A robust design procedure by @Nickoten
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These are pretty useful tools. I think the street scenes is the one thing that I don’t think about as much but adds a lot of color.
This is the type of information presentation questions I want to learn about. Thank you for sharing!
QUIBBLE TIME:
I really hate “adventurers guilds”. feels super game-y to me, pops me out of the verisimilitude. I prefer dancing around the edges of this, with very similiar-ish guilds, but never stepping up to the WE ARE ADVENTURERS. for “competing parties” I like being a bit sideways to the matter-- they are well armed miners, or a wizard and their entourage, a gang looking for loot, not “adventurers”. OK, its a small distinction, but it really comes up when you go to the logical conclusion of “adventurers guilds” with-- the job board. that just … is … a video game? I dunno. I don’t like it. NOT SAYING ITS EVIL. just a bad flavor for me.
otherwise, I love city adventures. I love making cities and this is great advice.
ADDING TO IT: speaking of culture, I really like FESTIVALS. like, hell, I wouldn’t be sad if half the time some festival or other is happening in a city. designing crazy festivals ESPECIALLY HOW THE PLAYERS INTERACT WITH THEM is really fun.
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I feel this. I tend to avoid the term “Adventurer” as well. It’s corny. At the same time, in a world with subterranean bunkers full of treasure it does feel like something like them would pop up to regulate dungeon theft. I tend to lean into the gangs angle.
Festivals for sure. Some sort of Carnivale is one I plop into just about anything. It’s one of those engaging show don’t tell tools. I need to make some random tables for festivals/feast days/etc.
edit: Ya know what it is about “Adventure Guilds” and job boards that I don’t like? It’s not those things in themselves, it’s when they are tacked on to any otherwise early modern, high medievalish setting. It feels too normal and takes me out of it.
I’m on the flip side of adventuring guilds - I love em. They’ve always made sense to me because I’ve benefitted from the modern equivalent - the Alpine Club of Canada. An adventuring club with a literal board to sign up for or invite people on adventures. You can hire mercenaries…errr…guides too 
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I have spent more time thinking about this than I would have expected, but here is another conclusion I have made:
there is a genre convention in ttrpgs where “The Party” is a rag tag team of unrelated people, strung together hastily for a single purpose. You all meet in a tavern and have very tenuous reasons for being together (I know, some games address this… but even then it’s tenuous).
so yea, in a world where there are actual dungeons, tombs with treasure, etc, are common, it makes sense that there will be both organized, semi-organized, or even improvised groups of people raiding these dungeons. BUT. I prefer that “The Party”, the actual PCs, be the exception; and that other “adventuring parties” follow narrative, in world logic rules more closely.
so, the rival parties, aren’t ANOTHER rag tag team of people that met in a tavern and decided to loot dungeons. they are members of the kings guard, a single wizard and his band of hirelings, a group of rogues that are looking for a big score, a bandit king and his men.
if The Party runs into another group of people that look like The Party, I think it should feel weird. like spiderman pointing at Spiderman. not like, its a regular thing that happens in this world.
hence no adventurers guild.
but yea, I dunno, it doesn’t kill me to have this affectation slip into the imagined world. just a preference against it.
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