d100 Points of Interest for Your Tabletop City

Populate your TTRPG city with clever and unique POIs with just one roll!

d100 Points of Interest for Your Tabletop City

When you're designing settlements for your fantasy TTRPG campaigns, you should always strive to make something memorable. Even Podunk towns with one questgiver and a handful of huts can be exciting and meaningful to your players if it has enough personality. There are many ways to accomplish this: you can give your town a central hook, fill it with rich NPCs, or make the town itself a web of complex social hierarchies. One of the easiest ways to bring character or intrigue to a town, however, is to simply plop noteworthy THINGS into it.

What do you players see when they walk into a town? Is it just dirt roads and houses? Or are there compelling points of interest (POIs) that might hide strange characters, crucial lore, or mechanical complexity? Whenever you begin brainstorming a settlement for your campaign, make sure to include a handful of buildings, structures, geographic features, or magical objects that will draw your players' attention and motivate gameplay. This list of 100 POIs is the perfect place to get started.

No player has ever complained about a setting being too jam-packed with noteworthy stuff to look at or interact with. Look at all the shit we crammed into our setting of Ancora Bay! And this is just one corner of the dang city.

Note that this table is geared toward fantasy settings. You could roll for inspiration for more modern or futuristic campaign worlds, but you'll probably need to tweak some details. 

Our album City Streets is filled with a broad array of tunes for fantasy towns

The following POIs are broadly arranged from most mundane / least magical to weirdest and most arcane. If you roll a d100, there's no telling what you'll get, but if you want to focus on more typical settings, consider rolling a d30 or rolling a d100 and dividing by 2.

d100 Points of Interest for a TTRPG City

  1. Twin spires symbolizing peace with a neighboring city/state/kingdom
  2. A stadium built for a sporting event unique to this town
  3. Evenly spaced watchtowers that have recently taken heavy damage
  4. A royal garden off limits to commoners
  5. A windmill that has not been active for decades
  6. The courthouse that handles legal disputes from all across the land
  7. A central square filled with tents belonging to myriad unhoused refugees
  8. A rowdy barracks manned by elite but frustratingly stupid guards
  9. An unfinished bridge the local government refuses to fund
  10. A cathedral to a god that most consider to be evil
  11. The office a freelance cartographer desperate to chart some unknown land
  12. A tomb perpetually wreathed in flowers
  13. A longhouse where mighty warriors break bread
  14. An idyllic beer garden adorned with umbrellas and lanterns
  15. The private studio of a master painter 
  16. A distractingly loud library in a tavern's basement
  17. A cooperage that is a front for gang activity
  18. A roundabout with a marble war memorial at its center
  19. A stockpile of sand just outside of town used by local glassmakers
  20. A cozy alleyway between bars where the party never ends
  21. An overused gallows stained white by bird droppings
  22. A smithy that forges weapons made of volcanic glass
  23. Eleven statues of illustrious former leaders; one statue has been removed
  24. A well that is secretly an entrance to a covert guildhall
  25. Free public baths where obnoxious preachers proselytize day and night
  26. A vast cemetery filled with dead combatants from a forgotten battle
  27. A meeting hall designated for negotiations between foreign dignitaries 
  28. Rooftop orchards that provide the fruit the city uses to feed the poor
  29. A somber boulevard with tombstones overflowing the median 
  30. An aviary atop a soaring tower
  31. A racetrack for horses or more exotic mounts
  32. A military recruitment center that will arm anyone who can hold a sword
  33. A handful of archways that suggest the city's former inhabitants were giants
  34. A market square where residents can purchase cuisines from all over the world
  35. A slaughterhouse lamentably close to a residential neighborhood
  36. An ornate palace with balconies that even a novice adventurer could easily climb onto
  37. An effigy of the leader of some neighboring land, ready to be set alight
  38. The entrance to a cave where lives a family of bears, orcs, or drakes
  39. A ceremonial mound upon which one must never step
  40. A caravan of exhausted migrant traders who are considering settling down
  41. A lengthy ditch that marks the border between the territories of rival families
  42. Sheets of rugged bedrock carved from the landscape by an ancient battle
  43. A fancy clubhouse for a wealthy guild of corrupt artisans
  44. A section of curtain wall that doubles as an affordable apartment building
  45. Shrines scattered around the town dedicate to forgotten godlings
  46. A tavern famous for its impromptu amateur wrestling competitions
  47. An art museum curated by a wealthy gnome with questionable taste
  48. A battery of cannons or ballistae that inexplicably faces the town's main governmental building
  49. An instrument shop that sells impossibly loud percussion instruments
  50. A yard filled with broken-down or decommissioned boats, airships, train cars, or other vehicles
  51. An inconspicuous home that contains many of the world's rarest texts
  52. An entire quarter of the city where no one is allowed to make any noise
  53. A wooden warehouse filled with thousands of yet unhatched eggs
  54. A stretch of uninhabited mansions owned by a greedy investor
  55. A sacred grove desecrated by lustful revelers
  56. A condemned neighborhood overrun with seemingly innocuous snails
  57. A field filled with half-buried ceremonial swords
  58. A witch's hut spewing bizarre herbal smoke from its flue
  59. A detective agency staffed entirely by the undead
  60. A magical surgery clinic servicing only the wealthiest citizens
  61. A gaudy casino exclusively frequented by orcs, goblins, and trolls
  62. The wreckage of an ancient fallen airship, repurposed as public housing
  63. A third-rate magic school where half of the students wind up dead before graduation
  64. One or more roads blocked by thick, spiky vines
  65. A giant vein of crystal that recently burst up through the floor of a home
  66. A squalid menagerie owned by a disgraced druid
  67. A square pool of black sludge no one seems interested in cleaning
  68. A trash heap where local tinkerers experiment with new recycling processes
  69. A toyshop that seems haunted but is in fact just really creepy
  70. A bunker in which the local government stores a year's worth of emergency rations
  71. A small chapel at the site where a God allegedly gave birth
  72. A copper-plated keep that is resilient against certain varieties of magical onslaught
  73. A bottomless pit that is always guarded by sentries tethered to the ground
  74. A private greenhouse filled with magical butterflies
  75. A belltower that rings whenever a citizen commits a grave sin
  76. A stone spiral staircase that leads down into the bowels of the city
  77. Scattered spike pits that residents ignore and casually sidestep
  78. A theater presenting plays that often reflect events soon to pass
  79. An observatory that seers can use to spy on distant corners of the world
  80. A man-sized carnivorous flower that the local leader finds curiously charming
  81. A kinetic sculpture that produces divine harmonies when the wind blows
  82. A beautiful man-made pond inhabited by a pod of lonely mermaids
  83. A sarcophagus sealed shut with chains from countless generations
  84. A vicious ogre frozen in time by the town's resident wizard
  85. An eldritch monument that prevents nightmares for anyone sleeping within a mile
  86. A park overrun by tricksy fae; locals avoid it at all costs
  87. A massive industrial oven in which the townsfolk bake cakes as tribute for a gluttonous genie
  88. A charcoal kiln on a hilltop manned by helpful fire spirits
  89. The rotting corpse of a legendary beast defeated by the town's heroes
  90. A walled crater within which a meteorite thrums with a beating heart
  91. Great pillars of ice that never thaw
  92. An enormous oak tree that withers and regrows to its full size every year
  93. A teleportation circle that deposits travelers to an unknown location; no one has ever returned
  94. A perpetual stormcloud that has never and will never dissipate
  95. An elaborate gateway that functions as a permanent portal to another town
  96. A pyramid covered in mirrors that houses a legendary magical artifact
  97. A hovering sky-fortress that protects the city from flying intruders
  98. A fountain that grants wishes when filled with blood
  99. Infinitely long iron chains that dangle from the heavens
  100. A towering lightning rod that harnesses power for a wizard's wicked experiments