State of the Art City Settings?

[S'mon]

City State of the Invicible Overlord published by Necromancer Games has some great details and isn't a lawful good friendly happy smiling type place.

I've looked through City State - it does look great, with far more of a "real sword & sorcery city" feel than you normally see in RPG cities.

 

[D+1]

What really prompted my question was my recent purchase of City State of the Invincible Overlord.
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But on the other hand, I'm also looking at using the City State in an upcoming game. And I'm finding the old-school structure rather hard to work with. It's really just a series of static encounter locations (though each location is rather vividly described by itself).

What I need are some adventure hooks, some quick and dirty ways to string a few of these isolate encounter locations together into a coherent adventure or two that would work for my particular party. I'm sure there are plenty of potentially exciting and challenging capers in the City State for a 4th level party, but I'd don't have a lot of time to invest on this.

What you are describing is not a city sourcebook - it's an adventure. And without too much work you SHOULD be able to create one out of nearly any one of those static encounter locations.

Example: I take the first shop I find at random - #155. Mask Maker. Decide why PC's or NPC's would need masks or disguises. They are looking to identify the person wearing a unique mask at a ball. Why do they need to identify him? He stole something is the first thing to pop to mind. Decide what he stole. Decide why he stole it. Decide what, besides talking to the proprietor of the shop, might happen as part of this adventure at this location. START with the PC's needing masks because they've been mysteriously invited to a masquerade ball. Who invited them and why? Where else in the city can they get costumes? Maybe the proprietor of the shop is forging invitiations simply to sell or rent his masks - but what happens if the invitation is seen as a forgery? What happens at the ball when a bunch of low-lifes with bogus invites show up and start to make trouble? Or maybe it will just be a convenient place to duck into to try and hide when someone is being chased.

This sort of thing is at the heart of Judges Guild philosophy - take what's there and then DO something with it, including change it, add to it, remove it, whatever. It's not Judges Guilds campaign, nor Necromancer Games campaign, it's YOUR campaign. This is the very thing that makes CSIO "old school" in the first place. There's enough detail there to do all kinds of things with it; to take the game in any direction you like. But more than any other setting you could hope to find, the "canon" material is not designed or intended to stand in your way. It's supposed to spark creativity, not replace it. It's what I really love about JG.

And with CSIO you can work it a half dozen different ways. You can start with an encounter on the street generated randomly or a standing encounter that is inherent to the street itself, a shop, the proprieter of the shop, one or more of the employees, something else that is simply present at the shop like entry to the undercity or a dungeon, a rumor, a legend, a decree from the Overlord... Any of those can be taken directly from the CSIO that can be turned into a single encounter, an adventure, or the basis of an entire campaign if you've a mind to. There's deities at some of the locations, artifacts, good guys, bad guys, monster races who are citizens, secret organizations, public organizations, lots of religions and temples to choose from in addition to hundreds more religions left unnamed that you can make up and insert anywhere, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of undesignated locations that you can insert them in.

What's NOT to like?

 

[Garnfellow]

What you are describing is not a city sourcebook - it's an adventure. And without too much work you SHOULD be able to create one out of nearly any one of those static encounter locations.

Well, actually, no -- what I'm describing isn't an adventure, really. Imagine a spectrum of setting design: at one end, the plain ole random encounter table. Completely bare-bones, a tabula rasa, without either the constraints or benefits of context. The DM has both the freedom and the burden to make any entry on the table into whatever he or she wants it to be. This is both liberating and work.

At the other end of the spectrum are meticulously plotted adventures within highly detailed settings. These things can save a lot of work for the DM, but can be very hard to adapt and can also feel very constraining.

I largely agree with you on the appeal of the Judges Guild philosophy. Personally, I'd rather have my game materials on the bare-bones end of the spectrum, something with some crunchy mechanics, some vague details, but leaving plenty of room to adapt to my current campaign and players.

But bare-bones does not have to mean "hard to use right out of the box." I buy game supplements because I want inspiration, along with practical short-cuts and time-savers. The process you describe to jazz up the mask-master is nice and all, but honestly I could make up my own generic fantasy city in a couple of hours from scratch, and could use some off-the-shelf NPC books to quickly populate it, and then write up all my own plot hooks. The point is, if I've got to go through a similar level of effort to use City State, what's the use? How much work has it saved me?

I don't want to overstate the case against City State, because I really do like it. I think it's a great read, but as a game aid, I suspect it could be a bit more helpful.