Moving Around in a City (Pt II)

When you are walking around in a city, especially within the urbancrawl structure, there are two levels of geographic importance: your position relative to the rest of the city (i.e. which district are you currently exploring) and your immediate physical location (i.e. what does this street look like).

To me, this implies that a pointcrawl map and a random table for immediate urban environments is all you need to plot locations in the city.

d6 for environment
1. Blind alley (-1 to d4 roll)
2. Side street
3. Y-intersection
4. 4-way intersection
5. Green (traffic roundabout with an open space in the center)
6. Boulevard (big street, adds +1 to the d4 roll)

And d4 for passers-by, modified by +/-1 based on time of day and city size
0-. No one
1. d6 people
2. d10 people
3. 2d10
4. 4d20
5+. Huge crowd (think Black Friday shopping mall)
This lets you know how many people generally pass by the area at any one time.  For added granularity, roll on your district encounter table (or on Zak S.'s excellent random city inhabitants table here) to find out what kinds of people pass by this area.

If your PCs are looking for a specific location, just write down its features and popularity just in case they want to return there (although, because Gumei is always changing, I'll just reroll on this table every time the PCs want to go there).

This method won't give you a map of the city, but it will give you an increasing list of locations within each district which, to me, is more useful.  Hopefully this is useful to you, too.