Which city on your map would lose the audit fastest, the one you placed for the view instead of a reason? Tell me what put it there and I'll help you figure out if it survives. Free Story Compass if you want a hand with the story behind it: https://thetaletinkerer.com/the-compass?v=RymX3rPsKYo&p=pinned

It should be noted that Tolkien's Mordor does have rich fertile volcanic soil thanks to Mount Doom, but the region is arid to semi-arid so the farming had to take place in the Southern part of Mordor where Lake Núrnen could be used for irrigation.

Dude's never been to Kansas. We built an entire state of, "I'm tired. Here's good."

Another thing to consider is naming conventions. There’s a town in my state called New Town. The name was literally just a road sign directing people to it after the original town was lost to flooding. The people arriving just kept the name because the migration took time and the name just stuck. “This way to new town” becomes New Town. Interesting stuff. I like reasons behind city names and locations.

1:00 The one between mountains is easy, it was a point in the pass between the mountains that trade caravans tended to stop during the trip and/or really rich mines were found there.

Whoa, wait a second. If a town has a river forty yards outside its main gate, it has a water table it can use to make a well.

Venice is a great counter example, it's good you mention it because it's a whole kind of city or town that does exist, people who settled in an undesirable location because of outside pressures not related to natural resources or even trade routs. There are also manufactured cities, Places that exist because of political compromise despite many factors making it difficult, Maybe a marriage after a war causes a new town to be formed between the two previously warring factions for example. That said I agree that the map maker needs to think through what the reasons are, it doesn't have to make sense based on the terrain since that's not how things always work out.

Canberra, the capital of Australia, was planned, on a site between Sydney and Melbourne, to stop arguments on which of those two would be the main city.

The daily travel distance bit is why all the colonial era towns in the Cumberland Valley in Maryland and Pennsylvania are spaced about 11 miles apart:  11 miles was the distance an ox cart could travel in a day on 18th century colonial roads.

It is definitely better to have a reason, but "You don't know" is a valid answer, since the characters likely have no idea. It is very plausible that no one in the city knows the actual reason.

"You don't know" also becomes a potential plot hook, if the players are curious enough to investigate.

As for the realism of any answers, though, most players are not likely to care. There are tables where it will, but if you place most settlements in obvious places and have one or two in 'strange' places, again, potential plot hooks.

I like the cities in Zharel Anger's Tana books.  The towns (big and small) are real places that spawned for real reasons. His archeology research on the Seine River and its trade routes made his Tana series immersive: commerce - mercenaries - raiders - actual river dynamics ... all integrated into the plot, so good.

The only problem with your videos - they give me so many ideas and I can't write right now! 🤦‍♀️😂 Seriously, though, this was SO helpful. Thank you! I've made the basic world map for my story but haven't gotten down to the nitty-gritty part yet. This video is getting saved for when I finally get to sit down and work on it.

3:26 I mean, the whole backstory of Radiator Springs in Cars is that it used to be a truck stop but then a new highway let people get through that stretch without the need to stop anymore.  Ifso facto, no service the town provides -> no reason for it to be there -> ghost town

Water was used in "Heaven's Poison" in way I never expected.  It destroyed crops, flooded mines that produced the elements for bronze, destroyed bridges, and flooded battlefields.  Simply, it was an amazing use of terrain that had historical backing.

Ehm, the town with river outside the walls will have the wells as well since most of ground is permeable for water to travel through, so hole deep enough will suffice.

I live in a part of Canada and one question I asked was "Why is there a hamlet or village or town every 8km?" And the answer was because that was where someone put an inn for the settlers to stay in as they were traveling. So you can have a place in the middle of "nowhere" but it's not going to be big, and it's not going to be nowhere. It's going to be along a route of some kind, a trade route or in our case, a settler road. The bigger places tended to be 16km apart. From my village, it's 16km to the next village in either direction, and 32km to the town in either direction, and in one direction, 46km to the big town that was founded around the falls that powered the sawmill that was the reason it's there, but is now the one with the hydro dam. In the other direction, the town is on the shore of a large lake that was historically important for trade.

I remember a discussion about the placement of fantasy cities or rather an argument that I had, that was based on the map of the world of Grayhawk for the official living Grayhawk campaign. The original map (the Darleen map I believe) of the world favored style over accuracy and used large symbols for major cities. I was responsible for drawing the large scale map of the Yeomanry. Now I argued that if a major town was shown in a square with a river or lake that it was on that river or lake, while others argued the map was exact placing that City up to 15 miles from the river. The tie was broken when I went through my digital archive of the Dragon Magazine (you could buy them on CD Rom at the time) and found an article by Gary Gygax that stated if the town or city was in a hex with a river or lake it was considered to be on that river or lake and my unpopular theory was vindicated. I love the concept of the break. I ran a Temple of Elemental Evil Campaign, one of the most entertaining parts was writing a sourcebook on the evil town Nulb. Its existence and economic stability and reason for its continued independence as a free town was because it was on such a break, it lays on a border at the crossing of a major river by a major road, so is a ford town, a second minor river joins here as well. So it is upstream from the angle of the two rivers and the rivers destination. I figured that large ships could sail here but no further as the waters became too shallow. Meaning ships are forced to unload here and either decant into barges or onto caravans. This requires labor and mercenaries for the caravans. It gave me a complete economic life and reason for the towns existence, its a free port because no adjacent power wants a tax on their goods flowing through the town to be paid to another power. So it has self rule and is lawless the kind of frontier town where an evil cult could form and prosper.

a common tactic in europe was to build castles and forts at river bends. youre defended on one side by the river and you have a means for easy transport of goods and building materiels by floating it down said river. later some of them began using those bends to make moats. you dig a large trench from the other side of the castle or fort and connect to the river.

historically, it was extremely common to see towns pop up around castles and forts due to the proximity of its safety. this is how cities with inner and outer walls become a thing. also, theres a surprising number of small towns built in valleys and passes between mountain passes irl. its a natural resting point for caravans and an obvious place to put a tolling station.

in the central us, especially, we tend to see a lot of towns that are placed seemingly in the middle of nowhere at regular intervals because we built them as service stops along rail lines. the great plains region especially is notorious for having towns built in random places simply because the people traveling west decided they were tired and stopped. then theres the various isolated mining towns, the towns that were established as stopping points for cattle drives, and the towns that popped up in the various central us oil rushes.

its not just a central us thing, either. along the east coast there are also towns that are in seemingly odd locations due to them being fishing towns with either small shipyards or natural coves to protect and/or service ships that are traveling up and down the eastern seaboard (which is prone to atlantic storms). in a lot of swampy areas (florida and louisiana, mostly) we also have some towns that exist there simply because were stubborn asf.

Mordor's soil may be fertile but its skies are blackened by magic clouds to protect the orcs from sunlight.

The town I live in started because of a fresh water spring. A monastic community grew up around it, and a secular community grew around that (it was an otherwise random spot in a fertile area) which encouraged its use as a market town.. Then a nearby port town called London grew and swallowed it up in its commuter belt…