As we set up for our next Dungeons & Dragons campaign, we sat down for session zero where character concepts were developed, relationships and important places settled, and the city where the campaign would be set was built.

And to build the city I tried something new. First we sat down and figured out the specifics of the city – climate (cold), environment (swampy bogs with rough highlands), nation (the as of yet unnamed nation that controls the Satrapy that has been the political villain or rival for the last two campaigns we played), and relationship to said nation (was once the political capital, but due to an over-abundance of gods and the horrible climate and geographic isolation, the capital has been moved away).

I printed out a bunch of half-pages each with a neighbourhood or district of the city we were considering. In turn, each player took one of…