A hex that contains a Town or City built under these rules loses the benefits of many rural or wilderness developments that already exists in the area. Nor can you add any other developments to the hex that are not listed in this Town/City section. If you are planning to build a town or a city in a hex, you need to think carefully about how to develop it. However, it is worth considering a phased development and there are notes in both the Wilderness and Rural sections that talk about upgrading hexes.

Every time you invest BP into a town/city hex two things happen. There is an urban development inside the city perimeters and there is some hinterland development elsewhere in the hex. Hinterland development happens automatically and is just the farms, small holdings, fisheries etc that spring up to service the town. It happens automatically, and you don’t have to worry about it unless you want to build a home or estate close to the city.

The bigger your town, the more hinterland development is required to feed it. By the time you have built a city, the whole hex will be dotted with small villages, hamlets, thorps and farms – but none of them, or their residents, will be exceptional in anyway. All the exciting developments happen in the urban area.

You need to ‘own’ a hex before you can develop it. If you haven’t already done so, you should read the “Claiming Land for your stronghold” and “Getting Started Stronghold building a stronghold” pages before you continue.

To start with you must prepare the settlement area for building. This means cutting down scrub or trees, removing boulders, levelling hummocks, so that you have a reasonable place to build. The cost of preparation varies according to the terrain you choose. You need people to do this work for you, so the cost includes building a small Tenement Building to provide housing for your workers. This building and its residents are the very first part of your town. This prepares enough ground for one city district. Second and subsequent city districts and upgrades are cheaper as you already have people on hand to do the work. This includes upgrading a rural hex with a village to make the first district of your urban development.

(*) Caverns covers existing caves, disused mines and underground passages that you have dug out yourself. Tunnel means that you dig rock out to form a series of tunnels and chambers that will serve as a subterranean district - if you want proper underground sewers for your city, you have to dig tunnels BEFORE you can start building them.

Every investment of 1bp attracts something like 100 people to the area. Some of those people will live inside your town, the rest of them will make a living in the hinterland surrounding the town and spread out over the hex. As your town grows into a city, more and more people move into the hinterlands and before long the whole hex is full of people dependent on your city. Which is why you lose the benefit of wilderness and many basic rural (Farm, Fisheries, Lumber camp) developments when you build a town or city.

However, you may build secondary settlements in the Hinterland of a Town or City.

Secondary Settlements

Towns and cities are divided into districts. You should build a one or two district town to start with, then add more districts when your town/city can afford to expand. The more districts that you have, the more expensive it is to run, so you need to make sure that the town/ earned enough in taxes or commercial income to support that growth. Remember that good Stewardship will make it easier.

Each district can only sustain a fixed amount of development and different buildings take up different amounts of that development space. When we talk about a 'building', we are not really talking about a single building, but a set of business and residential developments. Take a simple shop, for example. You only need a small building for the shop, but you also need a home for the shop keeper and other accommodation for ant staff. There need to be homes for people that use the shop, and those people need to earn some money. So the 'development' covered by the single word 'Shop' - might actually be a tenement block, with a shop and a “bunks for rent hostel” on the ground floor, with a series of residential rooms above. The residents of those rooms might work as labourers, self-employed tailors, washer women, casual bar staff - or be in any sort of basic employment.

I have chosen to use a very simple way to measure how much space a building uses up. Look a long its stats line and find the largest value - it might be Economy, Stability, Loyalty, Defence or anything else represented along there. The largest value represents the amount of development space it takes up in the district. So a building with Defence +3 takes up 3 units. A building with Economy +1 takes up one unit. Etc. Each district can hold up to twenty units of 'Development Space'

NOTE: A settlement must attain the Size (shown above) to gain the status, regardless of how many (half empty) districts it might have. It makes sense to start new districts before you have filled the old ones - that allows buildings space to upgrade when they need to.

Building Restrictions. You may only have one of each building per district. That doesn’t mean to say your town can only have one pub - but it means you have to think about it a bit more. There might be a hotel, an inn, a tavern, a restaurant and innumerable smaller bars, cafes and take-aways spread around the place. It just means that you can only have one of each particular building type (per district) contribute to the city’s stats.

Purely residential buildings are not restricted – you can have as many Residential (classification) buildings in a district as you want. Differentiated buildings are not restricted either: for example you could have a Craft Workshop (Leather Work) and a Craft Workshop (Wood Work) in the same district or a Sword School and a normal School.

One per district doesn't mean that the buildings have to be physically placed in separate districts. If you have three districts you can build (or upgrade to) three Hotels all in the same district, next to each other - so long as they are the only three hotels in your town.

Every development in the Lists has a BP price associated with it. Each building will give something to your town – measured in Economy, Loyalty, Security, Defence and Magic Items. You need to keep Economy, Loyalty and Security about level for your town to stay a nice place to live :}. Get them out of Sync and the DM gets to roll on the ‘Bad Things Happen’ table.

There will be business people who wish to invest in your stronghold - but they will want to develop buildings that add to your economy. To balance that out, you might want to concentrate on Loyalty and Security developments. Just remember that no-one can build in YOUR city (or on your land) without your permission. You may want to 'cut a deal' with an Investor - and only allow them to develop commercial building IF they contribute towards the cost of a civic building. Example 1 They need to spend 1 BP to build an inn. However, it is only valued at 700gp, so you might demand the 300gp value to go towards a different project. Example 2 You could charge then a whole BP (or more) for building permission. They might not like it, but YOU control access to your lands. Remind them that the whole point is to keep Economy, Loyalty and Security in Balance - and if everything goes pear shaped, it will be their economic investments that suffer :)

You probably ought to invest in building that give you defence points as well. Defence points represents a mixture of static defence (walls) and soldiers - they are what keep your people safe. AND you chances of getting a title is affected by the number of defence points you control.