City Supplements - What do we like?

[Brendan Byrd]

I will admit to liking the community creation procedure/rules in d20 Gamma World.

 

[Voadam]

But I guess my bias and focus is always going to be on things that drill down to brevity and table-usability (I Just look at look at Pirates Guide to Freeport and there's just So Many Words, I think that Harper does way more with less in BITD).

Pirate's Guide is a big 256 page hardcover with a ton of words, but I felt it did a good job of giving overviews and clear tones to start for the overall city and the individual districts to riff off of before getting into specifics and sample stuff. It also has clear strong conceptual themes that are vivid.

For me it might have helped that I started with the excellent short summaries in the module Death in Freeport and the Five Year Freeport Trilogy Compilation. The Pirate's Guide gave me more to work with when running my Freeport games even though I was making up a bunch of stuff and fitting it into my mashup campaign setting. I felt I had a solid base that was fairly easy to sum up and communicate succinctly to players both with the official stuff and my riffing additions when running my Freeport campaigns (one pbp here and one face to face campaign).

I found it easier to delve into and get a sense of than Ptolus, or World's Largest City (both of which are similar era huge D&D setting books), or even the old City State of the Invincible Overlord, which each detail tons of stuff and make huge sandboxes but seem less able to just dip into and get a sense of them. I love Ptolus and have the big books, but I mostly use a lot of the world info and not the city itself and work strongly out of the free 32-page player's guide, while looking up occasional specifics from my PDF of the big Ptolus book.

 

[Tigris]

Not sure if this counts as city or if its too small (it counts itself town) but Hammerfast is telative short (36 pages) and quite cool: https://www.dmsguild.com/de/product/188113/hammerfast-a-dwarven-outpost-adventure-site-4e


Else the neverwinter campaign setting is quite good, if you dont want everything to be completly defined (its more open): https://www.dmsguild.com/de/product/163174/neverwinter-campaign-setting-4e


Both are D&D 4e and with this points of light style, so lots of open space for GMs but cool hooks, ita not for everyone.

 

[Fenris-77]

The Salzemund city book for WHFRP is really quite good. It's one my touchstones for the current project.

 

[Fenris-77]

The book as I have it laid out right now will have 20 city-connected backgrounds, 10 wards, 50-60 locations, 30+ factions, somewhere between 50 and 100 NPCs, and 100 rumours (10 per ward). It seems like a lot when I list it all out like that. Eek.

 

[Voadam]

An interesting one for me is Hallowfaust: City of Necromancers from the Scarred Lands. A strongly themed Necromancer magocratic city state, a strongly themed LN necromancer refuge in a hostile monster filled wilderness. It is different in being a place where mindless undead are openly used simply as protection and utilitarian service and non-evil necromancers are openly there and in power. Originally a bunch of necromancers just wanting a safe refuge base to live and do their research it built up with people flocking there for the stability in a dangerous magical post-apocalyptic world.

It has a lot that I like, a strong interesting D&D theme that conceptually is fun and easy for players to get into, but the execution of some of the concepts just do not work for me. It goes hard on the research necromancers becoming efficient involved enlightened self-interest rulers for the city state down to the level of multipanel judges for court cases are made up solely of necromancers and not delegated servant bureaucrats. While I see magocrats wanting to hold power, I don't see research necromancers all giving up the time to bureaucratically staff everything anywhere near to the level portrayed in this 128 page book or to be any good at setting up or running such an involved bureaucracy focused on the good for the citizens and mostly not the necromancers themselves. It might just be my political science major and attorney background, but the practical government aspects jarred for me particularly and threw off my enjoyment of it.

Scarred Lands in general had great themed city state sourcebooks, there was also the dwarven mage undermountain kingdom city state, the paladin run city under a dormant divine titanic mithril golem from the god war surrounded by monster lands, and a Conan style city of decadence one.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

One of the things I like about both Freeport (Pirate's Guide version) and Ptolus is how much blank space is still available there. As opposed to some TSR/WotC cities, where I've never felt free to add more than one or two shops to sometimes heavily detailed cities, I regularly drop in locations in both Ptolus and Freeport (one branch of my campaign spent several years in Freeport), working off the excellent scaffolding in place there.

One of the most important locations in Ptolus -- the Delvers Library and Map Room -- has just enough info so that I won't get stuck if people go there unexpectedly, but I was able to make the inhabitants there my own and in my own style.

Contrast that with certain other settings, that get so far down into the nitty gritty that there's a canon answer about what kinds of roof tiles they have.

Even in a maximalist setting like Ptolus, giving DMs room to do their own thing is key, IMO.

 

[Fenris-77]

One of the things I like about both Freeport (Pirate's Guide version) and Ptolus is how much blank space is still available there. As opposed to some TSR/WotC cities, where I've never felt free to add more than one or two shops to sometimes heavily detailed cities, I regularly drop in locations in both Ptolus and Freeport (one branch of my campaign spent several years in Freeport), working off the excellent scaffolding in place there.

One of the most important locations in Ptolus -- the Delvers Library and Map Room -- has just enough info so that I won't get stuck if people go there unexpectedly, but I was able to make the inhabitants there my own and in my own style.

Contrast that with certain other settings, that get so far down into the nitty gritty that there's a canon answer about what kinds of roof tiles they have.

Even in a maximalist setting like Ptolus, giving DMs room to do their own thing is key, IMO.

Blank space is one of my core design goals for Ashalom. I want to provide lots of cool ideas and evocative detail, but I don't want to set anything in stone. I want lots of unanswered questions and room to freehand.

 

[zakael19]

Not sure if this counts as city or if its too small (it counts itself town) but Hammerfast is telative short (36 pages) and quite cool: https://www.dmsguild.com/de/product/188113/hammerfast-a-dwarven-outpost-adventure-site-4e


Else the neverwinter campaign setting is quite good, if you dont want everything to be completly defined (its more open): https://www.dmsguild.com/de/product/163174/neverwinter-campaign-setting-4e


Both are D&D 4e and with this points of light style, so lots of open space for GMs but cool hooks, ita not for everyone.

As somebody running a game using the NCS right now, it has nowhere near the scaffolding of, say, Doskvol to really bring the city to life by opening and going. It’s actually a little frustrating how much I need to add in and flesh out, even if it does give a lot of good ideas.

 

[Fenris-77]

As somebody running a game using the NCS right now, it has nowhere near the scaffolding of, say, Doskvol to really bring the city to life by opening and going. It’s actually a little frustrating how much I need to add in and flesh out, even if it does give a lot of good ideas.

This is a common complaint about city sourcebooks. I think it has to do with the design goals of city supplements being quite diverse. Duskvol is not, for example, much like City State of the Invincible Overlord.