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<blockquote data-quote="Rone Barton" data-source="post: 4669405" data-attributes="member: 64874"><p>A matter near and dear to my heart. I'm not trying to sell a book I wrote here, but I would like to explain how the process of writing it taught me a few things about how to organize and prioritize when birthing a rich urban environment that focuses on game-useable elements.</p><p> </p><p>My co writers and I had to ask ourselves many questions when developing and writing a city book called the Great City Campaign setting for 0one Games, and some adventures for the Road to Revolution urban adventure arc set within it.</p><p> </p><p>Where to start first? Well first we needed to figure out what the city's gist was. What makes this city any different from any other? In our case we decided that there was an imperial force that left the city a century ago, but returned to resume occupation just a few decades ago. That provides ample noble vs. native poor type tension, and tension is the name of the game when developing a city fertile with adventure seeds.</p><p> </p><p>We created many intrigues begging for investigation, factions for PCs to join, all sorts of interelating alliances, rivalries and mysteries between politicians, guilds and cults, and criminal organizations. We loaded it with power player NPCs, and even just interesting characters in the different wards.... speaking of which, the book is divided between the The Army Ward, The Castle Ward, the Docks Ward, The Residence Ward, the Temple Ward and the Trade Ward... and a different writer took a crack at each. I got Temple Ward.</p><p> </p><p>So, aside from designing a couple of city-specific deities, new monsters and religious organizations, I had only 12k words allotted to flesh out a bunch of temples, inns and other places of interest, not to mention sidebars indicating ward-specific events. The maps provided for me had keyed entries, and a bunch of unlabeled little buildings... and so I concentrated on giving 19 interesting locations in the ward and no more. If you can't make an adventure out of a Temple Ward with 19 locations, you're just not trying. Even if I was given extra word count and allowed to flesh out 30 locations, the reader would have had to crawl through it all. I figured, leave the even greater detail to supplemental projects such as adventures.</p><p> </p><p>All in all, the book is a good fast paced read that doesn't mire in the eensiest details, but reveals just enough of them that GMs will have what they need to hit the ground running. When designing adventures for use with the setting, a setting left deliberately modular so that it could snap into anyone's homebrew or favored game setting, we did our best to ensure that the corebook wasn't absolutely necessary for play, only useful as a way to further flesh outcertain elements out if desired.</p><p> </p><p>From this point on, when designing cities I'll be using the particular TOC we created because I think it's a winning recipe in terms of deciding what people need to run a city worthy of adventure and how much information to mete out before passing the 'school textbook' tipping point.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Rone Barton, post: 4669405, member: 64874"] A matter near and dear to my heart. I'm not trying to sell a book I wrote here, but I would like to explain how the process of writing it taught me a few things about how to organize and prioritize when birthing a rich urban environment that focuses on game-useable elements. My co writers and I had to ask ourselves many questions when developing and writing a city book called the Great City Campaign setting for 0one Games, and some adventures for the Road to Revolution urban adventure arc set within it. Where to start first? Well first we needed to figure out what the city's gist was. What makes this city any different from any other? In our case we decided that there was an imperial force that left the city a century ago, but returned to resume occupation just a few decades ago. That provides ample noble vs. native poor type tension, and tension is the name of the game when developing a city fertile with adventure seeds. We created many intrigues begging for investigation, factions for PCs to join, all sorts of interelating alliances, rivalries and mysteries between politicians, guilds and cults, and criminal organizations. We loaded it with power player NPCs, and even just interesting characters in the different wards.... speaking of which, the book is divided between the The Army Ward, The Castle Ward, the Docks Ward, The Residence Ward, the Temple Ward and the Trade Ward... and a different writer took a crack at each. I got Temple Ward. So, aside from designing a couple of city-specific deities, new monsters and religious organizations, I had only 12k words allotted to flesh out a bunch of temples, inns and other places of interest, not to mention sidebars indicating ward-specific events. The maps provided for me had keyed entries, and a bunch of unlabeled little buildings... and so I concentrated on giving 19 interesting locations in the ward and no more. If you can't make an adventure out of a Temple Ward with 19 locations, you're just not trying. Even if I was given extra word count and allowed to flesh out 30 locations, the reader would have had to crawl through it all. I figured, leave the even greater detail to supplemental projects such as adventures. All in all, the book is a good fast paced read that doesn't mire in the eensiest details, but reveals just enough of them that GMs will have what they need to hit the ground running. When designing adventures for use with the setting, a setting left deliberately modular so that it could snap into anyone's homebrew or favored game setting, we did our best to ensure that the corebook wasn't absolutely necessary for play, only useful as a way to further flesh outcertain elements out if desired. From this point on, when designing cities I'll be using the particular TOC we created because I think it's a winning recipe in terms of deciding what people need to run a city worthy of adventure and how much information to mete out before passing the 'school textbook' tipping point. [/QUOTE]
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