Help with a city interlude, please?

I'm not a very experienced DM, and I'm starting to worry about how I'm going to handle things when my group of adventurers finally make it back to their home base city.

They are being pursued by agents from a foreign empire, and they don't know why. Even their benefactor doesn't know. They are currently just finishing up a dungeon, where they will soon find a seal carved on the wall, which partially matches the decoration on a strange piece of enameled metal they found. They will no doubt take the enamel piece and a description of the seal back to their benefactor in the city.

One of the agents is presently in jail, but his familiar (a raven) is waiting for them outside of the dungeon they're exploring. This agent is strong enough to escape from the village lock-up he's in, when he has reason to do so. Following them back to the city will be that reason. The city is also crawling with other agents.

They need to spend some time in the city training, meeting other important NPCs and gaining experience. But I've never run a city based adventure before, and I'm not quite sure what to cook up for them. I figure that I have about a month, real time, to get something in place.

Any suggestions?

What i would do is have the PCs need to get to some place in the bad part of town. Make them roll wisdom checks to find it until they all get lost. Then have them get jumped, or see one of the agents following them, or something. Poof! Instant adventure hook. "Follow the man with the dark cloak into the twisty alleyway..." and then... do whatever.

The thing I always find with city-based sessions is that they can easily end up very open ended - there's no easy way of 'channelling' the PCs in the same way you can in a dungeon- (or other site-) based game. A city, being comprised of open streets, many buildings, potentially vast numbers of people to interact with and so on can be somewhat overwhelming at first.

What I try to do is not to let the actions of the PCs get too much in the way of the goals that I have in mind for the session. You might find it helpful to draw up something like a flowchart to help you plan out what events happen to whom and at what point in the scenario.

For example, in your setup, you've got the group being pursued by foreign agents. Presumably this seal and decorated piece of metal are related in some manner, and these agents are trying to prevent the PCs from finding out about the connection. If you've got at least one agent to pursue them to the city, where he can link up with others of his group then you've got quite a nice setup already, at least for an initial chase and pursuit session as Grim suggests.

Don't feel you need to 'force' the PCs to the part of the city that you've decided the event takes place in - there are often many equivalent locatiosn that will suffice. If, for example, you've got the intent to lead the PCs into an alleyway, have them ambushed by some of these agents, and to have the piece of metal 'recovered', then it doesn't matter if you ambush them in the alleyway between Short St and Market Way or the alley between the docks and Kings Road - the key thing to focus on in this encounter is the alleyway, regardless of where it happens to lie in the city.

I normally find that whenever the PCs enter a town or city they have completely different ideas as to what they want than I'm expecting, so the key to this is to have a number of 'stock' settings that can be fleshed out into 'real' encounters in a suitable location. As an illustration, if the PCs have to meet an important NPC to be given information or a task or something, and you've decided they'll meet the NPC in a tavern, unless there is some specific reason why it has to be in the Stoat and Wyvern, there's no reason why the meeting can't take place in the Golden Griffin instead. Equally, if the PCs choose not to look for, oh, I don't know, a well-respected sage to help them identify said seal and provide them with a key piece of information and instead, when faced with more alehouses than they've seen before in their lives choose to spend a week getting drunk on their ill-gotten earnings, try using someone like a drunken and disreputable bard who might engage them in a game of cards while in one of the inns to pass said information on instead. "Hang on, I've heard tell of that symbol before..."

Flexibility and the ability to recognise the key elements of any given encounter are what I find works for me when you lose the convenience of your environment being able to limit the actions of the PCs.

As a suggestion you might want to have a look at either WotC Speaker in Dreams or some of the Freeport series for some ideas of how to run a plot-based (rather than site-based) flow-charted scenario.

If you'd like some specific examples of plots it'll help to have a few more details about your game.

HTH.

Good points, PurplePCEater.

I would add to that the importance of PEOPLE, not PLACES.

The crucial thing in city adventures is not usually where the party goes but who they meet and what they find out. And just as a good dungeon has lots of rooms and secret doors and so on, a good city has lots of shady characters, secret relationships and desperate folks.

The short version of all this is: You need LOTS of NPCs. Lots and lots and lots. Make a big list of names -- tavernkeepers and bishops and dukes and merchants and gladiators -- whatever your city includes. This accomplishes two things. First, it gives you a quick resource when you find yourself improvising (and I guarantee you'll find yourself improvising) -- when the players want to know the name of a rich merchant or a crooked city guard, you'll have a name ready to go and it lends a feeling of completeness to your campaign. Second, just making up that list will start to generate ideas for things to happen. As you're jotting down names, some of them will jump out at you, giving you ideas as to what this person is up to or who they might be connected to. Follow those ideas -- don't worry if they don't tie into "your" plot -- a city should be full of people who all have their own agendas, agendas that may not have anything to do with the PCs' -- yet.

Do some thinking about who the party has to talk to or encounter, and how those encounters are likely to take place -- seductive banter, aggression and threats or enthusiastic greetings? Think of where those encounters might take place and how they might turn out, but as PurplePCEater noted, don't feel you have to have the PCs in a particular spot at a particular time.

If you want them to get asked for help by a winsome chambermaid, you may think that encounter has to take place at the inn where they're staying. But what if they decide not to stay at an inn? No problem -- they run into her in the street, or at a tavern. The story is more important than the set-up you created.

People, people, people. That's what you need. A great campaign is always powered by great characters, and city adventures are often where you find your best NPCs.

Have fun!

That helps a great deal, PurplePCEater. By the way, I like your name.

Mainly, here are the things I want them to accomplish in the city:

1. Have several encounters with the foreign agents.
2. Get the items they've picked up along the way identified and possibly sold.
3. Meet several NPCs who will be of use to them later.
4. Pick up a new party member.
5. Find another of the decorated metal pieces, and get some ideas about what they might be for.
6. Get a few more tantalizing hints about what happened to all of the elves (more on this below).
7. Have enough adventures, and solve enough puzzles, and role play enough, that they will advance to level 4 or 5. They just earned enough experience to train to level 2.

Here are some more points of interest about the campaign setting.

There are no elves. They vanished, in the middle of a siege, over 400 years ago. Since they had been systematically luring human women to their homeland to act as breeding stock for their vast army of half-elf slaves, no one much misses them. Many of these same slaves were sold to the empire whose agents are now pursuing the PCs. I should also add that the half-elves who were rescued were given their own country (think Israel) and today prefer to think of themselves as Kirian rather than half-elven. The PCs just ran across a mosaic that depicted elves drinking the blood of slaves to gain power. The Kirian party member is understandably upset. I intend for the PCs to eventually find out what happened to the elves, and go check it out. However, they would need to be very high level to survive that part of the campaign so I'm not thinking about details yet.

There are two nations of dwarves. The western ones are quite friendly with the Kirians and the humans. The mountain range their kingdom lies under is the border between the lands the PCs know and the Evil Empire (tm) the pursuing agents are from. The might of this kingdom is the only thing that keeps the Evil Empire from overrunning the free lands.

Meanwhile, the goblins are getting very restless in the south, and although no one knows it yet, its because the Evil Empire is whispering in the ear of the Goblin King. They're also providing aid in the form of magic weapons, gold and slaves.

The Kirian PC's parents and siblings were all taken by slavers when she was a child. She was not taken, because she was hiding from her parents to avoid punishment for some childish misbehavior. Another one of the PCs is an escaped slave. Yet another is a western dwarf.

I've got plenty to work with, in terms of the big picture, it's just that I think I need to tie these things together somehow, and fill in with individual encounters that are coherent with the whole.

Thanks in advance for any advice or ideas.

Thanks, Barsoomcore. I think I'll be printing this thread out, 'cause I'm getting lots of good advice.

Go buy the WOTC adventure Speaker in Dreams. Its a wonderful city-based adventure and even if you choose not to run it, it should give you a lot of ideas about how to structure a city-based adventure and you can maybe steal some things from it. I'm a fairly inexperienced DM myself, but my old group had a blast with this adventure. They were old-school dungeon-crawlers but liked the changed of pace and setting ("what do you mean I shouldn't cast fireball in this alley? oh, buildings will burn..."). It has a "flowchart" style outline that allows the PC's to do the adventure in many different ways but still keeps it organized enough for a new DM to follow. Let us know how it works out.

It probably won't help you in time, but buy Bluffside: City on the Edge when it comes out in February (hopefully). More city-based plots, NPCs, and places of interest than you could ever possibly use.

Thunderhead Games makes it. See my sig for the link.

As a matter of fact, I know about bluffside, and I'm eagerly awating it. You're right, though, that it won't come in time for this interlude. However, there is another city the players will eventually make their way to, so perhaps I'll be able to use it then.

At any rate, good ideas are never wasted.

And d12, I'll go get Speaker In Dreams after work tomorrow.

Thanks!

How my city adventure went...

Have the heroes enter a city and have a set amount of time to find an informant who is laying low because of the threat of foreign operative getting wind of him.
Unfortunately, the local thieves guild find him first and is dispatchs message to the heroes they will reveal his location for a ransom. Of course the thieves are lying.
One of the character's (preferably one with some sort of romantic attachment to another, hopefully another PC) be propositioned by an aid to the informant who has always wanted to sleep with an adventurer. And they really can help find them. Either directly or with insight to the informant's patterns of behaviour and likely hide outs.
Have some catastrophe occur within earshot of the heroes that this will rush to amend, only for it to turn out to be a plot by the foreign agents to flush them out. This only works if the heroes are truly good/patriotic, etc.
Otherwise setup of a string of clues and possible tacks for the heroes to do detective work to find the informant, but make sure they know this is all a race against the other agents.
Top of this spy vs spy episode with a climax where the heroes reach the informant's hideout (maybe in the sewer system?) and find him okay, just to have the foreign agents jump them.
To add an extra layer of excitement. Make sure they fight/meet the foreign operatives at least once before the fight at the end and that the bad guys have a definite leader with a physical distinction like an eye-patch or some such and a strong, maybe charismatic persona to grab their attention. This big baddy could eventually become the group's archnemesis.

I hope these ideas are useful.