London

It happens that I have the plague ... seems like a typical cold.  I've had all four shots, so no worry.  Don't know how well I'll feel over the next few days, so if there's no post and no work done, this is why.

Here's London, as Maxwell requested:

London has special problems, and not just that it touches six different counties, nor that it's highly overdeveloped.  London is so well known to so many people that any tiny error has a high annoyance factor.  Every bend in the river, every additional stream, every place name is instantly recognisable.  Thus extreme effort is required to get things right ... we can't just use the excuse that it's "fantasy."  We have to try.

Still, there are limits.  The scale and space won't capture every neighbourhood.  That's not practical.  As ever, a "sense" is the best we can do.  Any actual adventure planned for an area like this requires a very different perspective.

Note, also, with London, Paris, Naples, Moskva, Shanghai or any other medieval city you care to name, the "Big City" isn't just one city, it's dozens.  Fantasy RPG products try to pretend that this massive city map with streetnames surrounded by a wall exists in some void, where there isn't another place within hundreds of miles.  The thing is, a truly big city is a logistic nightmare; to feed those in the most urban areas, giant transshipment cities develop whose purpose is to collect from the environs surrounding the big city, so as to create an army of wagons that drag flour, fabrics, timber, wrought metal, bricks and much more from the outer edges into the main city.  As London grows, it creates cities that grow to feed it, which creates cities further out who gather materials to help the feeder cities, and so the tendrils stretch outwards.  You just can't have a big isolated city.  It would starve and run out of materials for a few days, no matter how large it's docks were.  Without a feeder system to make sure those docks are full of ships, barges and cargo, the dockworkers would find themselves with nothing to unload. The same goes for the gargantuan task of organising goods from the country to get them to the right streets in the big city.