#RPGaDay2024 for 9 August: An accessory you'd like to see

Today's prompt: An accessory you'd like to see

A dozen years ago I picked up a book, Barmi: A Mediterranean City Through The Ages, which traces through lavish illustrations the development of a fictional city somewhere on the western Mediterranean littoral. As someone who works in land use planning, I was immediately enthralled, seeing a Stone Age settlement transformed through the years to a modern city. I was also intrigued by the possibility of using Barmi as a ruritania in my Flashing Blades campaign - it took some years, but that's the campaign I'm running right now.

Barmi is in fact only one in a series of books on fictional cities around the world: Lebek, in the Low Countries; San Rafael, in Central America; and Umm El Madayan, on the coast of North Africa, each tracing the development from pre-history to the modern day.

Around the time Honor + Intrigue came out, I was approached about working on some setting-neutral city guides for swashbuckling roleplaying games. I declined - this is my hobby, not my vocation - but if anyone was to ever take on a project like that, for any adventure game in any genre, really, these books would be extraordinary models on which to base them: a timeline of evolving city maps, punctuated by illustrated details about construction and daily life.