After over 200 hours noodling on other playthroughs (got to see how Gale does it, nearly had a Dark Urge moment - but that's for a different discussion) I've finally reached the city proper. No, the nice auntie was not able to homeopath me back to health but I have had some refreshingly direct discussions with my Githyanki physician. I'm sure the psychological trauma will wear off. Eventually.
Now I get to see how the dev team handled city building. It's interesting, certainly. You are kinda left with the impression that the city exists for player characters to experience, but I suppose the same argument could be made for, say, New York. Every tourist thinks that New York was built for them alone because they only ever see those bits of New York that were built with tourists in mind. Students at CUNY probably feel the same way, at least in their first year, before they start stepping out of their comfort zone. When in a curated environment everything seems built for you, until you start looking for the things that aren't.
When designing an urban environment of the fictional variety it's usually a good idea to look at how it's been done before and by that I do not mean 'how did Tolkein do it?' No, I mean how did we do it, and the answer can be found in the oddest of places.
It depends on what kind of fiction you intend to write. For Keepers and Trail GMs, I always recommend Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen, followed by Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, and then, if you're really ambitious, Big Change: America transforms itself, 1900-1950. There is no better coverage of the period. If you really want to go gonzo nuts then Middletown: A Study in American Culture by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd is worth your time but it's a bit of a brain-breaker.
The point being that you do not know what tools you have to play with until you look into the box and see those tools for what they are. There are always ideas you haven't thought of. Concepts that never occurred to you, worries that you never knew anyone had, and you won't have the slightest idea until you go looking for them. Or to put it another way, until you start looking for the things that aren't built for you, you don't know what's really out there.
Let's say this is a fantasy setting. What resources exist?
Well, Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a damn good start. If you, as an author, can read that without blushing and confessing, perhaps through gritted teeth, that you too have been to Fantasyland, then you're a better author than I.
However, if you're looking for a fantasy city (or possibly a fantasy village) then I highly recommend Joseph & Frances Gies' Life In A Medieval City, or Life In A Medieval Village. Perhaps followed by a dessert course of Myddle by Richard Gough, if you enjoy period pieces. Life in a burgher's household, big business, small business, the church, the condition of the streets, books and authors, disasters, fairs - it's all here. A moveable feast of material.
What kind of feast?
Well, taking a look at Life In A Medieval Village: 'One holiday, Wake Day, the feast of the local parish saint, varied from place to place. Probably in the 13th century, as later, the villages kept vigil all night, in the morning heard Mass in honor of their patron saint, then spent the day in sports. Often the churchyard was turned into a sports arena, a usage deplored by the clergy ...'[p102]
Let's say this is Ravenloft. In that setting there is the Church of Ezra. 'Pious souls in various domains pray to Ezra, an aloof god who embodies the Mists ... With no domain-spanning organization, the church serves largely as a formalization of local superstitions ...'
It's reasonable to think that, in at least some of the Ravenloft realms, Ezra may have local saint figures or provincial heroes who fill the same role. Or that Ezra has different aspects, just as in, say, Greek mythology where Zeus has many aspects: Zeus Agoreus, Zeus Xenus, and so on.
Let's say that this is Mordent. Ravenloft's equivalent of Hammer Horror Cornwall/Kent/Sussex. Mist-shrouded coastline with a ghostly secret.
Captain Clegg (1962, Peter Cushing)
Now we have:
The Demon Fiddler
The characters arrive in Oxney, which overlooks Lazarette Rock, just before its annual feast. The Chapel, the only building in Oxney made of stone, plays unwilling host to the feast; the priest, Berriman, does their best not to intrude, as the last priest who did was run out of town. By tradition the villagers gather in the churchyard for the celebration, eating specially prepared cakes over the graves of their forebears, telling stories of ships at sea and the fabled Lazarette Rock, where the long-term contagious are, by tradition, left, so as not to spread their sickness to healthy folk. In the morning, again by tradition, there is a service, followed by sports, games and a ritual dance, again all in the churchyard for the benefit of the dead. This ritual, it's said, keeps the dead quiet in their graves. Not walking about or harming honest folk.
This year the service is attended by a Tiefling Bard (College of Spirits) who has never visited Oxney before. Nobody knows where the bard, Ariala, came from. Some claim she arrived all alone, by boat, from Lazarette Rock. Whether she came from there or somewhere else, she has unsettling tales to tell about the people of Oxney and the priest, Berriman.
In the morning Ariala is found dead. How did she die?
Option One: Unfriendly Dead. In Mordent nobody ever rests. The dead linger, and in Oxley the dead don't like having their stories told. It was the grasping hands of Oxley's ghosts that did for the bard but, in so doing, presented themselves with a problem. Now Ariala is one of the dead and, so long as she stays in Oxley, it will forever be feast night, where the villagers must appease the Demon Fiddler all night long ...
Option Two: Wicked Priest. The Bard dropped too many hints that she knew about Berriman's dealings with those out on Lazarette Rock. The priest slips the long-term sick shipments of luxuries to make their interment more pleasant, but each trip back and forth increases the risk of spreading diseases to the parishioners of Oxley. Now that dead Bard's ghost haunts the churchyard where she died, and Berriman's not about to reward adventurers who start asking why that should be.
Option Three: Ezra's Burden. There never was a Bard. There was a servant of Ezra, sent to warn the people of Oxley that their transgressions were going too far. When the people of Oxley turned their back on the Bard, Ezra turned her back on the people of Oxley. Now the church cannot protect the village, Oxley will soon know what it's like when its dead are no longer confined to the churchyard by yearly rituals of cake and storytelling ...
There are moments in any RPG narrative where the heroes have has A Moment, whatever that moment may have been, and now need to transition from the Moment to wherever else in the narrative they need to be right now. Maybe they just overheard the bad guys explaining their plan and now need to get the hell out of there, as happens in SPECTRE. Maybe they need to get from their current location to a more useful location, say because somebody in the party died and they need to get to the temple for a resurrection or raise dead.
Maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other thing, but the point is they were Here, and now they need to be There. Right Now.
Often this involves a chase scene, a dramatic interpersonal showdown, or something that, as Director, you may not have planned for - hence this post.
Many RPG campaigns, no matter the setting, explicitly plan for this moment. Horror on the Orient Express is designed so the ending scenario of the campaign is a race to [LOCATION HIDDEN] to prevent horrible things from happening to the world. Nights Black Agents has Extended Heat chases for exactly the same reason, always linking the agents to the ongoing threat whether they happen to be in Lisbon or Bern this week.
However, you can't always plan for these moments. Players are unpredictable. They may invent the most peculiar moments and make them the Moment, for no better reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. Then you, as Master of Ceremonies or whatever shiny hat you're wearing this week, have to pull a scene out of your capacious crevice.
Or it may be that the players haven't invented a Moment at all, but instead they're stuck in a holding pattern waiting for a Moment that may never come.
Waiting for Godot, Harold Pinter (Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McKellen)
What to do in moments like this? Or even Moments like this?
Cheat.
The great thing about many RPG systems, and I'm going to use Dungeons and Dragons as an example, is that the crunchier they are, the easier it is to cheat, since most of the narrative depends on die rolls. It's not exactly scripted, but it's easy to manipulate a situation so that it appears scripted because everything ultimately depends on whether or not a particular die roll hits a particular difficulty.
That means you can create interchangeable scenes. You take a prewritten sequence, slot it into the narrative, and boom! Instant plot, that looks as if it was made from scratch.
So in any given chase scene, for instance, it almost doesn't matter who's doing the chasing or where the action is taking place. What matters are the DCs scattered along the path, because the DCs determine whether a particular moment goes one way or the other.
This is more difficult to pull off in player-facing systems where the emphasis isn't so much on hitting a particular number as it is leveraging a particular situation. In those circumstances the GM really does need to know what is going on in that specific scene, rather that rely on a set of generics to help them out of an awkward situation.
However, even then it can be done. Consider Night's Black Agents, with its various Thrilling scenes - chase scenes, infiltration, digital intrusion, and so on. These scenes ultimately depend on the agent hitting a particular sequence of difficulty numbers in more or less the right order. That means it doesn't matter who's the active party and who the subject, or where the scene is taking place. What matters is the sequence of difficulty numbers that the agents have to cope with.
Let's say this is Dungeons and Dragons, Ravenloft, using the Mordent setting.
Mordent is a ghost-ridden coastal community, vaguely Georgian in terms of technology and social mores. There are no cities; the biggest community is about the size of Whitby, Yorkshire. There's vast stretches of lonely moorland, isolated hamlets, spooky mansions on the hill, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are chewing chunks out of the scenery, that sort of thing.
So how shall we cheat?
To begin with, on that description we already know that most if not all scenes will take place in a moderately civilized but not urban area. This isn't Tolkein's Middle Earth; you won't find ancient dragons sitting on vast hoards of stolen dwarvish gold down some mountain hole or other. Nor is this Jack the Ripper's fog-shrouded London town, with sinister threats lurking down every dark alley - and there are more dark alleys than there are hot dinners.
On the other hand, a coach racing down a lonely road trying to outrun a half-dozen highwaymen sounds perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic. Or a skiff out at sea trying to beat the storm and get back to harbor before being driven up on the rocks.
So any DM wanting to organize a transition chase scene could assume that the available chase options are:
Small village (one-horse town).
Large community (more than one street and horse, but not a metropolis).
Open civilized countryside (ie. something with a road in it, but houses/inns are few and far between).
Open countryside (no road, probably a few treacherous bogs or a Hound of the Bonkervilles lurking down an abandoned tin mine shaft).
Coastline, shallow water.
You could get more complicated than that if you wanted to, but that should cover most options.
Then you go through each line item, assign half a dozen obstacles or chase moments (is that a fallen tree trunk blocking the road ahead? What's the Jump DC?) and you're more than halfway there.
So if the players manage to antagonize, say, a bunch of hellhounds and have to run for their lives, you already have most of the work prepped ahead of time. Or if they're at sea and need to beat that storm back to shore, bingo! One coastline shallow water chase coming up.
Exactly the same works for systems like Night's Black Agents. In fact it's easier, because the players announce ahead of time that they want, say, Thrilling Digital Intrusion scenes by giving their agents 8 pool points or more in Digital Intrusion. Knowing this, you can set aside a couple of Digital Intrusion sequences knowing full well it won't matter whether this sequence is meant for the casino in Monaco or the military base in Germany. Then, when the player announces they want to make a Digital Intrusion, you can slip one of your pre-prepared sequences in and it will look as though the player's improvised moment is part of the narrative.
Systems like Dungeons and Dragons, which rely heavily on crunch, are particularly easy to manipulate this way because everything those systems do rely on one Difficulty Number or another. Social Interaction is a set of Difficulty Numbers, Stealth is a set of Difficulty Numbers, everything can be reduced to a set of DCs - and it doesn't matter who's making the roll or why, because what matters is someone will have to make a roll eventually.
This, in a nutshell, is the difference between a player-facing system and a more traditional RPG. A player-facing RPG relies more on the player than it does the game mechanics; a traditional RPG relies on the mechanics rather than the player. Point being, if the game relies on mechanics then as DM you can manipulate the mechanics to make your life easier. Sometimes this can involve outright bullshit, like fudging die rolls behind a screen to produce one result or another, and that kind of thing is always a bad idea.
But sometimes it can involve using the existing mechanics to your advantage, to save yourself work.
Let's say the players suddenly take it into their heads to interrogate the Master of the Guild of Bakers. God alone knows why. Maybe they want to know how he makes those delicious scones. Doesn't matter. What matters is whether the Master (or whoever the heroes have to talk to before they can get to the Master) is Friendly, Indifferent or Hostile, because that will determine their initial reaction to the heroes.
Then that NPC will have character traits - ideals, bonds, flaws - which can be manipulated (through die rolls) to change their original rating of, say, Hostile, to Indifferent. At which point, having played the NPC like a Stradivarius, the PC then makes ... you guessed it ... a die roll to determine the outcome.
What this means is, it doesn't matter whether the Master is some critical path character who the heroes have to talk to in order to unravel the plot, or just some random nutbar who the PCs happened to take an interest in this week. Centaur or Goblin, doesn't matter. Alignment doesn't matter. Stats don't matter.
You could just work up half a dozen profiles with Ideals, Bonds, Flaws and starting Interpersonal rating - Friendly, Indifferent, Hostile - and it will not matter whether you use a particular profile on the sinister vampire lord Strahd Von Whosavitch or Bingo the Wonder Dog.
But it will look as though you planned it all along.
