Best city book

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Chicago by Night for Vampire: The Masquerade. Any edition really - it just encapsulates the whole game in terms of its possibilities and capacity for replaying, has loads of factions and characters to work with, while serving as a model for how to do a city setting well. Notably, V5 includes a chapter on building city campaigns now too.

I also really like the London box set for Cthulhu Brittanica (Call of Cthulhu) that Cubicle 7 released a while back.

My first city book was Middenheim for WFRP, so that also captures a certain fondness for me too.
 
My first vote has to go to Ptolus. A truly epic tome that provides more adventure hooks than any single campaign will ever be able to use, a host NPCs, and tons of great locations. Plus, the design makes it super-easy to use.

Honourable mentions go to the the original Lankhmar book by TSR and Middenheim for WFRP 1E.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
My first vote has to go to Ptolus. A truly epic tome that provides more adventure hooks than any single campaign will ever be able to use, a host NPCs, and tons of great locations. Plus, the design makes it super-easy to use.
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Came here to say this.
 
Not easy to stick to one. The city out of which most of my campaigns have been set for many years is one I've expanded by a factor of ten, but at the core of it is Midkemia's City of Carse; the various Midkemia city books were all good.

My ultimate favorite was Gamelords' Free City of Haven, a massive and excellent work. I was happy to be signed on to help with the third volume ... just before Gamelords collapsed. Drat.

For more current books, I'd go with Magical Industrial Revolution, which I've touted on this site before: it's frigging BRILLIANT. Call it Magicpunk Victorian London, but describing its awesomeness in a single paragraph just isn't on.

In that line, there's GURPS Banestorm: Abydos, which is 60 pages of how a city run by and for necromancers would work, no holds barred. It comes with a legit content warning, and you need a strong stomach: this is no-shit Heart of Darkness stuff.

robertsconley said:
I go with the first the City State of the Invincible Overlord. It minimalist entries are just right and it hangs together surprisely well even after nearly four decades.
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I'm sad to rebut -- and of course understand you touting it -- but CSO has aged poorly. There's not a lot in it that couldn't be done by a random generator these days: one-dimensional shopkeeper X, with Y stats, Z weapons, V cash on hand, an obligatory rumor/factoid per shop. The usual fare of the era, with almost every NPC that counts being male, except for a smattering of female slaves, barmaids, prostitutes, daughters and spinsters, half of whom were given names ending in "-ienna/-inna." In 1976, it was the best there was; the hobby quickly learned to do it better.
 
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I've been wanting to run a game entirely within The City of Great Lunden for The Midderlands. It's a grimy, crime-ridden, sprawling mess of about 30 neighborhoods, each with their own distinct description, goings-on, and key locales. I think it'd be a lot of fun to explore.
 
The city books for vampire already mentioned are great. I find all city books for Vampire great. Not necessarily as guides to the actual city, but just for taking premade npcs.

Can't name a specific book just about a city. But I really liked the way city building was done, in the first Dresden Files rpg.
 
The Los Angeles citybook for original Torg. It had a unique style of art compared to all other books in the line, and the focus on one city meant a heck of a lot more detail and nuance than other Torg setting books.
 
Based on how I’ve used it, CSIO comes on top but I actually struggled with it in my play by post game. But that’s as much because traditional D&D adventure play isn’t really suited to a cityscape.

Haven is getting a run now for my RuneQuest Thieves Guild campaign and I think will do much better.

Outside of that I have various cities I love but haven’t actually played much in them. Other city products I love:

Midkemia cities
Flying Buffalo Citybooks
Pavis
Thieves World
 
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City of Lies.

The one book showcasing the faux chinese-japanese civilization of Rokugan (Legends of the Five Rings) which gives you the feeling of... you just live there (and you could easily die there, too, and in a most dishonourable manner) !

Apart from that, I never read any Midkemia city books, but my curiosity has been primed now.

And I second the goodness expressed about the Flying Buffalo Citybooks.
 
One of the reasons I like Thieves World is the Midkemia guys did the random encounter tables and the author of each system the NPCs are stated for is also the author of said game so you get a feel for how they think you could correctly adapt the setting to their system.
 
Pavis and Big Rubble supplements for RQ2. A cheat because it is two boxed sets, although it really describes one big city location, and you can get everything condensed into a single volume from Chaosimoon these days.

I further cheat because, I do not think it is that good, certainly not 'the best city book ever'. What I like about it more than anything is the idea of the place - the location is a huge collision of people and events, all in tension, that in some ways contradict what is distinctive about Glorantha/RQ - a game rooted in culture and setting. While Pavis/Big Rubble still is this, it is far less of a monoculture that RQG is selling itself on now. The Big Rubble itself is essentially a 'dungeon' location where adventures go off to loot, with a conveniently placed city right next door they can fall back to recuperate.

Pavis details the city in meticulous detail, if you're interested to know where the nearest fish shop is in whatever quadrant of the city you are in, but then relegates the most important and interesting details for running an adventure - ie. NPCs, power blocks, plots and power struggles (it is a city under foreign occupation) to a small paragraph or sentence. The gem in the supplement is "The Cradle" adventure, which while spectacular is a lethal adventure-on-rails (technically, on a boat) which you could not get away with publishing today due to the always-a-winner combination of incredibly high fatality rate for the PCs, and zero agency - no matter what the PCs do, the outcome remains the same - it suffers from the Indiana Jones problem in this respect. All that said, it still manages to be more imaginative than any other city location I have read about.

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Ravenswing said:
Not easy to stick to one. The city out of which most of my campaigns have been set for many years is one I've expanded by a factor of ten, but at the core of it is Midkemia's City of Carse; the various Midkemia city books were all good.

My ultimate favorite was Gamelords' Free City of Haven, a massive and excellent work. I was happy to be signed on to help with the third volume ... just before Gamelords collapsed. Drat.

For more current books, I'd go with Magical Industrial Revolution, which I've touted on this site before: it's frigging BRILLIANT. Call it Magicpunk Victorian London, but describing its awesomeness in a single paragraph just isn't on.

In that line, there's GURPS Banestorm: Abydos, which is 60 pages of how a city run by and for necromancers would work, no holds barred. It comes with a legit content warning, and you need a strong stomach: this is no-shit Heart of Darkness stuff.
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Ravenswing said:
I'm sad to rebut -- and of course understand you touting it -- but CSO has aged poorly.
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I agree that CSIO has issue and some of it hasn't aged (slavery, wanton wenches, etc.). I never used any of the wanton wenches stuff even when I was in junior high. As for slavery, it still there in my take but the ick factor has grown over the decades. What has happened as a result of various campaign, that the CSIO is now viewed as an "evil" city, and Viridistan the city state of the once World Emperor, is now viewed as the place to be. A little like the character arcs of Londo Mollari and G'Kar in Babylon 5 if you are familiar with that. The reason is that over the decades successive (and different) groups of players managed to knock off the World Emperor and turned Viridistan into a capital of a merchantile empire and a crossroads of trade and cultures.

In CSIO various groups of players playing "evil" characters have taken control over the City State of the Invincible Overlord. But it not like CSIO became a cesspool and Viridistan a shining place to be. But the nuances piled up and when novices read over summary background they in last decade they been opting to start in or near Viridistan.


Ravenswing said:
There's not a lot in it that couldn't be done by a random generator these days: one-dimensional shopkeeper X, with Y stats, Z weapons, V cash on hand, an obligatory rumor/factoid per shop.
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I disagree, CSIO is work of Bob Bledsaw. The randomness feel is a result of Bob's like of gonzo in his campaign but there are plenty of serious elements to build on as well. I played with many random city generators and none can produce anything like CSIO.



Ravenswing said:
Not easy to stick to one. The city out of which most of my campaigns have been set for many years is one I've expanded by a factor of ten, but at the core of it is Midkemia's City of Carse; the various Midkemia city books were all good.
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I concur
Ravenswing said:
My ultimate favorite was Gamelords' Free City of Haven, a massive and excellent work. I was happy to be signed on to help with the third volume ... just before Gamelords collapsed. Drat.
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The problem I have with Haven it was too verbose. The overall idea was solid and as well as the individual entries but for a project of that scope having two or three paragraphs per was too much compared to CSIO.

You have my sympathy about the third volume not getting done. I have all the Thieves Guild and Haven stuff and it sad to see the gaps that never got done.

But... have debated my thesis about CSIO and Haven. I just remembered there is an other equally good source of not just one but multiple cities. Harn namely Tashal, Golotha, Cornanan, Cherafir, Thay, and Aleath. All of them are concisely written. All of them have improved recent version that go in the right direction in the added details. The later versions flesh out the NPCs a lot more.

And the format is outstanding with a main city article and then individual building articles that the Columbia Games can keep adding too and the referee can ignore if it is too much.
 
Big fan of Sargent and Niles City of Greyhawk boxset, I picked up the quite nice POD from OBS because I'm afraid my original boxset will fall apart from too much handling.

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Skullport for 2e is a great gonzo city supplement, loads of cool NPCs and adventure hooks.

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Also, the original 'city of monsters' Erelhei-Cinlu in Vault of the Drow.

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robertsconley said:
I go with the first the City State of the Invincible Overlord. It minimalist entries are just right and it hangs together surprisely well even after nearly four decades.
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Me too, but my expereince is limited.
 
Lychee of the Exchequer said:
Apart from that, I never read any Midkemia city books, but my curiosity has been primed now.
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They did several. The two that got the most attention were Cities (a generic city builder and encounter lists) and The City of Carse. They also came out with Tulan of the Isles and Jonril: Gateway to the Sunken Lands, smaller cities in the same vein, as well as Towns of the Outlands, six villages of various types in the same format. They're all system agnostic, and none are all that huge: 80 pages or less.

The problem is that they're long, long out of print. Chaosium bought the rights, came out with revisions in the mid-80s, and that was that. Amazon and Noble Knight Games will sell copies, at high to outrageous prices. The original authors have a website (midkemia.com) purporting to sell PDFs of the originals, but I haven't tried myself.
 
Free City of Krakow is a personal favorite and one of the earliest sandboxes published.

Arkham Unveiled set a wonderful standard rarely equaled.

But Thieves World may objectively be the best published city guide.
 
Blacksand for Advanced Fighting Fantasy is my favourite. Everything from city factions to random business generators. And a gonzo city where a tavern full of goblins and a woman with a snake's head can happily sit on the same street.

Also, it has the small goblin like "Bays" and their favourite sport "Bay's Ball" which never gets old.
 
The problem I have with Thieves World is the tie to fiction and the fact that none of the games I would play it with would remotely actually be that good a fit for the fiction.

That said, it WAS playtested as Refuge in Glorantha, so, I will place it there. And mostly ignore the fiction and run it as an RQ city.

Or, since my RQ Thieves Guild campaign may make better use of it, I might place it near Haven and maybe the PCs will go there after getting in trouble in Haven...

And Thieves World should have been on my list (now fixed)...
 
Whenever I've run a city there's always been a bit of the old City State of the Invincible Overlord... since it was the setting of the first RPG group I ever played with. Even for modern day urban fantasy.
But I always smoosh it up with other stuff... and nowadays that would include Cadwallon, with its baroque network of factions and guilds and districts. Not as detailed as something like Ptolus, but it has a lively swashbuckling feel, a bit of Renaissance Venice maybe? ... and lots of secrets and intrigues to uncover.
 
So I'm looking through various city books and a lot follow the same script in a way. You get the various sections of town, major NPCs, descriptions if a few businesses. Factions section maybe adventure ideas.

Some try to up their game with volume(haven, ptolus) some in flexibility with sparse details but good random generators to help be flexible


I guess I'm trying to figure out what makes it the best?

I'm kinda interested in a separate detail on this which might need a separate thread but what's the best bits of the city as well as what's best?

Not trying to take over the thread but it's got me curious.

Jan Paparazzi Jan Paparazzi let me know if you want me to break this out into its own thread.
 
I can tell you what I look for in a city book, Bunch, and some of the things I don't.

For my part, I run a lot of urban adventures, I've got urban-based parties, people like to wander, and I've been at this a long time. So what
I need in a citybook is basic. Most citybooks lavish attention (and many pages) on geopolitics, history, and the like, and in my experience, players care a lot less about those things than game companies seem to believe. Players want NPCs with whom to interact, and businesses in which to shop. (Beyond that, if I'm getting a citybook, I'm plugging it into MY setting, not playing the company's one.)

So you need businesses, and a good many of them. I want an idea of the quality, breadth and price of the goods. I need to know a couple things about the person -- whether it be owner, counter person or salesman -- with whom the PCs will interact. It's nice to have a couple sentences of shop description. And these need to be adjusted depending on the business: groups are obviously going to spend more time and effort dealing with taverns, alchemists, armourers and temples than they are with fishmongers, basketweavers and sharpeners.

And that's it. I don't need loving descriptions of how many gold, silver and copper pieces are under a floorboard in the owner's third story living quarters; thinking back over the last decade of gaming, I can count the times that PCs have been in a proprietor's living quarters at all on one hand. I don't need illos, because the players will give them a second-and-a-half glance at best, shrug, murmur "That's nice," and forget about them a moment later. I don't need long stat blocks, because on the remote chance someone wants to throw down with the neighborhood candlemaker, I can just plug in my system's standard for Terrified Mook Shopkeeper Brandishing A Cudgel. I don't need maps of the place, because people usually don't have melees when they've popped into the greengrocer's to stock up on tea and spices for the next overland trek. I don't need lavish descriptions of every member of the shopkeeper's extended family: how likely are we to interact with them, ever, beyond waving politely to the alchemist's husband, who kindly brought her lunch down?

Truth be told, I've stopped making maps at all for smaller cities: they're superfluous. All a GM needs to know -- and only sometimes -- is where Place A is, relative to the party, and how long does it take to get from Place A to Place B, roughly. A simple "These businesses are in the Old City, and these businesses are in the East Gate District, and these businesses are by the University, and these businesses are in Twilight Hill ..." will do.

Another mistake citybooks make are in the NPCs they embellish. All too often it seems to be the ruler, the city council, key government officials, all with a column or more of description, combat stats, gear and the like. Sorry, but I've seldom known a group to interact at this level. Heck, I've been running parties out of the large capital city my current group is in since about 1979, and the first time any PC ever met the King was six years ago ... and that PC was a princess and the envoy of her government. Until just two months ago, no one had ever met the chancellor. No one's ever met the chief justice. No one's ever met the High Admiral. No one's ever met the head of the criminal syndicate. (And for pity's sake, no one's ever engaged any of these people in battle. Why would I want not only all of their complete stats, but a full listing of all their magic items and all the treasure they have on them?)

Yet these are the NPCs on whom citybooks tend to focus, to the exclusion of people they are likely to meet.

The NPCs we need more than a couple sentences on are not the King, the Exalted Archpriestess, the High Admiral or the Grandmaster of the Alchemists' Guild. The NPCs we need are the guard lieutenant in charge of the neighborhood in which the PCs' inn is located, the priestess of the neighborhood temple around the corner, the officer commanding the harbor patrol boat, and the defrocked apothecary who sells bootleg healing elixirs.
 
Bunch said:
Jan Paparazzi Jan Paparazzi let me know if you want me to break this out into its own thread.
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No, keep it going. I chose Freedom City, because the layout of it's districts and neighborhoods within were very clear and after that it filled the entire city with company's, hospitals, university's, clubs, police stations etc. I thought it is way more complete than a lot of Vampire city books who seem to skip on certain areas and mix parts of history with parts of geography and parts about certain locations all in one chapter. But then there are also books like Damnation City or Block by Bloody Block who focus more on building a city of your own. What city books do you consider to be very flexible?
 
Ravenswing said:
Truth be told, I've stopped making maps at all for smaller cities: they're superfluous. All a GM needs to know -- and only sometimes -- is where Place A is, relative to the party, and how long does it take to get from Place A to Place B, roughly. A simple "These businesses are in the Old City, and these businesses are in the East Gate District, and these businesses are by the University, and these businesses are in Twilight Hill ..." will do.
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I do think that it is very important that each of those areas have their own unique flavor. Twilight Hill should be very different from East Gate District.
 
City State of the Invincible Overlord, Night City Sourcebook, Montreal by Night, H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham and Cthulhu City are all good.

If I had to pick one it's City State of the Invincible Overlord simply because I have gotten so much mileage out of it.
 
Ravenswing said:
I can tell you what I look for in a city book, Bunch, and some of the things I don't.

For my part, I run a lot of urban adventures, I've got urban-based parties, people like to wander, and I've been at this a long time. So what
I need in a citybook is basic. Most citybooks lavish attention (and many pages) on geopolitics, history, and the like, and in my experience, players care a lot less about those things than game companies seem to believe. Players want NPCs with whom to interact, and businesses in which to shop. (Beyond that, if I'm getting a citybook, I'm plugging it into MY setting, not playing the company's one.)

So you need businesses, and a good many of them. I want an idea of the quality, breadth and price of the goods. I need to know a couple things about the person -- whether it be owner, counter person or salesman -- with whom the PCs will interact. It's nice to have a couple sentences of shop description. And these need to be adjusted depending on the business: groups are obviously going to spend more time and effort dealing with taverns, alchemists, armourers and temples than they are with fishmongers, basketweavers and sharpeners.

And that's it. I don't need loving descriptions of how many gold, silver and copper pieces are under a floorboard in the owner's third story living quarters; thinking back over the last decade of gaming, I can count the times that PCs have been in a proprietor's living quarters at all on one hand. I don't need illos, because the players will give them a second-and-a-half glance at best, shrug, murmur "That's nice," and forget about them a moment later. I don't need long stat blocks, because on the remote chance someone wants to throw down with the neighborhood candlemaker, I can just plug in my system's standard for Terrified Mook Shopkeeper Brandishing A Cudgel. I don't need maps of the place, because people usually don't have melees when they've popped into the greengrocer's to stock up on tea and spices for the next overland trek. I don't need lavish descriptions of every member of the shopkeeper's extended family: how likely are we to interact with them, ever, beyond waving politely to the alchemist's husband, who kindly brought her lunch down?

Truth be told, I've stopped making maps at all for smaller cities: they're superfluous. All a GM needs to know -- and only sometimes -- is where Place A is, relative to the party, and how long does it take to get from Place A to Place B, roughly. A simple "These businesses are in the Old City, and these businesses are in the East Gate District, and these businesses are by the University, and these businesses are in Twilight Hill ..." will do.

Another mistake citybooks make are in the NPCs they embellish. All too often it seems to be the ruler, the city council, key government officials, all with a column or more of description, combat stats, gear and the like. Sorry, but I've seldom known a group to interact at this level. Heck, I've been running parties out of the large capital city my current group is in since about 1979, and the first time any PC ever met the King was six years ago ... and that PC was a princess and the envoy of her government. Until just two months ago, no one had ever met the chancellor. No one's ever met the chief justice. No one's ever met the High Admiral. No one's ever met the head of the criminal syndicate. (And for pity's sake, no one's ever engaged any of these people in battle. Why would I want not only all of their complete stats, but a full listing of all their magic items and all the treasure they have on them?)

Yet these are the NPCs on whom citybooks tend to focus, to the exclusion of people they are likely to meet.

The NPCs we need more than a couple sentences on are not the King, the Exalted Archpriestess, the High Admiral or the Grandmaster of the Alchemists' Guild. The NPCs we need are the guard lieutenant in charge of the neighborhood in which the PCs' inn is located, the priestess of the neighborhood temple around the corner, the officer commanding the harbor patrol boat, and the defrocked apothecary who sells bootleg healing elixirs.
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I hear what youre saying but my most recent city adventures have been a bit of the opposite.

Waterdeep - Dragon Heist to see exactly everything you dislike done in a useful way. You'll play low level PCs who do encounter all those major npcs. You'll deal with the factions at a low level. You break into/enter a fair number of random places and potentially need to know what's under the floor.

ffilz ffilz is running a Haven game and since it is a city designed to be interacted with by thieves the concept that you might need to rob the shops, deal with the shopkeeper and his family and know what's under the floorboards also comes up.

Not intended as a denial of your comments but just randomly my most recent experience is running a little counter to yours.
 
Jan Paparazzi said:
I do think that it is very important that each of those areas have their own unique flavor. Twilight Hill should be very different from East Gate District.
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I completely agree. As it happens, I don't take those names from random. East Gate District is a heavily trafficked commercial district straddling the great highway from the Old City through to parts beyond ... bustling, overcrowded, congested. Twilight Hill is a neighborhood at the outskirts only recently developed, taking some flavor from the University to which it's adjacent, and is a popular playground for the nouveau riche and the less-hidebound members of the aristocracy. Broad spaces, broad avenues, spacious buildings, some parkland.
 
Bunch said:
I guess I'm trying to figure out what makes it the best?

I'm kinda interested in a separate detail on this which might need a separate thread but what's the best bits of the city as well as what's best?
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That's a good question which I can only answer by saying "best" depends on the kind of game you are running. My needs for a "lords of the city" Vampire: the Masquerade game are going to be different than my weird fantasy D&D game where a city is for downtime and shopping but in both cases a comprehensive citybook is more of a hindrance than an asset. The Night City and Arkham sourcebooks on the other hand provide enough detail that I could run an investigative game "out of the book" in a pinch. The Cthulhu City gamebook needs GM elbow grease to be usable but is full of amazing evocative ideas that one can hang an entire campaign upon.
 
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Brock Savage said:
That's a good question which I can only answer by saying "best" depends on the kind of game you are running. My needs for a "lords of the city" Vampire: the Masquerade game are going to be different than my weird fantasy D&D game where a city is for downtime and shopping but in both cases a comprehensive citybook is more of a hindrance than an asset. The Night City and Arkham sourcebooks on the other hand provide enough detail that I could run an investigative game "out of the book" in a pinch. The Cthulhu City gamebook needs GM elbow grease to be a workable campaign but is full of amazing evocative ideas that beg to be tried out at the table.
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Yeah Waterdeep dragon heist was a bit if a surprise to me. I actually wanted to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage a old schooling mega dungeon. But Dragon Heist is suggested as an intro. It's an interesting module. Like many of these older properties with long and detailed histories its kind of a pain to run I'd you try to worry about canon. That I didn't like. Fortunately all my players were pre Forgotten Realms players so no one knew the canon. I have to get better at saying screw canon this is how I'm going to say it works but that can bite you in the ass a bit with published module. There were other far more annoying parts like not mentioning minor character A will reoccur in two other side quests that bothered me more than the adherence to canon. Anyway, you do deal with the head of the city and many of the top NPCs.
 
Freedom City is my favourite setting for a superhero role-playing game. I like Century Station, but the layout isn't as good and it is more heavily invested in it's own gimmick, Freedom City is easier for the referee to adapt.

Night City is excellent, only let down by the booster gangs, which are such a signature component of Cyberpunk, but are too cartoony for my taste and an occasionally cumbersome layout.

Chicago by Night 2nd Edition is my go-to for Vampire: the Masquerade. It just works. Every time. And the campaign is different every time too.
 
Thought about how to answer this for too long. As has already been interrogated, "best" can be a loaded term. And as I considered the question more, "city book" is also a definition that is rather open to interpretation.

My first take on the question was Ptolus. And to be sure, Ptolus' quality is not just from its size. It's organized really well. As much as I love the various Green Ronin Mutants & Masterminds city products, this is one place M&M is sort of weak.

But the truth is, I don't think I've actually ever used Ptolus. This is in part due to the fact that I'm more of a "retool and repurprose" GM when it comes to settings. The "city" book I've probably gotten the most use out of Palladium RPG Book II: The Old Ones. But the definitional problem here isn't just that it's not a single-city book. I get the most use out of it precisely because I don't respect the setting as is and don't worry one bit that I am spoiling it's value if I ever want to run it as-is, because I know I'm never going to run it for the intended setting or system, so I gleefully rip off maps, rename them, and modify them and repurpose them. One can't call a product the best if the reason I feel free to rip it off is because I don't care much for the larger setting, can it?

I can leave that as a philosophical question and reframe it as: okay, what product based on a single city have I gotten the most use out of? I sort of run into trouble here, as the answer is not a single product, but one published in a rather disjoint fashion: The City Quarters books produced by The Game Mechanics (brought to print by Green Ronin), i.e., Thieves' Quarter, Arcane Quarter, Temple Quarter. Though the quality was somewhat higher than PRPGB2:TOO, it was a still a small press vanity product that was never fully completed in print form. Sort of hard to call it the best.

I adore Mutants & Masterminds and get the Freedom City love here. Alas, in my own games, I get more use out of Emerald City. Freedom City already has a strong slate of established heroes, something I struggle with when it comes time to waving off Elminster Syndrome. Emerald City is well done and has a fun founding premise that works a little better with my neurosis about established canon heroes. By canon, Emerald City is a city that criminal elements have conspired to keep major superhero groups out of. And Freedom City is a lovely place to visit, and a fantastic supervillain sourcebook in its own right.
 
I'm not sure I would say it's in the running for GOAT, but I'll second Palladium's The Old Ones being in this discussion; it is an overlooked and super useful product. A perfect example of the principle that what you need as a GM is sometimes not what you want when you are leafing through books at the store or judging things from their covers online.
 
As far as the details of what's in a city supplement, for my general fantasy gaming, I actually probably need little more than a nice street map, indications of how the city is divided and what types of businesses might be where. Then detail on any specifics of entry and exit to the city, unusual laws, and maybe a variety of tavern and inn writeups. Also for many games, knowing what there is for temples. Current political situation with a page or so of history is valuable. But mostly for my games, cities are a place to rest between adventures, provision up, get training (if part of the system), buy/sell/trade magic items (if part of the system), etc.

For my OD&D play by post in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, I did the encounter rolling thing. In the end, I decided that didn't work. It turned it into something like a dungeon with no fixed encounters (and treasure). Plus the encounters weren't level appropriate. I dunno, I'm not sure how to run that kind of thing.

Bunch said:
ffilz ffilz is running a Haven game and since it is a city designed to be interacted with by thieves the concept that you might need to rob the shops, deal with the shopkeeper and his family and know what's under the floorboards also comes up.
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Now this RuneQuest Thieves Guild campaign in Haven is different. Like you say, we need details of the places that will be hit up, we need detail of what the city traffic is like. Random encounters will be important, if someone happens by as they are breaking into a place, that's important. What I have no idea is how long such a campaign will be sustainable, but, since it's RuneQuest and I'm very comfortable with it, if they get bored of being thieves in the city, we can do the highway robbery or tomb robbing scenarios from Thieves Guild, or do anything else. They can even visit other cities.

At the end of my 3.x days, I did try running an Arcana Evolved campaign in Ptolus. We got well into the first adventure before the campaign shut down. The city itself had similar issues to what I saw with CSIO. I think ultimately the problem is for a city to be interesting at remotely this level, the campaign needs to be in and about the city. Now the shop keepers are important. And their stats and treasure, sure, let's have it. Most NPCs the PCs may not interact with at that level, but if they do, having non-generic mechanical details is going to make those game mechanics interactions more interesting. And in such a campaign, we need stats for a range of folks, and stats of the upper echelons are important. At some point, who runs the city should matter to the campaign, even if the PCs are gutter scum. And for this kind of campaign, there has to be a mix of procedurally generated content and pre-written content. The advantage of the latter is that it creates a setting where things tie together and the hidden ties can exist more easily. But since detailing any reasonable size of city like this is impractical, having procedurally generated content is handy to fill in the space between the fixed content.
 
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