D&D General Favorite Iconic D&D Metropolis

KoolMoDaddy-O said:

So instead of asking a multiple-choice question you really want us to make an A/B binary choice, and when you ask which city we like best, we're supposed to understand that some of the cities we consider cities aren't really cities because waves hands. Your "Criteria...entirely up to you" statement is really "Criteria entirely up to me."

Click to expand...

Mercurius said:

Wow, some people take online polls about elfy games a bit too seriously. My apologies for not framing it exactly to your liking. I didn't know the stakes were so high.

Click to expand...

KoolMoDaddy-O said:

Oh you gravely misunderstand my attitude -- I'm over here laughing at my keyboard. I just don't why you bothered to make the poll in the first place.

Guys I made a poll who's your favorite Jedi Knight from Star Wars? Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, Captain Kirk, or Count Chocula? But you can't vote for Darth Vader because he's a Sith.

Click to expand...

Mercurius said:

OK, fair enough. But...no need to take it too seriously or deconstruct it too much. It is a very casual poll, not a dissertation.

Click to expand...

KoolMoDaddy-O said:

Peace be upon you I don't want the thread to spiral negatively. All I'm saying is the opinion that Neverwinter isn't a real city is a bit of a wild take. IIRC the third act of the 2023 D&D movie is set in Neverwinter and it very much resembled an urban landscape.

Side note: Some weeks ago in the What Next WOTC thread somebody suggested Wizards should publish a collection of 4 or 5 gazetteers of D&D cities and the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. We know Baldur's Gate has its own chapter in the upcoming Forgotten Realms setting book and maybe Sharn will get some love in Forge of the Artificer. Sigil had its own book in the Planescape slipcase set and the City of Greyhawk was described in the 2024 DMG. So it has me thinking what other D&D cities are due for a 5.5e glowup or even a debut.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

I mean, define heavily.

Compared to a lot of the rest of the UK that wasn't London? Yes.

Compared to London? Not really.

Compared to cities in Germany and Japan? Not even slightly.

We lost about 10% as many civilians to bombing as the Germans did (the UK lost about 40,000 civilians over the entire war, a figure worth noting), and similarly our infrastructure and factories were far less damaged. The Luftwaffe at its worst was as-nothing to the industrial-scale bombing raids of 1944 and 1945. Don't make people with more production capacity than you and who possess similarly amoral attitudes towards civilian populations to you mad, I guess! (Not that it works or achieves any legitimate military goal - bombing civilians is pointless at best, Dan Carlin did a pretty good podcast on that I note).

Growing up in London in the 1980s and 1990s, there were still a few old bomb sites here too. Just places with half-grown-over rubble or waste ground the older people knew had been bombed. By the end of the 1990s or early 2000s I think people hard or were building on pretty much all of them.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Hardly.

As much it has been mythologized, it wasn't bombed even a fraction as much, relative to its size, as a lot of cities in Germany, nor comprehensively destroyed by firebombing as many Japanese cities were, particularly Tokyo (the bombing of which would undoubtedly and frankly correctly have lead to warcrime trials had the West not won - the US intentionally targeted purely residential areas with horrifically designed "napalm pump" weapons which had no purpose beyond mass-killing human civilians - military and industrial structures were largely immune to them - the low-end estimate is 100k civilians - mostly women and children - burned to death in a single evening)

Click to expand...

KoolMoDaddy-O said:

Peace be upon you I don't want the thread to spiral negatively. All I'm saying is the opinion that Neverwinter isn't a real city is a bit of a wild take. IIRC the third act of the 2023 D&D movie is set in Neverwinter and it very much resembled an urban landscape.

Click to expand...

KoolMoDaddy-O said:

Side note: Some weeks ago in the What Next WOTC thread somebody suggested Wizards should publish a collection of 4 or 5 gazetteers of D&D cities and the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. We know Baldur's Gate has its own chapter in the upcoming Forgotten Realms setting book and maybe Sharn will get some love in Forge of the Artificer. Sigil had its own book in the Planescape slipcase set and the City of Greyhawk was described in the 2024 DMG. So it has me thinking what other D&D cities are due for a 5.5e glowup or even a debut.

Click to expand...

Tonguez said:

City Beyond the Gates has certainly made London a legitimate DnD metropolis, so I cant dispute its inclusion

Click to expand...