City Supplements - What do we like?

[kronovan]

It's not the first time I've mentioned it here, but I'm a big fan of Kobold Presses' city of Zobeck. It sits at the center of their Midgard World setting and is detailed with a Streets of Zobeck adventure guide and a Zobeck Gazeteer. Both are now available together in one publication titled Zobeck: Clockwork City Collector’s Edition. I don't feel it's overdone lore-wise, with all of the content being useful for a DM that wants to explore it through adventures or run a full on campaign.

I've homebrewed adventures and details for another Midgard city using a similar approach, but on a more bullet pointed/less detailed scale. So I'd say Zobeck is useful as a template. IMO definitely a good example of a book that clearly details a predominant city at the center of a continent.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

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.

I think of each district as a Dominion when generating overall events / ideas / plot hooks / timelines. (RC)
Quarterly background noise isn’t always needed when an adventure is in progress, though.

 

[Voadam]

There was a series of 3E books that just focused on a quarter at a time. There was a thieves quarter, an arcane quarter and at least one more. It was a pretty fun concept.

From The Game Mechanics, Temple Quarter was one of them. No longer available for sale on drivethru.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

From The Game Mechanics, Temple Quarter was one of them. No longer available for sale on drivethru.

I'm always fascinated by old content being taken down off of DriveThruRPG. There's no hosting fees or anything, so what's the motivation for pulling it down?

 

[RenleyRenfield]

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!

I am partial to Chicago by Night (any edition). I think they do a great job at giving a "sandbox" setting that feels a lot like Grand Theft Auto V = here are a bunch of people who are doing stuff and why. Here is some background in terms of our setting. And here is a few adventures that are more 'examples of play' than something you need to follow the plot on.

In general what I look for are NPCs.

People make ANY game come to life, and the more 'alive' an NPC is, the more ANY given city, setting, location - will be able to be used.

I am the GM so I have to make up thousands of people every year, so many NPCs it makes my head spin, so having some already built, and with context of a setting, and with some actual personality to them... great !

.....

Also, I am also writing a city book. So now I get to put my 'money where my mouth is' and try to make a useful setting book

It will be an official city book for Chaosium, so it has to be polished and valuable knowing people all over the world will read it (just a little bit of pressure! lolol) .

 

[RenleyRenfield]

...It seems like city supplements are ripe for the kind of over-written lore dump...

I just noticed this part and I think it's worth talking about too. I think part of what caused me personally to shy away from massive lore dump games is how the book is structured.

Give me a 600 page beast and i am ok with it as long as it was written like a reference manual so to speak - by that I mean separation of concerns and content.

• 200 pages on metaplot? fine, so long as that is ALL that is in there. Don't make me parse 200 pages looking for a rule or a power!
• 50 pages of NPCs? fine, but don't spread them out through the whole book - put them in a persona dramatis section. And make them all formatted the same.
• 100 pages of overly detailed locations? now worries, just make sure there is a index I can use to find 'shops', and 'brothels' and 'guard stations' or such.

I need to be able to - in 5 seconds or less - open the book and find what I am looking for.

Otherwise its like trying to find that one funny like in A Dance of Dragons, and I can't be re-reading a novel just to find a rule/mechanic/whorehouse NPC.

I dislike any rpg that is lain out like a novel where you have to parse prose to find rules or stats or location details.

 

[dragoner]

IMO ultimate fantasy kit was Thieves' World Box. Sci-fi is easy, just grab something from real life and whisper Blade Runner.

 

[Voadam]

I'm always fascinated by old content being taken down off of DriveThruRPG. There's no hosting fees or anything, so what's the motivation for pulling it down?

My guess would be it is usually when a couple people run a company and then split and do not want to deal with each other over it for whatever reason anymore and do not transfer all the rights to just one of them who could then get the occasional couple bucks from drivethru for sales of their 20+ year old product. It would be nice if they turned them into free products instead so they were still available, but that is my guess for most of them.

The Game Mechanics were JD Wiker, Rich Redman, and Stan!, former WotC D&D designers. The company website is no longer up.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My guess would be it is usually when a couple people run a company and then split and do not want to deal with each other over it for whatever reason anymore and do not transfer all the rights to just one of them who could get then get the occasional couple bucks from drivethru for sales of their 20+ year old product.

The Game Mechanics were JD Wiker, Rich Redman, and Stan!, former WotC D&D designers. The company website is no longer up.

It would be nice if they turned them into free products instead so they were still available, but that is my guess for most of them.

Yeah, that makes sense -- I have one of the rare copies of Reach of the Roach God sitting next to me -- but sometimes, even a one-man shop, like Phil Reed's 3E stuff, goes dark. Maybe it's an arts rights issue.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I am partial to Chicago by Night (any edition). I think they do a great job at giving a "sandbox" setting that feels a lot like Grand Theft Auto V = here are a bunch of people who are doing stuff and why. Here is some background in terms of our setting. And here is a few adventures that are more 'examples of play' than something you need to follow the plot on.

In general what I look for are NPCs.

People make ANY game come to life, and the more 'alive' an NPC is, the more ANY given city, setting, location - will be able to be used.

I am the GM so I have to make up thousands of people every year, so many NPCs it makes my head spin, so having some already built, and with context of a setting, and with some actual personality to them... great !

.....

Also, I am also writing a city book. So now I get to put my 'money where my mouth is' and try to make a useful setting book

It will be an official city book for Chaosium, so it has to be polished and valuable knowing people all over the world will read it (just a little bit of pressure! lolol) .

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.