City Supplements or Adventures

[Evard's Small Tentacle]

What are some of the best city supplements or adventures? Most seem to so rote, with little interactivity, often wasting a lot of space trying to be too encyclopedic, with little consideration given to adventuring other than some boring adventure hooks interspersed that seem little to do with the city and any 5th grader can come up with. I am planning on running a city only campaign...

 

[Beoric]

I don't like any that I have looked at, except as sourcebooks for building your own adventure. I think that, like domain adventures, city adventures could benefit from one solid example of somebody doing it right - and by "right" I mean it would have to be open ended and non-linear.

EDIT: I will add that pointcrawls don't do it for me because they omit the experience of being in a city by removing the experience of moving through streets or operating in an environment that includes crowds of people. I think for a proper city adventure the city needs to be a character, the same way the malevolent underworld is a character in a good dungeon crawl.

I don't necessarily have a solution, although I have been thinking about it for some time. I do think that the answer lies in part with random encounters, and a system for moving through neighborhoods. I hypothesize that movement within neighbourhoods should be treated as a hexcrawl, whereas movement along major roadways should be a vector-based mode of travel, and that a good adventure will make meaningful the choice between getting to your destination by travelling a major route or by using the side streets. Each neighbourhood should have character, and that character should be discoverable through play, and have the potential to impact play.

So for instance the character of a neighbourhood is revealed through its planned locations and its random encounter tables, and it impacts play by the types of information and other rewards that are available, and the difficulty of getting them. I would probably want to include an element of choose-your-difficulty; Cavallah the crime lord) may be an excellent source of information, but her headquarters are in a dangerous part of town and owing her a favour carries it's own risks; it is safer to talk to Mitch the Snitch on the docks, but his information is often suspect.

 

[Malrex]

I think Bryce reviewed some Pickpocket Press adventures that were in a city...one was a tavern crawl or something trying to find a lost or kidnapped noble?
You could grab Kellerin's Rumble--its free.

I keep making major tweaks to Vermilion otherwise I would offer a part of it for playtesting for feedback.

 

[Melan]

It is embarrassing to toot my own horn, but In the Shadow of the City-God (which I published, although didn't write) is really smooth. You have a charismatic and macabre location hiding multiple mysteries, competing agendas, a core conflict to drive player action without depriving them of their freedom (in fact, the whole thing is open-ended), a secondary plot for followup adventures, and a collection of memorable locations/NPCs. It draws you in and lets the players make a difference. It is also written in a concise and matter of fact style that cuts to the heart of things.

 

[Two orcs]

I got a lot of use out of Statues. It's hardly a perfect adventure, but definitely an "event" you could have run in the background and the player's can decide if they want to engage with it or not. Since they spent much of the campaign in the same city it was effective to show how this event affected all stratas of the city.

 

[Two orcs]

I have a friend who's been running "Capital of the Borderlands" straight from the page in a thief centric campaign. The player's are a gang of thieves mostly preying on the civilized and wealthy, it as enough material to run proper heists but also an undercity etc. and ofc. in ACKS style a lot of material to support a proper wargame or merchantile ventures. I haven't run it myself (though I've skimmed it) so it's a 2nd hand recommendation.

It's 200 pages and absolutely packed with things to run a 4th century city in Anatolia plus material for the surrounding province.

 

[Evard's Small Tentacle]

I don't like any that I have looked at, except as sourcebooks for building your own adventure. I think that, like domain adventures, city adventures could benefit from one solid example of somebody doing it right - and by "right" I mean it would have to be open ended and non-linear.

EDIT: I will add that pointcrawls don't do it for me because they omit the experience of being in a city by removing the experience of moving through streets or operating in an environment that includes crowds of people. I think for a proper city adventure the city needs to be a character, the same way the malevolent underworld is a character in a good dungeon crawl.

I don't necessarily have a solution, although I have been thinking about it for some time. I do think that the answer lies in part with random encounters, and a system for moving through neighborhoods. I hypothesize that movement within neighbourhoods should be treated as a hexcrawl, whereas movement along major roadways should be a vector-based mode of travel, and that a good adventure will make meaningful the choice between getting to your destination by travelling a major route or by using the side streets. Each neighbourhood should have character, and that character should be discoverable through play, and have the potential to impact play.

So for instance the character of a neighbourhood is revealed through its planned locations and its random encounter tables, and it impacts play by the types of information and other rewards that are available, and the difficulty of getting them. I would probably want to include an element of choose-your-difficulty; Cavallah the crime lord) may be an excellent source of information, but her headquarters are in a dangerous part of town and owing her a favour carries it's own risks; it is safer to talk to Mitch the Snitch on the docks, but his information is often suspect.

I think i'd buy this based on your concept alone. It's the way i'd think about it- driving a high level of interactivity with "show" and not tell. I especially like the "choose your difficulty"; even that one sentence already has my mind racing about the possibilities. That level of interactivity which delivers the feel of the city without being proscriptive doesn't seem to exist in most of the city adventures and supplements I have looked at. It tends to be passively embedded (which seems to have been the historical encyclopedic approach, that is easy to do, and everyone seems to follow) and lazy and is not evocative or interactive.

 

[Evard's Small Tentacle]

The one city supplement/adventure that sticks in my mind is The City of Skulls. Way overwritten, but I recall it being pretty interactive (though not a home base).

 

[Palindromedary]

My general issue with city adventures is that they're often as much settings as adventures, and that makes them far less useful to me because you can't just plop them down in your campaign in the same way you can a dungeon. A city means something: it's a major place, living and linked to the rest of the world in a way the Lost Tomb of ZXoiptgh isn't (which could be anything, but the "lost" part makes it instantly adaptable to most campaigns nine times out of ten because you don't have to fit it into the current setting environment beyond perhaps some surface-level bits).

That tends to lead me towards things like Melan's The Nocturnal Table, Finch's City Encounters, Midkemia's Cities, etc. Those have limits of their own, of course, but overall they've been more helpful to me than any pre-cooked citybook. Something like Carse or Marlinko has fun stuff for inspiration, but I almost never want to run a city as-is.

 

[Beoric]

My general issue with city adventures is that they're often as much settings as adventures, and that makes them far less useful to me because you can't just plop them down in your campaign in the same way you can a dungeon. A city means something: it's a major place, living and linked to the rest of the world in a way the Lost Tomb of ZXoiptgh isn't (which could be anything, but the "lost" part makes it instantly adaptable to most campaigns nine times out of ten because you don't have to fit it into the current setting environment beyond perhaps some surface-level bits).

That tends to lead me towards things like Melan's The Nocturnal Table, Finch's City Encounters, Midkemia's Cities, etc. Those have limits of their own, of course, but overall they've been more helpful to me than any pre-cooked citybook. Something like Carse or Marlinko has fun stuff for inspiration, but I almost never want to run a city as-is.

This is why, though I like something like Marlinko conceptually, it is of limited use to me. To be broadly useful a city adventure needs to be a bit vanilla, drawing on common tropes. So the warehouse district can be swapped for any warehouse district, and the waterfront district can be swapped for any waterfront district.

I suppose that poses a challenge if you want to make the city a character. But there are tropes for cities as well (Chinatown isn't limited to the Chinatown of Los Angeles in the 1930s, it is representative of corruption everywhere), and one city can embody more than one trope (both Gotham and Metropolis have been New York inspired), so it should still be possible to create something with broad appeal if one was so inclined.

Honestly, probably the most influential product for me is the City/Town Encounter Matrix in Appendix C of the 1e DMG, which shows just how strongly you can imply a setting with a single encounter table. I have a tweaked version of that in a spreadsheet which I use as a base, and either swap out encounters or just reflavour them depending on the neighborhood. But in a pinch you can use it straight out of the book and improvise alternations so that the encounters are flavoured for the specific campaign in the specific neighbourhood in the specific city where the encounter is occurring.

I mean, just building encounter tables is probably a great way of city-building. For instance, what does a "Noble" encounter, or a "Thief" encounter, look like in this neighbourhood, in this city? If the thief is in a wealthy area, or the noble is in a poor, crime-ridden area, why are they there, and what are they doing? What is going on that we care why a city official is encountered on the street? Is he taking bribes? Having an affair? Paying respect to a crime lord? Getting mugged? Are the guard chasing criminals, or pointedly ignoring them, or acting as muscle for them?

 

[squeen]

I've written up the capital city of my campaign world at street/building/major-establishments level, but limited the population to only ~5,000. It takes a lot of time and it's still could use a ton of work.

What I'm dragging my feet on is writting up the NEXT major competing city which is more corrupt/Lankhmar-esque. I understand why it's not done in print too any great detail. It's an explosively big, mega-dungeon level, task.

 

[Maynard]

In order to justify the setting, characterized by the density of people in a small location, you have to give the players ways to interact with the people of the city in a meaningful way outside of adventuring. Otherwise the "city" is just a bunch of otherwise disconnected adventuring locations packed together.

Heavy emphasis on social random encounters, carousing rules, deep factions that interact with eachother and the players, etc.

Cities also create the obligation for the DM to explain the contradictions inherent in DnD's frontier mechanisms running into a state apparatus strong enough to control a Polis. This is really difficult to portray effectively without a lot of attention to detail and world building.

 

[Beoric]

I've written up the capital city of my campaign world at street/building/major-establishments level, but limited the population to only ~5,000. It takes a lot of time and it's still could use a ton of work.

What I'm dragging my feet on is writting up the NEXT major competing city which is more corrupt/Lankhmar-esque. I understand why it's not done in print too any great detail. It's an explosively big, mega-dungeon level, task.

I think as urban centers get larger there is diminishing utility to mapping it at the street level - the vast majority of which would never be visited. This is why I am leaning toward a hex format, with hexes representing "area of the city of [district type]", and movement through them being generalized. And then major roads around or through hexes representing a mode of travel that largely avoids the hex.

So the activity does not involve players choosing which individual side streets they take, like choosing which corridor to take in a dungeon. They choose to take a major route, or to go into or through "the side streets" or "the [district type] quarter", which is more closely equivalent to choosing to take a road or go cross-country on a hexcrawl, with the caveat that many destinations will eventually require them to leave the main road at some point. And their ability to navigate within a hex, or moving from one hex to another, is dependent on their familiarity with the area and their strategy for getting around, with perhaps some random or skill-system based element for when they don't really know where they are going.

And then when you need to know a street layout, probably because it is relevant to an encounter which might include combat, you use city geomorphs. Another really handy product, if anyone who likes making maps was ever inclined, would be to make, say, 4 rotatable geomorphs for each common type of district, and a few interior maps for typical buildings, all at battle-grid scale.

 

[squeen]

I hear what you guys are saying and that sounds like it would certainly work at the hex-level, but will add this: when I did finally key the city at the street-level, and some of the abstraction disappeared, I found myself much more comfortable running city adventures. The place started to come alive and my players started spending more sessions solely in the city itself. They even started making plans that involved establishing themselves a home-base in some way.

Another big step forward was when I keyed the royal castle and church as multi-level dungeon, and worked out all the major NPCs and their motives etc. They even got "a little lost" in the castle's corridors at first.

There was a bit of push back, when I started asking things like "which way do you go to get there?" etc. as they had an agenda and just wanted to see it implemented without worrying the details. But they are honestly always leaning that way...desiring to say "I do this" and have it magically happen unimpeded. As John Lennon famously said, "Life is what happens to you while your making other plans." I think there some of that in D&D especially---the world frustrates PC desire. I think it keeps them motivated if you walk the line skillfully as a DM (and not too dogmatically).

I know a lot of folks can imagine getting bogged down in boring details about city-navigation, haggling with shopkeepers, etc. But there is something to be said for slowing down a bit and smelling the flowers. It forces the players to truly experience the location. Once something is known, of course, we move through it faster. But it's like that wonderful experience of being a tourist in a new city and piecing together it's layout. Likewise, the NPCs can become enemies, allies, and even friends the party is willing to "go to bat for".

It was very gratifying to finally make non-dungeon play click for us. It felt like a long-overdue accomplishment...something I never pulled off as a DM in my youth. Even as a player, with my great DM, we hand-waived a lot of that until it was an in-dungeon output. If you are interested in ever going the "city as dungeon" route, I suggest starting small and building your way up: a Keep (B2), a Village (T1), a Town, a (small) City, etc. De-scoping the scale of the world certainly helped me tackle the daunting task...as did allowing for there to be unfinished/unpainted elements only vaguely sketched in.

Otherwise the "city" is just a bunch of otherwise disconnected adventuring locations packed together.

I will be honest, I do rather lean this direction. Too much cohesion seems artificial at time. I also like my big dungeons to have some of this random naturalism. That said, what's a lot of fun for me is having various threads pop up repeated throughout the trapestry in a subtle manner. It forms connections that can be followed, but don't compel.

Cities also create the obligation for the DM to explain the contradictions inherent in DnD's frontier mechanisms running into a state apparatus strong enough to control a Polis. This is really difficult to portray effectively without a lot of attention to detail and world building.

Agreed. I do think you need to at least work out a legitimate explanation as to why the humans don't control everything in a region. Again, lower population helps. Middle Earth (in the books, forget the movies!) was a great example of a wilderness-heavy setting.

 

[Malrex]

I hear what you guys are saying and that sounds like it would certainly work at the hex-level, but will add this: when I did finally key the city at the street-level, and some of the abstraction disappeared, I found myself much more comfortable running city adventures. The place started to come alive and my players started spending more sessions solely in the city itself. They even started making plans that involved establishing themselves a home-base in some way.


I know a lot of folks can imagine getting bogged down in boring details about city-navigation, haggling with shopkeepers, etc. But there is something to be said for slowing down a bit and smelling the flowers. It forces the players to truly experience the location. Once something is known, of course, we move through it faster. But it's like that wonderful experience of being a tourist in a new city and piecing together it's layout. Likewise, the NPCs can become enemies, allies, and even friends the party is willing to "go to bat for".

I will be honest, I do rather lean this direction. Too much cohesion seems artificial at time. I also like my big dungeons to have some of this random naturalism. That said, what's a lot of fun for me is having various threads pop up repeated throughout the trapestry in a subtle manner. It forms connections that can be followed, but don't compel.

I agree with a lot of Squeen's post. I personally couldn't run a city like a hex-crawl. I also wouldn't want to run a city adventure with every single building keyed out. For a city adventure, less abstraction is key for me, which usually means a lot more work for a designer/DM. It's easier to have abstraction in a dungeon, but in a city--there is just too many people/npc's to roleplay out and keeping track of a few half baked ideas becomes tough. During a city adventure, I don't want my mind thinking up half-baked ideas because I'm usually more focused on NPC roleplay/interaction--and knowing things about whats going on in the city, etc. helps tremendously with my roleplaying of NPCs, like Squeen said--I can more easily make the city feel alive.

Traveling through a city--smelling the flowers--this is where I create the 'walls' of my city adventure. The 'walls' being numerous overheard rumors in the streets, gossip, and adventure hooks--overwhelming the PCs so they focus on one hook and stay focused (they create their own walls and limits).

"Otherwise the "city" is just a bunch of otherwise disconnected adventuring locations packed together." -Maynard

This is how I lean, BUT--the 'disconnected' dungeons can be connected easily through rumors in my opinion and some things within one city dungeon can be useful/needed for a different city dungeon. And how PCs go through one city dungeon may effect other things/dungeons around it--because they aren't in the middle of the wilds and rumors will blow up like wildfire, which may dictate actions by factions. So timetables can be important too. I had a real cool thing going on with different street gangs and how their actions were being dictated on what the players were doing so it gave that 'every action may have a consequence' type feeling--but then there was a TPK.

A challenge I've been facing is the political type story/adventure. The adventure relies heavily on NPC motives...and the challenge is how to share that with PCs so that the "plot" isn't too easy to pickup, but also that it's not a railroad--I think that is my challenge where it just feels like a railroad, but timetables are helping me through that so its more sandboxy.

 

[Beoric]

@squeen and @Malrex, mapped cities would have been my preference as well, and I tried to make them work for a long time. But I hate the typical maps of "cities" that are really little more than large villages, which are typical in RPG map design. I notice the fact that there are not enough streets, and it bugs me. So then I start treating the few mapped streets as the "main roads", and the areas in between as neighbourhoods. And then I need a way to navigate within the neighbourhoods, because the cartographer didn't include any streets because he didn't mean those areas to actually be neighbourhoods.

Plus I have a lot of cities, many of which are quite large, and most of which are not detailed. I sometimes need to make a rough city on the fly, and being able to do so in an abstract way is really helpful. The City State OTIO isn't big enough, usually doesn't conform to the necessary geography, and I can't really use it for everything anyway, so I needed another solution. And I don't like the die drop solution in Vornheim, I prefer geomorphs when I need to break it down at the street level.

Otherwise the "city" is just a bunch of otherwise disconnected adventuring locations packed together.

This is a feature for me, not a bug. The players get to choose which rumors to follow, and eventually connections end up suggesting themselves through play, so what was formerly disconnnected becomes connected.

 

[Malrex]

@squeen and @Malrex, mapped cities would have been my preference as well, and I tried to make them work for a long time. But I hate the typical maps of "cities" that are really little more than large villages, which are typical in RPG map design. I notice the fact that there are not enough streets, and it bugs me. So then I start treating the few mapped streets as the "main roads", and the areas in between as neighbourhoods. And then I need a way to navigate within the neighbourhoods, because the cartographer didn't include any streets because he didn't mean those areas to actually be neighbourhoods.

Plus I have a lot of cities, many of which are quite large, and most of which are not detailed. I sometimes need to make a rough city on the fly, and being able to do so in an abstract way is really helpful. The City State OTIO isn't big enough, usually doesn't conform to the necessary geography, and I can't really use it for everything anyway, so I needed another solution. And I don't like the die drop solution in Vornheim, I prefer geomorphs when I need to break it down at the street level.


This is a feature for me, not a bug. The players get to choose which rumors to follow, and eventually connections end up suggesting themselves through play, so what was formerly disconnnected becomes connected.

Ya, I hear you...when mapping digitaly, there is a way you can add buildings very quickly, but sometimes there isn't enough streets OR too many streets/alleys. I'm still organizing Vermilion, I keep thinking of new things, but I got a big master map that shows the whole city, then may break it up into districts...then have 3-4 zoomed in areas per district (i.e. geomorphs that match the whole map), where I may add street names and special fleshed out Areas. That may be overkill with the number of maps, but if you get a random encounter on the streets, will be helpful to have a map. I've even considered just making a district its own module because at this point I don't think a Kickstarter would fund the whole thing--but that seriously cramps my rumor and time tables. I don't really want a rumor that says something and then (see Module #6).

I really like how interwoven adventures can be in a city compared to a dungeon.

 

[squeen]

Plus I have a lot of cities, many of which are quite large, and most of which are not detailed. I sometimes need to make a rough city on the fly, and being able to do so in an abstract way is really helpful. The City State OTIO isn't big enough, usually doesn't conform to the necessary geography, and I can't really use it for everything anyway, so I needed another solution. And I don't like the die drop solution in Vornheim, I prefer geomorphs when I need to break it down at the street level.

I agree. The purely random city/Vornheim method for me is just pure lazy trash. But, as you say, size matters. With what you're trying to achieve, I think you've got a solid plan. Let us know how it works out.

Personally, I would foolishly try to map the crap out of it but only key a few buildings....maybe being lucky enough to have something ready for the evening's game. Honestly though, that's why I went small. Since my players had come up through Hommlet and a whole lot of wilderness, a 5,000ish pop. city felt big to them. (Three Inns to choose from! What a smorgasbord!)

This is a feature for me, not a bug. The players get to choose which rumors to follow, and eventually connections end up suggesting themselves through play, so what was formerly disconnnected becomes connected.

I don't want to keep beating on poor Maynard's gaff, but isn't it kind of cool conceptually that one plot thread is happening next-to/above/below another in a labyrinthine city-scape totally unawares? I know it gets me going.

 

[Maynard]

@squeen and @Malrex,
This is a feature for me, not a bug. The players get to choose which rumors to follow, and eventually connections end up suggesting themselves through play, so what was formerly disconnnected becomes connected.

The point is about concept economy. Like a short story, you don't have a loaded gun if it doesn't fire.
If you're going to do a city campaign the city has to justify itself through mechanics/theming or its just window dressing.

 

[Avi]

For random city maps (at least on the block level) try

Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou

Not a game

watabou.itch.io