City Supplements - What do we like?

[Blue]

Players don't interact with cities the same way they do adventures, and that difference guides me. I don't find location based at the granularity of "you walk down this street and see..." useful at all.

Usually an overview of the city, including some movers and shakers in terms of NPCs and organization. Just enough for the GM to have a feel for what's going on.

Then I break down into districts. Same idea of movers and shakers, plus a tenor for each district, examples of the types of buildings there, things you could see on the streets from buskers and carnivals to pickpockets or servants shopping to dwarven slaves building new buildings, and a few notable NPCs of the district outside the movers and shakers that people might direct the NPCs to. A few notable buildings as well, but more in the "This district also hosts the famous Lapis Lane, a street of jewelers and white-smiths anchored by the House of Gold at the northern end, renown across the Imperium for the quality of it's good".

Then I want hooks and ideas. "Ideas" means things that are either changing rapidly that the PCs can get caught up in, or things poised to change that the PCs might be a factor in doing so. Hooks should be around the specific people or notable features of the settlement, not generic quest ideas, but need not take place in the city. Perhaps there will be a wedding of the scions of two major trading houses and they need Edelweiss flowers as a local superstition for successful marriages, but the mountaintop where they grow now has become the lair of something not detailed as the GM can make up a reasonable thing."

Obviously non-fantasy cities would have different specifics, but the same general idea.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This a matter of scope - how many pages devoted to what.

In the Wildemount book each town gets like half a page or a page IIRC. If it were a supplement for say...Sharn, i would love about the same for each of the major districts/neighborhoods, along with faction descriptions. Each area writeup could have a short note on what factions intersect, if any, in that area.

maybe 1 full page, 2 at most, per area. Same per faction. Maybe some demographic details when/where it may actually impact adventures.

and art with clear direction that actually helps ypu imagine the city overall and each area.

 

[Voadam]

Players don't interact with cities the same way they do adventures, and that difference guides me.

Do you mean cities vs. dungeons instead of vs. adventures?

The Death in Freeport module is set entirely in the City of Freeport, for example.

 

[Piperken]

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

Plenty of published sourcebooks already mentioned.

Rules/mechanics/procedures for cities that I have fondness for:

• Downtime in Zyan (Ben Laurence)
• Sandbox Settlements: Prep, Run and Thrive (elmcat)
• Swyvers generator for The Smoke (Gearing & Hoskins)

In addition:

• A map, preferably broken up into smaller maps when each locale is discussed.
• How one may travel, and travel times between different locales.
• What locations are restricted e.g. by pass, class, a key, or lack of reputation.
• Some sense of what can be accomplished in a day (or night).
• Faction pages.
• Curated encounter tables for locales, that integrate points of interest, NPCs, factions, rumors etc., possibly with a day/night split.

Inspiring Writing:

• Invisible Cities (Calvino)
• Hill Cantons (Kutalik)