"Perdido Street Station" and urban gaming

[JPL]

Careful, JPL, careful....

Hey, I'm not blaming God. He does what He can. We're the ones who keep screwing it up.

[Apologies to anyone who believes in the divine right of kings].

 

[Spatula]

The great thing about Perdido Street Station and gaming is...

this quote (in reference to "adventurers", not really a spoiler):

"I don't trust them, though. Thrill-seekers. They court danger. And they're quite unscrupulous graverobbers for the most part. Anything for gold and experience."

 

[Gizzard]

Tangent:

The folks involved had something of a Marxist class-consciousness.

Although Mieville is personally a Socialist, I didn't necessarily read PSS as having a Socialist agenda. The powerful certainly do oppress the weak, but it really could be any system of government from robber-baron capitalism to stalinist communism to feudalism.

I wish I could remember who was at the Socialist-leaning writers panel with Mieville; I believe it was Ken McLeod (Cassini Division, Sky Road) and maybe Charles Stross (Lobsters). To tie this back into the original discussion, McLeod's stuff might be someplace else to mine for modern fantasy influences; Stross is pure cyberpunk.

Paul Di Fillipio did a novella called A Year in the Linear City which would be a good place to mine for particularly urban campaign ideas.

 

[Carnifex]

Anything for gold and experience."

One of my favourite lines in the whole book

 

[Umbran]

Instead of a conventional "adventuring party", maybe a looser association of characters...guys with day jobs, y'know? [Since I anticipate a rather loose association of players, given our geographical dispersal and busy schedules].

Note that "day jobs" are pretty darn restrictive in terms of what they allow a character to do. If you want to keep your day job, running around and frequently doing things that wil get you in a hospital generally makes your boss very upset. You can't take off and deal with adventures any old time you want, 'cause the boss is counting on you to be there. You need to be able to get up tomorrow and look presentable when you go to work.

Superhero characters run into this problem all the time, and it can be a right pain in the neck.

 

[barsoomcore]

Combining Marxist ideas in a fantasy world dates back to at least, well, Marx.



Steven Brust's Dragaera has always featured a whole host of social ideas and movements, including Marxism -- but Mieville does have weirder sex scenes, I'll give him that.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Note that "day jobs" are pretty darn restrictive in terms of what they allow a character to do.

True, but adventurers in such a setting would likely have day jobs that are slightly off-kilter: Bartenders, bouncers, messengers, muscle for crime lords, musicians, artists, and so on. For the most part, they have flexible schedules, and their jobs are so replaceable and dead end that if they lose one, they can just get another just like it. It's also not unreasonable in some of those instances for the DM to allow a boss that might be more flexible in allowing time off - even if he hates the PC and would liek to fire him, he may quickly develop skills that can't be cheaply gotten elsewhere. If you're talented, people will forgive a lot of flakiness.

 

[Desdichado]

Combining Marxist ideas in a fantasy world dates back to at least, well, Marx.

I thought about saying that and wasn't quite brave enough.

 

[dougmander]

I'm halfway through "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville. Awsome book for gamers, featuring a city that's not unlike Sigil in its diversity and colorfulness.

Now that me and the boys are working on a once-a-month game [after many months of gamelessness], I'm tempted to try an urban game in a city where any kind of crazy stuff can happen.

I attended a panel with Mr. Mieville at last year's WisCon which was about the geography of fantasy. He made several remarks about cities as settings for adventure. Now that industrial cities are more common that deep, dark forests, (he said), they have replaced the wilderness as the archetype of the dangerous place where adventurers go to seek their fortune. He specifically mentioned the work of John Crowley (Little, Big) as an inspiration. He said that he had played RPGs when he was younger, and that what he enjoyed the most was making up new monsters.

I would also recommend the "Border Town" and "Border Lands" anthologies from the late 80s. Ellen Kushner, Terri Windling, Charles de Lint, etc.

 

[barsoomcore]

Yay "Bordertown"! I always wanted to write a story for that setting.

Getting back to urban adventuring, the big difference between urban settings and dungeons or wilderness settings is the range of options open to the players. Any particular block in a city is going to contain probably dozens of NPCs, establishments, entrances, exits, perils and pleasures. It can put a MASSIVE load on you the DM to come up with more and more material. You may spend hours developing a tavern only to have your players say, "This place sucks, let's go next door."

A dungeon makes it easy to control game flow. A wilderness at least can offer you time between options as they trek about. But in a city they can go so many places, do so many things, that it can overwhelm the poor DM.

Citybook

If you're going to run city adventures on any scale, look for the Citybooks. Great books, hard to find now but you can order them online.