City Ruins

[Baron Opal]

Does anybody know of an adventure or supplement that details a ruined city? My players are making noises that they want to finish off a particularly irritating wizardly thorn in their side and he's known to be in the ruins of a city.

Ideally, there would be a map of a temperate city that was devistated by a near-miss meteor strike. But I can modify practically anything. What I can't do on the fly well is sketch out the ruined buildings and streets.

Oh, an online product may be best for rapidity of access. Any and all suggestions will be appreciated, however.

 

[Mark CMG]

This might help - http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mapofweek/city802.jpg

 

[Henry]

If you can afford $4.95, the old TSR product from Onebookshelf called "Dragons of Despair" has one of the greatest ruined cities of all time in it -- Xak Tsaroth!

The city is mangled into several descending layers, as it was annihilated when a great cataclysm basically cast half of the city down a cliff. Full three-quarters perspective 3-D map, and some neat encounter ideas mixed in.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=908&

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

The old "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" module details a ruined city, where different parts of the city or still-standing buildings act as sort of mini-dungeons. The nice part about this would be that you could drop your wizard in one of the locations, and still have other the other stuff around for the party to attack or ally with as they see fit.

Of course, you'd have to update the stats to 3e, but it probably wouldn't be too bad. There were a fair amount of yuan-ti, IIRC.

 

[Mercule]

Excellent. I need something like that, too.

 

[Stormborn]

Don't have the product, but Bruce Cordell has a book about running a campaign in such an enviroment that might be helpful called When the Sky Falls.

 

[RichGreen]

Don't have the product, but Bruce Cordell has a book about running a campaign in such an enviroment that might be helpful called When the Sky Falls.

This is a great book that I've used in my campaign, but I don't think it's what you're looking for. There aren't any ruined cities detailed.

Cheers


Richard

 

[WayneLigon]

What I can't do on the fly well is sketch out the ruined buildings and streets.

Right now I'm running an Eberron adventure that deals with a massive archeological dig site. I sat back after coming up blank for maps and had a realization:

Don't bother.

Don't bother mapping the thing; there are people that spend their entire lives mapping ruins and digs and such with not half the complexity of a recently devestated city and they still find new things on ground that has been covered a dozen times before. Mapping such a thing in anything but the very broadest of terms is futile.

Instead, find some nice 'devestated city' pics on the web and print those out. 'This is what the thing looks like' you say and via the magic of pictures the players should realize that no way in hell are they mapping this thing or uncovering much of anything other than what you want them to uncover.

I have a generalized 'stick map' that looks kinda like a subway route map: simplified, but you can get a general feel for the ebb and flow of the ruins; what parts are totally impassable, and what parts are somewhat intact.

Then just do a series of set encounter areas representing typical areas they can find, or lairs of whatever creatures have moved in.

A decent sketch map of a much smaller area would be the Stormreach city from the Secrets of Xendrick book. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ag/20060731a

 

[Varianor Abroad]

There's Mike Mearls' Ruins of Intrigue, which is an Arcana Evolved adventure, but easily usable in a D&D game. (No meteor crater though.)

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

The old "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" module details a ruined city, where different parts of the city or still-standing buildings act as sort of mini-dungeons. The nice part about this would be that you could drop your wizard in one of the locations, and still have other the other stuff around for the party to attack or ally with as they see fit.

Of course, you'd have to update the stats to 3e, but it probably wouldn't be too bad. There were a fair amount of yuan-ti, IIRC.

That map also has a large lake in one section, which could easily be retconned into a meteor crater/lake.