The Living City (2011)

User summary:

An IP-free version of Chapter Three, "City Creation," from The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, Volume 1: Your Story, made freely available on the faterpg.com website.

From Introduction:

When you sit down to play, you'll want to know the setting—which is to say, you'll want to come up with and flesh out the city in which your game takes place. Since it mostly takes place in today's urban jungles, this doesn't have to take a long time, as you're already pretty familiar with the way our world works.

(For crazy stuff like games taking place in the supernatural world or the like, read on—we've got you covered, too. We have a loose definition of "city.")

There's a lot of stuff in this chapter. Our purpose is to give you lots of ideas and options. If you don't really want to immerse yourself in the process we lay out here, it's no big deal. While we still encourage you to read through the chapter so you see what we're going for, toward the tail end we provide an on-the-fly city creation technique that highlights the really critical parts, letting you get to the gaming faster. (If you do the full city creation process a few times, your own process will probably move toward that anyway as you learn which parts are the most useful for your group.) You should feel free to pick and choose the parts that look fun as you go along.

A city is much more than just a collection of streets and buildings—it's a world filled with people, including the players' characters and all the characters they might encounter. Creating your city includes mapping out both some of the physical locations and the relationships the people who live and work there have with the places and with each other. Once you're done with city creation, you should be ready to sit down and play.