City Supplements - What do we like?

Ralif Redhammer said:

Chicago by Night (at least the first one) does a great job of having 1 - NPCs that are doing stuff and 2 - things for the PCs to do in it. So many setting books do a great job at describing the locale, but don't actually give you a reason to go there or any good hooks for the GM to use.

Click to expand...

Such a good point! Yes!

Some games can feel like "your character is not needed here" or in worse cases "your character will have no fun here since everyone is already doing the things you want to do and better than you at it"... and then as you say there is the whole "we made a setting for you and there is no real purpose to being here!" I have seen all three....

The no purpose to be here can be actually a red flag for a game system overall, where it exposes how the game never really gave players a purpose for their character...

Ralif Redhammer said:

That's the thing with NPCs. Is it useful to know their stats? Sure, but it can be more useful to know what they know, how they are situated in the world.

Click to expand...

Yep. It's easy to make up the stats to suit the story and moment. If you can make NPCs that are tied to parts of the city thematically and dramatically, it then becomes easy to use those NPCs and those parts of the city in a game in ways the players will care about.

Another thing I want in city books is something major and a few things minor that set the city apart from other cities. Things like how Sharn is a mile high city of towers, sure, or how a city in my world of Chevar is built in a fjord with waterfalls flowing through the city from the mountains to the sea, but I also want little stuff like the street food and music scenes and what Little XYZ neighborhoods exist in the city.

Uncaged: Faces of Sigil is a AD&D2e book that really helps flesh out the city of Sigil for the Planescape setting. It’s a set of many NPCs, with different connections between them all, with competing goals and motives, and associated locations.

More about the dwellers in the city than a city guide. But it helps make the setting feel like a lived in place with people who have a history thee and with each other.

hawkeyefan said:

Uncaged: Faces of Sigil is a AD&D2e book that really helps flesh out the city of Sigil for the Planescape setting. It’s a set of many NPCs, with different connections between them all, with competing goals and motives, and associated locations.

More about the dwellers in the city than a city guide. But it helps make the setting feel like a lived in place with people who have a history thee and with each other.

Click to expand...

I wasn’t going to mention the “S” word…

The character quotes [and additional commentary -Ed.] are fantastically flavourful!
I know it’s a love/hate thing with the cant, which I suspect has a great deal to do with how much you’ve read it in use (players will be at a disadvantage here).
I have a very strong disliking for the font used for titles/headers.
Evocative? Yes. Legible? Not so much.

“I just don’t feel like myself today.”
-Farrow

Fenris-77 said:

What are your favorite city sourcebooks, or specific mechanics, or procedures, or rules? You might even tell us why!

Click to expand...

Hmm.

For me it's all about trying to make it feel living.

It's centrally about a web of factions and characters, who want things, have certain values, and certain resources, and relations with eachother. Chicago by Night, though IMO not ideally presented, understood the crux of the assignment. Over time the city should gradually change as these people do things. Don't try to account for what the players do, but just cover what major changes happen when if the players don't intervene, and what resources these people and factions have to make those things happen. You'll also need some key recurring locales for the city.

Beyond that: procedural generators for rumours and events and people and places can be helpful to flesh things out on the fly; and you need to have name lists for when some randomly generated background NPC steps into object-permanence.

I think that's the core. Anything beyond that is situational to your city adventure at-hand.