City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities is a rules-free universal sourcebook specifically designed to help guide storytellers through the process of creating exciting and compelling urban areas and other sorts of communities and places within them for their projects. It is not specific to any particular game system or setting and is intended to be compatible with almost any ancient, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance, fantasy, or other role-playing milieu.

City Builder: Platinum Edition is a comprehensive, fully-illustrated 240-page book that is organized into 15 sections and includes:

* More than 100 pieces of custom art that have been executed in a similar style and selected with an eye toward giving the book a unified look.

* A Preface by co-author Michael O. Varhola that talks about the development of City Builder and the role that D&D creator Gary Gygax played in it.

* An Introduction that describes the scope of the book and how to use the material it contains.

* A section that examines communities of all sizes, from smaller ones like thorps, hamlets, and villages to larger ones like towns and cities, along with special-purpose settlements like military bases, plantations, and communes. Topics within this chapter include regional and racial influences; characteristics of towns and cities, to include buildings, availability of goods and services, law and order, adventuring on, above, and below city streets, urban lighting, and community defenseworks; and disasters like flood, fire, war, and pestilence.

* Chapters devoted to 10 specific kinds of locations, including Craftsman Places, Entertainment Places, Professional Places, Tradesman Places, Mercantile Places, Service Places, Scholarly Places, Religious Places, Governmental Places, and Underworld Places.

* Descriptions of 85 different sorts of places.

* Two or three Adventure Hooks tying in with each described sort of place. 

* An appendix on Guilds that discusses organization and regulations and includes tables for randomly generating guilds.

* An appendix on creating Inns and Taverns.