweet! Probably not for a modern city though.
most times I go looking for maps I get so many hits of things I dont wnat, guess my google fu is weak...also i never find exaclty what im looking for so i try to design them myself and get overwhelmed....
then when I find a design I like I dont know how many of what building to put in, specially for a rpg, you want enough places for supplies while not over doing it, and then I dont know realstically the numbers are set either...i mean a gun shop on ever cornor is a bit too much but so is just 1 in an entire city....
like i said i have never really paid any attention to the designe of the bigger cities I have been in...
personally I just grab a map from somewhere like http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/
then add detail as the characters encounter it. They need a gun shop ... well there is on 3rd and Constantine by the Mr Donuts store.
You need to be familiar enough with the city layout that your descriptions are consistent and you need to have an idea of the big stuff, the university, the church, the town hall etc. The idea of drawign out a whole city and spending hours keying out each house store and inhabitant fills me with dread. My mum used to do this when she was DMing (whole fantast towns mapped out with a6 index cards for each house, its inhabitants and content) I think its just an excuse for a lack of imagination and the inability to ad-lib :)
Also good are mapquest and ordinance survey.
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/
http://www.mapquest.com/
http://www.mapquest.co.uk/mq/home.do
Actually cos I was bored I just googled for a US city with 20000 pop and a university and came up with Macomb Il. \
The google map is pretty good and you can zoom in and add all buildings and then use the stree cams ...and and ... only took 3 mins (actually took me longer to write this entry)
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=Macomb%2C%20Il&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
In the USA a city will have 1.5 police officers per 1000 pop, roughly; this includes all sworn personnel-figure one police officer on the street at any one time, two on duty during the hours of darkness. The fire dept will be volunteers.
In a state with open gun laws, figure maybe one dedicated gun shop and 0-1 pawn shops with guns. 10k is really too small of a population to support much businesses beyond essential goods and services. Being on an island would help, maybe.
10k on an island would make a mall unviable. It takes about 100k population within 120 mile radius to support a small mall.
10k is rather small for a town with a military base.
One thing about using a real town is that you can get all the data you need on, well just about everything off the web. So looking at the Macomb example I found I can see that the Macomb sherrif's department has a sherrif and 5 deputies who patrol an area of 580 square miles.
There is no gun store in Macombe, the nearest is Hunters Den 35 miles away in Carthage. But they do have 2 pawn shops. Of course there is also a Wall Mart wherer you can by loads of gun assessories as well as Bows, hunting stuff and a selection of murderously sharp and chic knives.
However, you don't need a gun shop when the local cops are as forgetful as this http://www.macombjournal.com/homepage/x702311392/Boy-finds-officers-gun-in-bathroom :)
Yeah, really; why go to the trouble of making a whole city from scratch? Find a city map of somewhere that fits your criteria.
RPGPundit
Most places over 25,000 will have at least a core of paid firefighters.
Very few places over 100,000 have volunteer fire departments.
Some states have firefighters as sworn law enforcement.
When running a modern urban game (or a near-future one, especially apocalyptic) I pretty much always use my own home town. Maps are easy to get (the gas station is a block away) but more importantly the whole table already knows the space in detail and the maps are often superfluous.
For games on the move, I get a current Rand MacNally Road Atlas in its huge format.