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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ranes" data-source="post: 6380234" data-attributes="member: 4826">In scale, big FRP city settings are more akin to towns in real life. They are never big enough to really justify being called cities, and the reasons why are obvious. It would take too much work to create a truly city scale setting. And even if you did all that work, dump it all on players in a game and you risk tedium or players feeling oppressed.But I like cities and I still want to create the sense of scale. A few years ago, I ran a Ptolus campaign. I started small and grew it slowly. I never used the city map. I always multiplied mundane travel times (without dwelling on them, unless absolutely called for). The PCs soon discovered that most NPCs had never heard of most other NPCs. (The really big players were a different matter but ideas like a middleweight NPC being famous were kept to the neighbourhood district scale.)As weeks went by, my players got a sense how much was going on in just their locality. By the time they were levels 7-8, they had the impression of being in a really big city, where they could lose themselves, enemies could hide, and new environments could be discovered without anyone thinking it was unusual that they hadn't been encountered before.As the unfamiliar territory becomes familiar, one of the big differences between and urban campaign and one that spans a greater area is that key NPCs tend to recur more frequently. And the NPCs who become key to the campaign aren't necessarily always the contacts and the heads of organisations. They're the colourful characters you created to liven up a street scene near to where the PCs made their base, about whom the players begin to care. Your players see them frequently or they expect to, so they ask about them when they don't see them. This makes it tempting to make these NPCs hooks for adventures and the opportunity is certainly there to do so. But it's worth keeping some of these NPCs that the players take a shine to away from plot hooks. These regular faces come to represent the normality the players' characters are trying to protect and are most valuable in that role alone.And running an urban campaign gives you the opportunity to make the familiar seem unfamiliar. Where do all the beggars go at nightfall? They take to the rooftops for safety. There's a whole over-city. But the players don't know that until they do their first rooftop chase or they get a lead on someone they've been searching for, only to discover an entire community or network has been right over their noses all along. You need lots of NPCs, not stat blocks but characters, too many to make up. There are simply so many character-based encounters in an big urban setting that it's tempting to think the next shopkeeper or street urchin is just another throw-away. After all, the PCs will never meet them again in a city this big. The trouble with that approach is that soon too many of your encounters are just ciphers and your setting begins to lose its character and appeal. I tried to make a short a note about some of the more curious, interesting or annoying people I would see, hear or read about during the week and try to apply them to every nth non-critical NPC the players encountered during the next session. I'd aim to use whatever was on the list every week. In terms of ideas for an urban campaign I'd like to try, I'd love to do a take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I don't know if I could pull it off though.</blockquote>

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