The City of Portchester

The actual city of Portchester is proving to be a sticky wicket.  I can't decide jus thow much work I want to put into the development of the city.  At mininum, I need a list of important NPC's,  a list of places where you can buy important or rare items, and a sketch map of the city, overall.   I'd like to have a more detailed map, but don't know whether its worth the trouble.  

The only adventure site for the city that I have in mind is Dengwur's townhouse.  He lived there for a number of months during the campaign, and of course the people of the city must have sealed it up and shunned it as being haunted or accursed.   Parsnak's (Marlon's) hunting lodge outside of town is also marked down for adventure (especially since Parsnak buried heaps of weaponry all over the place nearby).

The most important thing, however, is to establish the number of troops, and character-class NPC's.  Nothing is so irritating to me as a player than to find that a DM just fiats in tons of guys of higher than reasonable level to prevent you from taking over a town or castle, or knocking over a liquor store or whatever.   I think one ought to be duty-bound to justify the defenders of a place based on the game system's demographics and basic reasonablity. 

If players are fifth level, say, that is absolutely no reason why the jeweler might have a pile of 3rd level fighters guarding the place, if the world is running by regular D&D rules.  That is bad DMing at its worst.  AD&D sets up that most encounter soldiers, guards and warriors are level 0.  That shouldn't change just because it might stop the PC's from becoming town super-villians.  A DM might bring in a crime-solving paladin to hunt them down later, but he should never just start packing shops with necromancers or heroes.

If however, you establish from the beginning that level 1, 2 and 3 fighters, for example, are all as common as dirt, and the pc's know that, and you've replaced the rules for big npc bandit bands, nomads etc., then that's a different story.  For example, in d20 Traveller, there were no real "monsters" and NPC's were never "level 0" and might reasonably be expected to be any level.