We’ve been planning our next Kickstarter project over the past couple of weeks, and now we can announce it!

Here’s the description from the Kickstarter page:

Random city generator and editor for role-playing games of multiple genres & systems. Runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

More than just map software!

Do your players ever take a game session in a different direction and you need a quick city or village?  Or maybe you want to cut down on your game’s prep time by getting some help creating some of the cities or villages in your game’s setting?

Cityographer is the perfect solution for these situations!  You set some preferences for the city you want (technology level, population size, whether the city has a river, if it is on the coast, etc.) on a setup screen and it will randomly generate an entire village or city for you.  (You can also start with a blank map/city.)

Not only will the program generate the city’s map, but it will generate simple floorplans of the buildings, and each building’s residents and any important belongings.  If the building is a business you’ll also get a list of the staff and a menu or price list of products available.

Further, everything and anything can be fully or individually re-generated or hand edited!  So if you don’t like the whole city, just start over.  But if you simply don’t like the placement of a few buildings, move them or delete them and add new ones.  If you don’t like a particular building just regenerate it or an aspect of it.  For example if the building is an inn, regenerate it or regenerate just the staff or just the price list or hand edit any particular item!

Note: Although the backer rewards list a delivery timeframe of October, we hope to have a beta available in September and perhaps earlier.

Take the city with you

Like sister-products Hexographer and Dungeonographer, Cityographer will be written in Java and can easily be run from a laptop running Windows, Mac OSX or Linux.  But Cityographer will also let you export your city/village to a set of webpages which you can ZIP and transfer to another computer or post to a website to view via a hand-held device.  An RTF export will also be available.  There will likely also be a PDF export which will make your city into a PDF document for viewing on anything with a PDF viewer.  Maybe an MS Word export too.

More details and screenshots from the prototype are on the project’s Kickstarter page.

(BTW, if you have an idea for a cool high-level backer reward, please let me know.  I’d love to entertain ideas.)