Design cities, towns, and settlements for fictional worlds. Use when creating urban environments, mapping city districts, or when settlements need realistic layered development and spatial logic.
You help writers create realistic settlements by applying the ten core principles that govern how real cities and towns form, grow, and evolve. This produces urban environments that feel lived-in rather than designed-for-plot.
Core Principles
Geographic Determinism: Natural features profoundly shape settlement patterns and growth
Functional Necessity: Settlements develop to fulfill specific economic, defensive, or social needs
Network Emergence: Settlements exist within interconnected systems, not isolation
Layered Development: Urban spaces evolve through accretion rather than comprehensive planning
Power Projection: Settlement design reflects and reinforces social and political hierarchies
Resource Constraint: Available materials and technologies limit construction possibilities
Cultural Expression: Built environments embody cultural values and social organization
相关技能
Adaptive Reuse: Structures and spaces are repurposed as needs change over time
Disaster Response: Settlements evolve in reaction to catastrophes
Spatial Stratification: Social hierarchies manifest in physical organization of space
Focus on relevant typologies for current settlement
Implementation process is reference, not required
Setting adaptations load on-demand
When Context Gets Tight
Prioritize: Current typology, active parameters
Defer: Full typology matrix, evolution sequences
Drop: All setting-specific adaptations not in use
Anti-Patterns
1. Designer's Map Syndrome
Pattern: Creating settlements that look good on a map but don't reflect organic development—perfect grids, symmetrical layouts, convenient district placement.
Why it fails: Real cities accumulate over time through crisis, growth, and adaptation. The "designed" appearance signals artificiality. Readers sense something's off even when they can't articulate it.
Fix: Add at least one layer of disruption—a fire that forced rebuilding, a flood that redirected development, an invasion that destroyed the old walls. Show the scars of history in the urban fabric.
2. Functional Perfection
Pattern: Every element of the city serves the current plot—the perfect tavern for meetings, the convenient sewer for escapes, districts that exist only when characters visit.
Why it fails: Cities exist for their inhabitants, not for visiting protagonists. Plot-serving urbanism makes the city feel like a stage set rather than a lived environment.
Fix: Include elements that don't serve the plot but serve the city. Markets for goods the characters don't need. Temples to gods the characters don't worship. The city should feel like it would exist without the story.
3. Scale Implausibility
Pattern: Descriptions implying vastly different scales—a "small town" with specialized districts that would require a population of 50,000, or a "great city" that characters walk across in an hour.
Why it fails: Readers have intuitions about urban scale from experience. Contradictions break immersion. A hamlet can't have a thieves' guild district; a metropolis can't be crossed on foot between breakfast and lunch.
Fix: Choose a real-world analog for scale reference. Research population densities for your technology level. Match institutions and specializations to actual population thresholds.
4. Missing Infrastructure
Pattern: Rich descriptions of palaces and markets without mentioning where water comes from, where waste goes, or how food arrives.
Why it fails: Infrastructure is what makes cities possible. Its absence makes the settlement feel like a fantasy diorama rather than a functioning organism.
Fix: Decide how the city handles water, waste, food, and fuel. These systems shape urban form—aqueducts create neighborhoods, markets cluster near gates, tanners locate downriver.
5. Homogeneous Population
Pattern: Every neighborhood has the same feel, the same prosperity level, the same building types. No tension between rich and poor districts, old and new areas, native and immigrant quarters.
Why it fails: Urban texture comes from variation and contrast. The interesting parts of cities are the edges where different zones meet, where wealth borders poverty, where old meets new.
Fix: Design at least three distinct zones with different characters. Create transition areas where they interact. Show the tensions that arise from proximity.
Integration
Inbound (feeds into this skill)
Skill
What it provides
worldbuilding
Broader geographic and cultural context
governance-systems
Political structures that shape urban form
economic-systems
Trade patterns and production that drive settlement growth
belief-systems
Religious architecture and sacred geography
Outbound (this skill enables)
Skill
What this provides
scene-sequencing
Physical spaces for scene staging
positional-revelation
Urban roles that create plot access
underdog-unit
Physical constraints for institutional outcasts
Complementary
Skill
Relationship
economic-systems
Settlement design needs economic logic; economic-systems need physical expression in markets and districts
governance-systems
Political power expresses itself through urban form; use together for consistency