Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 3166813" data-attributes="member: 1288">Well, there have been a lot of thoughts and comments, positive and negative, posted about Cityscape on this and other boards. I’ve long since accepted that nothing I work on (or anyone else works on, for that matter <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) is going to be loved by everyone, so I’m not going to try to argue anyone’s points or change anyone’s mind. What I would like to do is talk for a moment about the thinking behind the book. Nothing I might say is going to make people who dislike the book suddenly like it, or vice-versa, but I would like to offer some insight into what C.A. and I were thinking when we were working on Cityscape.Some people have commented that it’s not quite like the previous Environment books. That’s true; it’s not. As far as C.A. and I were concerned, it couldn’t be. An urban campaign, and the urban environment, have traits and particulars and their own challenges that other environments don’t have to deal with.Adventuring in an urban setting requires changes to the campaign that the others do not. Let’s say you’re running a desert campaign. You’re going to be dealing with new dangers, like heat and sandstorms; new spells; new monsters; new cultures; even new gods. But the types of adventures you run and stories you tell don’t necessarily deviate from those you would find in a more traditional setting. You can still run your favored combination of dungeon crawls, wilderness exploration, in-city politics, etc. In a desert sourcebook, the writers don’t have to give advice on how to run a desert campaign; it’s enough that they provide you the mechanical tools to do so.The thing is, that’s just not the case in a city. Sure, you can still run dungeon (sewer?) crawls and monster hunts. But trying to run a city-based adventure, or campaign, comes with its own requirements that cannot just be ignored. Run long-term in a city, and you will have to deal with the government, with trade and economics, with guilds and crime, with noble families and social castes. A DM who knows how to run a traditional adventure probably also knows how to run a desert or tundra adventure, but does he necessarily know how to run an encounter with the city’s magistrates when the PCs are arrested for bearing weapons in the town square? Does he know how the location and purpose of a city impact the demographics of its inhabitants? Would it even occur to him that a war a thousand miles away might still impact the city, or that the PCs might run into trouble with the law just for casting spells in public?C.A. and I felt strongly that a DM who has never before run an urban campaign, or given any serious thought to things like types of government and the repercussions of war, should be able to pick up Cityscape, read through it, and then feel comfortable running exactly that. Yes, it’s got far more advice and far more suggestions than prior environment books. I know that disappoints some people; I’m sorry that’s the case, as I really do want to make as many folks happy as possible, but I won’t apologize for the decision to design the book that way. I still think it was the best way to go, and I’d do it again tomorrow.(That said, I do wish there had been room for some more mechanics. We had a few nifty things in there that got cut.) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />Ultimately, if you think of Cityscape as much as a “Heroes of...” book as it is an Environment book, you might be better prepared for what’s inside, or at least more understanding of why we did as we did.</blockquote>

Verification