D&D 5E What Makes a Good Urban Adventure?

[Yaarel]

Urban adventures are awesome.

One of the givens of the urban environment is law and order. (And a demand for fair laws.) The police/city guards are central to any adventure.

Often, players must resolve and ‘win’ combat encounters nonlethally, and hand the perpetrators over to the police. Or else get a special license to kill. Or if going for an antihero vibe being in conflict with both the police and the villains.

In any case, make sure the heroes have effective ways to end encounters nonlethally, including intimidation to force surrender, fear to make flee, and means of restraining opponents.

 

[rgoodbb]

Star Trek, Riddick and Dredd are some of the best Urban Adventures

 

[Yaarel]

Star Trek cannot be Star Trek without the ‘phaser on stun’.

 

[rgoodbb]

'phaser and stunner huh?' .......Karl is an 18th level Monk!

 

[THEMNGMNT]

One thing that's critical is to determine what sort of campaign you and your players want to run. If your players want to figure out how to overcome challenges within the constraints of the law, then you obviously want to place your urban campaign in a city of laws and rules. If your players are the type to act regardless of the consequences, then consider placing your urban campaign in a lawless city, where violence and murder are the norm, and the authorities look the other way. Both campaigns are valid. But they are very different. Personally, I prefer the latter. I like my cities to have only a veneer of civilization, with countless dangers, little if any justice, and a desperate need for heroes.

 

[hastur_nz]

The Age of Worms did an interesting job with Alhaster, basically a LE city that the PC's spend some time in a couple of times through the adventure path / campaign, definitely at the high-level end. It mixed up some twisted intrigue with the ruler and various other high-fliers, with more traditional mini-dungeons within the city, then the finale was in the city itself where the PC's have to save the place from the machinations of a God who's trying to enter the world via a portal atop a huge spire that the ruler ended up building earlier.

Personally I've always liked playing up the Lawful side of urban adventures, i.e. the players should *know* they can't just behave like the typical murderous dungeon-delvers of D&D, they have to operate within the norms of society. That leads to a lot of interesting challenges for DM and Players, because everything can't just be solved through violence. It also allows twisted DM'd to play that up, have a bit of fun with NPC's who are clearly not 'good guys' but especially if that's the norm the players have to try and navigate the waters by thinking etc.

 

[Luz]

The urban adventure is the antithesis of the dungeon crawl. Where a dungeon may offer two or three different paths, the city offers near limitless routes for the PCs. Both are great in their own way, but an urban adventure demands much more improv on the DM's part. Players will want to go to the tavern, buy equipment at the trading post, follow the suspicious looking character down the alley, or buy the local panhandler a few drinks for a rumor or two. And the DM has to bring all this to life, quite often on the fly and without prep as the players will almost certainly find something else to do other than what is planned. I like to do a lot of prep for my games; planning a dungeon is relatively easy as it allows a DM to focus his attention on one location, but the urban environment is a different beast and the campaign thrives on less prep. Sure, its always good to have details of the city laid out, some mini dungeons and locations to explore, and major npcs/villains/organizations developed, but the city allows the PCs to world build simply by going left instead of right. Every move they make in the city is opportunity for random campaign expansion, every decision and action they make has consequences that affect good, neutral, and evil npcs that will have a reaction. This is stuff that can't be anticipated and prepped, but really is what makes an urban campaign so great.

There are some good tools online to help make some of the more mundane personalities of the city easier, one in particular I find very useful is this article, but the most fun is the stuff I create myself. For example, when my players are in the city they always head to the tavern where they hope to find adventure or trouble. So to respond to this I made a "Bar Brawl" deck - a collection of random events that could occur in a bar fight - written on flash cards. I presented a bunch of ruffians looking for a fight and in no time had a barroom brawl, so I put the flash cards on the table. This works similar to the Chase rules in the DMG, except I had each player draw a card at the start of their turn. Sample random events included:

Bell Rung: a bottle is smashed over your head from an unseen patron (1d4 damage; make a DC12 Constitution save or be stunned until the start of your next turn).
Knucklebones: your punch fully connects with your opponent and knocks him out cold. However, you broke your hand on his face and can no longer use that hand until healed.
Whoops: slip on some spilled beer. Make a DC 14 Dexterity save or fall prone.
Mob Rules: a crowd of people pile into you. Make a DC10 Dexterity save or be restrained.
Curse of Wile E. Coyote: a random anvil falls from above (+5 to hit, 2d6 damage). I couldn't resist...

And so on. The players had a blast and it added some humour into the scenario, as well as creating a cast of npcs and a memorable tavern in the city. Throw in the law showing up (or maybe the thieves guild running the joint as a front) and the urban campaign begins to run itself.

 

[The_Gneech]

I know that what my players really want when we re-start our game is an urban adventure. So I'd like to give it to them, but I'm not really sure where to start. I'd like to get people's thoughts on what makes a successful urban adventure.

How to make best use of the urban atmosphere?

Dungeons are about what you CAN do. Urban environments are about what you're ALLOWED TO do. There's a reason Conan didn't like them much. He punched a judge and had to flee for his life.

In an urban environment, you should be navigating opinion, favor, factions and the like rather than making Athletics checks and attack rolls... most of the time.

What are the special challenges of an urban adventure?

You need to have a double handful of important and interesting NPCs for the characters to work for, work against, and generally interact with. And the NPCs need to also interact with each other, even if it doesn't happen "on screen." Relationships are what makes cities work. This can be a lot of stuff to keep track of.

How does the party's level affect the adventure? The higher level the party, the fewer NPCs in town who should pose a realistic challenge for them.

The queen is the most powerful person in the realm and she's only CR 1/8.

If your players treat an urban environment like a dungeon and you need to actually figure out how to buff the opposition, your party is actually made up of outlaws rather than heroes and will be treated as such. Shops will lock their doors and windows rather than do business with them, they'll be hunted and hounded by the city watch, bounty hunters, the militia, and more if they continue to be a menace. If they're a big enough problem, other parties of high-level adventurers will be hired to defeat them. (Not to mention lawfully-aligned gods turning their back on clerics/paladins, and so forth.)

High level PCs are like superheroes– if they don't behave, they can get away with it for a while, but eventually there will be a reckoning.

Dungeons in an urban adventure: yes or no?

Any adventure site that's isolated and full of monsters can be a dungeon. Check out Paizo's "Gallery of Evil" for instance. Sewers, prisons, magical laboratories, underground crypts, unearthed ruins all make good urban dungeons.

Can anyone point me to some good urban adventures that I might study for inspiration?

Gallery of Evil, as I mentioned, is a good one.

Any or all of the 2E Lankhmar materials, as well as the 2E Book of Thieves are great references for an urban campaign. A lot of the Eberron stuff set in Sharn is very good as well.

-The Gneech

 

[Libramarian]

To me the most natural logical structure for urban adventures is node-based, where each node is a "scene" that connects to or unlocks other scenes.

Unlike in a dungeon, where as long as you survive you can eventually explore the whole thing (putting aside for the moment the notion of secret areas), you can't go to a party or something unless you're invited.

Most of these scenes are social encounters where the "treasure" is valuable information and relationship development with powerful NPCs/factions. Some are exploratory/combat. (Dungeon encounters I think ideally are mostly combat, some exploratory/social. Wilderness mostly exploratory, some combat/social).

 

[hastur_nz]

Another interesting Urban adventure is "Murder in Baldur's Gate. It was written for the 5e playtest, so you'd need to tweak some stuff including the stat blocks (most are in the 5e MM), and it probably works a lot better for 2nd or 3rd level PC's as not 1st. The best parts of the adventure are:
1) very detailed background information on Baldur's Gate, its' power factions, etc - like, way more than you need to actually run the adventure.
2) loads of events that take place with or without the PC's, all of which may or may not provide hooks for the players to get involved and shape the outcomes

Some have critisised it for having a beginning setup that doesn't really match the actual adventure content, but for me that's a very minor thing that I plan to change when I run it anyways (I'll run it in Luskan, so a few things will be tweaked to fit).

The thing that I like about it is the event, time-driven approach i.e. the dungeon doesn't just sit around waiting for the PC's to arrive. And the fact that while the players can do their best to get involved and make a difference, at the end of the day the place is pretty much doomed so some things will most likely happen regardless i.e. the PC's can make a difference, but there are things that are way bigger than they are, which for me is an important tone for city-based adventures.