City Supplements - What do we like?

[Fenris-77]

I'm in the middle of writing a city supplement for Shadowdark and it has occurred to me that there are a lot less in the way of design exemplars and best practices out there for city supplements. I don't want to restrict the conversation to just fantasy games either. It seems like city supplements are ripe for the kind of over-written lore dump that I cordially dislike in my RPG books, and a survey of my collection hasn't changed my mind much on that score.

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

 

[Enaknomolos]

I share your feelings. I love the idea of a good city supplement, but that actual ones I've come across tend to be too static, gigantic lore dumps, or (some of the older ones) just a bunch of generic encounter tables.

I really like Hyena Child by Gazer Press, though. It details 17th century Alexandria; but, while excellent, the city, faction, rumours, and encounter sections are pretty short. Instead, it gives you five interlinked adventures and a big dungeon under the city. Doing it this way puts everything into chaotic motion, which I think a city needs more than hundreds of pages of buildings and npc shopkeepers.

It's also OSR (Lamentations), so probably not far removed from where you're at in terms of style of game.

 

[zakael19]

Blades in the Dark’s Doskvol is my top tier example of usable city. I think it’s the way it organizes districts and then gives each a distinct flavor up front, followed by a selection of marquee POIs and a handful of NPCs? Super easy to slot something the group needs in, and when I built a more “generic D&D” city for my Daggerheart game following the same outline + some Trophy style hooks & Moments I literally never had a moment where I didn’t immediately have something prepped to answer a player’s ideation or direction.

 

[Fenris-77]

Blades in the Dark’s Doskvol is my top tier example of usable city. I think it’s the way it organizes districts and then gives each a distinct flavor up front, followed by a selection of marquee POIs and a handful of NPCs? Super easy to slot something the group needs in, and when I built a more “generic D&D” city for my Daggerheart game following the same outline + some Trophy style hooks & Moments I literally never had a moment where I didn’t immediately have something prepped to answer a player’s ideation or direction.

My Ashalom project resembles Duskvol in a lot of ways. The history and whatnot have been kept quite short and the detail is in the various district writeups. The real trick, IMO anyway, is to maximize gameable content in a type of book that's often overwritten in the opposite way.

 

[LordEntrails]

I can't recommend any, but your post got me thinking... Since I don't have Duskvol, maybe this is some of what it does.

I would think a city map with numerous flagged/tagged locations, but to your point, no need to detail each one (i.e. too much lore). Then do the district "flavors" like mentioned by others. Then a list of a few, maybe ten, for each type of establishment. i.e. ten inns, ten stores, ten curio shops, etc. That way you wouldn't need lots of unused lore, and would make it easy to "build" the city as the GM needs it. Flexible, concise, and easy to organize.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I like multiple different things in my cities.

At one end, you have Ptolus, which is a maximalist city setting, which hundreds of locations and NPCs detailed. But it makes it work through travel guide-style organization (think Lonely Planet or Fodor's), with a good use of a side rail, icons, color coding, etc., so that it rarely feels like a 600-page book. I've been using this as the basis of an ongoing fantasy campaign since 2006 and would be happy using it for the rest of my life. (Also, lifting up said book will likely help extend my life.)

On the other hand, I'm increasingly of the opinion that cities (and megadungeons and settings generally) can largely be run off of bespoke generators that help determine most contents of a region, including who's there, what they're doing, the aesthetics, etc. Most settings would still have some marquee locations that are fully detailed, but I probably don't need the dozens of taverns detailed in Ptolus to all be written up. There's maybe three or four of them in the source book that really merit that treatment. The rest can be generated on the fly and just put into campaign notes. Books like Into the Cess & Citadel (which creates a very specific type of hellish city) are good here.

I think city books generally fall between these two points on the spectrum, and creators and buyers all have different spots they like.

I don't regret owning and using Ptolus -- I wouldn't have replaced by 3E version with the 5E one if I did -- but otherwise, I'm much more interested in a lighter book where I'm not expected to adhere to the name of a baker's second daughter in a backwater alley of the city, unless she's killing people and putting them in pies, or something.

 

[Voadam]

Pirates Guide to Freeport is my favorite fantasy city sourcebook.

Statless, it gives a good overview of tone and themes, the city history, it’s place in the world, and then a good organized well by city section, giving a good breakdown of the sections and factions plus individual things like taverns and individuals that you can use.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Pirates Guide to Freeport is my favorite fantasy city sourcebook.

Statless, it gives a good overview of tone and themes, the city history, it’s place in the world, and then a good organized well by city section, giving a good overview of the sections and factions plus individual things like taverns that you can use.

An all-time setting book.