Planning a new campaign - a "pseudo-sandbox" ruined city

[Mark CMG]

So I'm trying to imagine what I need to do to run this. I'm thinking at least a few things need to be in order before starting:

- Maps: of the region, the city, the under-city
- Random encounter tables
- A bunch of encounters/delves
- A solid idea of what the city was like before it was destroyed.
- A bunch of clues for them to piece together

Anything else? Any thoughts or advice or ideas in general? How would you prepare and run this?

That's a good start., though the more specific you get the more difficult it becomes to run on the fly. Make the map big and mostly undetailed. Devise some system for how to cope with the maze-like ruins, ways of losing direction or getting lost if it is night or overcast. Get a bunch of "ruins" tiles and, when encounters occur, layout many areas randomly.


Get some stuff like this -

http://paizo.com/store/byCompany/p/...meMastery/maps/campaignMapPacks/v5748btpy806u

http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpg-industry-forum/304521-fat-dragon-e-z-tiles-ruins-sale.html

which can be mixed with regular streets, city and village, where it is not as ruined -

http://www.fatdragongames.com/fdgfiles/fantasy/2d-tiles/e-z-tiles

http://www.skeletonkeygames.com/

 

[Mercurius]

Some great inspirational images - thanks. Keep 'em coming! Hopefully this thread will inspire others as well.

And those images are totally what I'm going for - all of them, to varying degrees. That CG art, Hand of Evil, challenges my artistic luddite sensibilities - beautiful!

Another thing to mention is that the unnamed city is called, among other things, the Endless City, because the ruins seem to go on forever. The high magical civilization was so advanced that they had the infrastructure to support the equivalent of a modern city...I'm imagining a city that had at least a million inhabitants, maybe more, and 20+ square miles.

 

[Hand of Evil]

a gallery

CGPortfolio - Philip Straub

 

[Hand of Evil]

A plateu City, a huge column like a tree trunk, players have to dungeon crawl to the top.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And lest we forget, cities tend to accrete. Troy was famously built and rebuilt several times on the same spot. Even modern cities have strata that are the result of building on the ruins of the old.

So this city's portions (on dry land) that are the "youngest" may in fact sit upon several subterranean levels of the "old city."

 

[Mercurius]

And lest we forget, cities tend to accrete. Troy was famously built and rebuilt several times on the same spot. Even modern cities have strata that are the result of building on the ruins of the old.

So this city's portions (on dry land) that are the "youngest" may in fact sit upon several subterranean levels of the "old city."

Yes, that's what I'm going for. I'm going for a bit of a "Dying Earth" theme with this world. First of all, the long history of the world is generally lost, at least to humans - dwarves and elves have history but they are very guarded with it, perhaps because they don't humans to know certain truths about the past, but that's another story.

But the main complex of ruins dates back to a civilization that was at its height 1,000-1,500 years ago; but that was built on an older civilization, and that before it...going back tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Who knows, perhaps the founders of the original city was of some amazingly alien species- Aboleths, Illithids, or something Far Realmsian- and bioarcanically engineered a race like Elves (or some such) to be their servitors. Their slave labor built the city.

An eventual revolt overthrew the masters, and the former slaves rebuilt the city. Time & tide- combined with the forces of nature (as in the Gods of the Green)- tried to eradicate it's lingering blot from the world, but it kept getting rebuilt.

But eventually, decadence set in, and the city fell, never to rise again.

And all so long ago that this story has been forgotten by all races who knew it...

 

[Aeolius]

I saw this in the news and thought of this thread: Human Sacrifice Found in Maya City Sinkhole

Also IMAX: Tropical Rainforest (iTunes)

 

[Aeolius]

Lucky you: One can no longer climb Chichén Itzá.

When I was 6, I climbed the steps of the Acropolis, at the Parthenon in Athens, and touched the massive marble columns. I'm betting that's of limits now, as well. I better hurry, with that trip to Hawaii, before throwing oneself into an active volcano is prohibited.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

When I was 6, I climbed the steps of the Acropolis, at the Parthenon in Athens, and touched the massive marble columns. I'm betting that's of limits now, as well. I better hurry, with that trip to Hawaii, before throwing oneself into an active volcano is prohibited.

I did the Acropolis visit back in the 1970s. I hear they closed it down in the 1990s.