City Adventures?

Very good subject! INTRIGUE is the key to city adventures, in my experience. This is one of the things "The Enemy Within" did so well. The setting must be presented as believable, with a good core of mundane NPCs as part of the scenery. The players interaction with those NPCs will determine the flow of information they receive. Actions must have consequences: stopping a mugging by burning down the market is not going to cut it....

I think that CSIO was a huge help in that so many of the things a Referee needed include was part of that module. My group has done a few "Urban Sandbox" sessions using LL and CSIO. It has worked well with small groups, playing "private detective" in a medieval setting. Combat has been minimal, but problem solving and role playing have been great.

City Adventure is my favorite form of adventure in D&D. I'm testing lot's of stuff in my current campaign and drawing many conclusion on how to get better at this, from my point of view.

I had planned to post well thought out and playtest-oriented posts in my blog about City Adventure, but right now I have so little time...

I did an interview with one of the founding fathers of British gaming last week (will be up on my blog in the next few days) and he totally slates CSIO for being unnecessarily detailed. He's against pre-scripted planned out cities:

'Wilderlands is fkn Freebird, no, Prog Rock, it's someone else's thing - not the mutant product of the interaction at the game table. DMs should let their nuts hang.'

The trouble with city adventures is that they are (at least in my games) so heavily built on emergence and usually so tied to specific character goals that you can't distil them into a modular package. The best you can do is present the entire city (which can really get out of hand) or a package of a few relevant locations/personalities/customs/adventure possibilities.

The first solution is good for sandbox purposes but mighty work-intensive (that's why Zothay is the only one I have written up for publication, and why Khosura is the only other I have written up to that level - or almost to that level if we don't count the undercity) and may overwhelm people. The second solution is manageable, relatively easy to write, but isn't a true sandbox, only a possible springboard for one. One such city of mine was published in Fight On! #5, and another will be found in Knockspell #3.

I've always shied away from running city adventures. The city was just there to provide a base of operations and resupply.

And the city adventures I've played have all been urban dungeons -- the fact that they were in a city was incidental.

I, too, would love to see a "How to Run a City Adventure" article in Fight On!

Though not a general "How to Run a City" article, I submitted to FO!6 the Enharza city with a guide on how to run that city. It's underlying principles, methods and ideas could be used to create new cities.

Basically, it's not a "city adventure" (no defined beginning, no defined end) but a "city setting", a "city sandbox".

CSIO is like this, but it's size makes it a bit hard to manage.

Mine is done like a WOHF wilderness map, but for a city:

1) It's map, a small intro, some encounter tables, and a bunch of vaguely detailed locations.

2) You don't need "modules". You just explore and adventure in the city for it's own sake, like a WOHF map. The scenario is the place of adventure ITSELF. Random tables, improvisation, and "dropping" some modules into the scenario is what makes it work.

3) Instead of player's saying: "Hey, this mountains on the player's map look interesting, lets find some rumors about them and check them out", in the city sandbox player's say: "this wierd building on the map looks interesting, let's ask about and check it out".

That is why you need that in your map, your "special locations" are distinctive from the rest of the mass of anonymous, of no note, buildings. Like in this map:¨



4) the journey from one point of the city to the other is an adventure itself. You can roll for random encounters that can derail the "expedition" and take it to where not even the DM knows where it's going.

5) Instead of "we need to travel back to town A, across the dangerous forests, to speak with npc B", the players go: "we need to get back to temple X, across the dangerous slums, to speak with npc Z".

So at many many levels, wilderness and city works pretty much the same. It's just in a "in-game" smaller scale. But in-game scale and time is an ilussion.

You migh also say that cities are more populated than wilderness. But it's also quite of an "in-game" illusion. When they are in the wilderness and you describe: "you see a lagoon with many flamingos", is not very different than saying "you see a market with lots of miserable people". It's pretty much a cosmetic difference, but a cosmetic that really changes the whole feel of what the players sense.

You can also have ready 2 o 3 more detailed adventures ("hired to killed a noble", "cleaning up a cult", "steal something from a mansion" with no defined location within the city, and no defined hook or backround, and you just "drop it" into the game when needed and where needed.

No two DMs running will be running the same city out of the same materials. Pretty much what happens with the WOHF!

So the condensed advice is: "create and run your cities, pretty much like you create and run your wilderness sandboxes".

Here is how a session run like this looks like:

zetaorionis-zulgyan.blogspot.com/search/label/City%20Adventuring

Flying Buffalo. I think at least some of them are still in print, too. Yep, just checked the website - 2 and 6 are out of stock but they have 1, 3-5, and 7 in:

www.flyingbuffalo.com/prices.htm

'City Encounters should observe the Rule Of Three, there is always a bystander, an interupter or a distraction. The City is not a town and interactions flow at a different rate.

'Everyone knows something (their trade, gossip etc) and someone. Connections are being made and un-made all the time. The City is not static, there is always an influx and an exodus. Characters need to nurture and consolidate their relationships with others in order to be able to receive assistance in times of trouble.'

- Trevor Peach, 'The City Never Sleeps': The Cabal fanzine 1977

I've read Zulgyan's guide to running adventures in Enharza and it is spot-on, hits the nail on the head.

My apologies. I meant Baldemar:

www.amazon.com/Baldemar-Fantasy-Master-Robert-Blake/dp/0941993132

Also, T. Foster at K&K reminded me recently about the Cities supplement by Midkemia (later reprinted by Chaosium, and version for RQ was done as well I guess), and I have to say, if you don't have that supplement, you should!

I've been hankering to introduce some city adventuring into my Caverns of Thracia campaign. The limiting factor is that exploration of that dungeon is still ongoing, and I'd like players to be able to move back and forth from city to dungeon without the Caverns suddenly becoming the suburbs of the metropolis that's less than a day's walk away. So I've been planning to introduce a means of planar travel by which the PCs can travel to and from the Nameless City in Limbo.

Originally, the extraplanar element was there to allow the city to be as teeming and Lankmaresque as I like (and also as magically exotic and high-powered) without the implications spilling into the mundane wilderness and small towns surrounding the Caverns. Recently it's also become a useful way to allow PCs to pass back & forth between one local campaign and another, since each game is in its own assumed reality.

Inspired by Zulgyan's post, when I introduce the Nameless City I'd like to sell the PCs a map of the city to empower & inspire their sandbox wanderings. Does anyone have suggestions? Here are some of the ones I'm thinking of:

- Lankmar boxed set. Good: Own it, has beautiful color and evocative-shaped buildings. Bad: Blank regions for geomorph tiles are nice for in-game discovery but less so as a player aid; locations are too iconic & recognizable to be re-purposed as a "Nameless City".

- City State of the World Emperor map. Good: Poster size, full of detail, awesome old-school pedigree. Bad: I just own the map, not the accompanying text (bought it loose at Lou Zocchi's booth last year) so I'd have to wing everything (although I guess I could use the PDF).

- Player's Guide to Kaiin. Good: Recommended upthread, I think I own it (bought it three-for-one at Titan Games booth last year?). Bad: Online reviews suggest it doesn't have a street-by-street map of the kind I'm thinking about giving the players.

- City of Brass (Necromancer). Good: Recommended upthread. Bad: Freakin' expensive, online review suggests cartography not its strong point.

- Sir Robilar's City of Brass (Kenzer). Good: Associated with Rob Kuntz. Bad: I have mixed experiences with Hackmaster stuff, Amazon customer review is poor.

- Secrets of the Lamp (TSR). Good: A TSR take on the City of Brass; I like Wolfgang Baur's work. Bad: Haven't heard anything about it; any experiences?

I'm reading Zothay with considerable pleasure. Ultimately I think it's more realistic / low-fantasy than I want for the Nameless City, but I'll certainly use ideas from it for city encounters.

I went through my gaming shelves and looked at some of the stuff in the above list. The maps of Kaiin in the Player's Guide are awesomely unusual and definitely make me want to say "Let's check out that building!" - unfortunately there's no city overview map. I saw a trio of Dying Earth maps at Warehouse 23, one of which was Kaiin, but it was sold out; if I can track that down, it might be the way I go.

The World Emperor map has less unusual buildings than I might have wished; the focal point is the palace/citadel, which is not surprising I guess. Also in that pile is a map of Jakalla, from Tekumel - its calligraphy style, the sub-islands, and some of the place names (like the City of the Dead) are pretty interesting but the map is dark and even though I bought it with a book, that book doesn't seem to have a map key!

Another strong contender is the map of Cauldron from Paizo's Shackled City adventure path - full-color poster map, distinctively shaped buildings, unusual layout, and existing map key (the 3.5isms don't bother me) are all pluses here.