Visible Cities pt. 1

 Building Urban Spaces for Fantasy RPG play

Why do city books suck so much?

    City building is fucking hard. Witness the proliferation of adventures for any given RPG, from the ridiculous to the sublime, and then compare that to the absolute dearth of great (or, indeed any) city supplements for those same games. Any given system is lucky if it has even one solid city book, never mind something really awesome. There are many reason why this should be the case.

    First, adventures are generally far shorter than city books, so people with less stamina can still knock out an adventure without their brain exploding from the creative strain. Second, the fantasy RPG 'adventure', or module if you're a million years old, has a very tried and tested general format. Dungeons are marvelously well bounded – the corridors and rooms funnel the players directly into all the planned material. Cities aren't even remotely like that. You start trying to design one and you immediately feel like you're playing a whole different game, and one you don't fully grok. Third is the issue of scale. You need more detail to run something like a city rather than anything dungeon-like short of a megadungeon, and even then I'd argue that the megadungeon is easier to design.

    So what is a lonely TTRPG designer supposed to do? Frankly, I thought I knew that answer to that question. I thought I knew exactly what a good city book should like, for Shadowdark, in my case. I was wrong. I wrote a lot of stuff, some of it really compelling (I thought), but I realised pretty quickly that it just wasn't actually all that good. It wasn't designed to be useful at the table. In essence, it had the same problem as a lot of city supplements – it wanted to tell you all about the city, but didn't do a goddamn thing to help you actually run it at the table.

    Well, fuck.

    Here's the problem, boiled down for glue – GMs can't keep a whole book worth of lore in their heads in order to run a city, and no one should expect that to be the case. So many city books are written like that, in various ways. It's just a huge info dump with pretty fonts and it's a hot mess to actually try to run smoothly at the table. There are a valiant few who revel in the massive detail of something like City State of the Invincible Overlord, but that city is unrunnable by a lot of OSR GMs in this, the year of our lord, 2026. It's a great city for the kind of GM that rolls around in that level of detail like a very happy pig, but most folks will find it impossibly dense. So what do we need to do differently? How can we write a city that is actually pick up and play and doesn't suck? Well friends, I'm not sure I know that answer, but I do know I have some things to say on the topic. Stay tuned.