As a first step in experimenting with urbancrawl structures, I simply broke down the three basic elements of ‘crawl-based play and tried to apply them to an urban environment:
- Keyed Locations
- Geographic Movement
- Exploration-Based Default Goal
KEYED LOCATIONS
What are we keying? Neighborhood? Buildings? Organizations? People?
Neighborhoods seem too large. For example, here’s a map of Green Ronin’s Freeport as found in the Death in Freeport module:
If you look at something like the Temple District, it’s pretty easy to imagine multiple locations that the PCs would want to interact with. If you’re trying to key multiple entries to a single location, it’s a dead giveaway that you’re keying at the wrong scale. For example, the idea of writing up multiple key entries for a single dungeon room probably sounds inherently weird to you. Although, just for the sake of argument, here’s an example from Lords of Madness I recently stumbled across:
Hexcrawls tend to be a little more forgiving of multiple keys per location, but even there I would argue that if you’re frequently keying lots of stuff into a single hex it’s an indication that your hex map is at the wrong scale.
Individual buildings, on the other hand, seem too small. Even a small city like Freeport has hundreds or possibly thousands of buildings. Keying even 10% of them would be a daunting task, and if you left 90% of a dungeon or a hexcrawl unkeyed you wouldn’t have enough material to hold the scenario together. (And even if you did key them, most of them would be boring. It would be like keying every tree in a forest for a hexcrawl.)
Keying organizations or people would give you a very different way of “navigating” the city. For example, Monsters & Manuals talks about building a relationship hexmap for urban-based sandboxes.
But since our next bullet point is geographic movement, I’m going to at least temporarily steer away from that and propose that we should be looking to key a geographic entity somewhere between neighborhoods and individual buildings.
GEOGRAPHIC MOVEMENT
How do we move through a city?
It seems like the obvious question to ask here, but I find that it ends up being a trap. If you’re like me, when you go out “into the city” you’re generally pursuing some specific goal: You’re going to the grocery store. Or driving to Suzie’s house. Or walking to the park.
I’ve come to think of this as “utility-based” or “target-based” movement. It’s the way I’ve run movement in an urban environments at the game table for years: The PCs say they want to go to Castle Shard and, at most, I figure out how long it takes for them to get there before segueing directly to, “You arrive at Castle Shard.” (Occasionally there might be an encounter along the way that gets triggered one way or another.)
But target-based movement is anathema to the ‘crawl structure. The PCs aren’t making a choice of geographic movement, they’re making a choice of where they want to be.
The distinction might be clearer if I apply the same logic to wilderness travel: Let’s say the PCs are in City A and they say, “I want to be in City B.” You can resolve that by looking at a road map, calculating how long it will take them to travel along the road, and then say, “Three days later you arrive in City B.”
But if you do that, you are not hexcrawling.
Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with that. There are plenty of situations where that is exactly the right way to resolve that sequence of events. But it’s not a ‘crawl.
Similarly, if my players say, “I want to go to Castle Shard.” And I respond by saying, “Five minutes later, you arrive to find the drawbridge lowered and Kadmus waiting to greet you outside.” There’s nothing wrong with that. But we aren’t urbancrawling.
EXPLORATION-BASED GOAL
The key distinction here appears to be the difference between travel and exploration. Which neatly brings us to our third bullet point: A default goal based around exploration.
What does it mean to explore a city? Does it mean anything at all? How are we interacting with the city when we’re “exploring” it?
If you google “explore a city”, what you generally find is a lot of travel advice. And most travel advice takes the form of target-based movement (“take a tour”, “go to a museum”, “visit a club”, etc.). Alternatively, we have this guy who explored a city by flipping a coin at every intersection to determine his route. And here’s a blog post talking about women walking through New York on foot, but they’re doing so just for the experience.
This may be an insurmountable hurdle. If “exploring a city” doesn’t actually mean anything – if it’s not a naturalistic behavior that characters would actually pursue – then we’re trying to model something that doesn’t exist.
But let’s not despair quite yet. Let’s tackle this from a different angle: What’s the goal we’re trying to pursue in the city?
For example, in the dungeon we’re looking for monsters to slay and treasure to loot. In a dungeoncrawl this naturally carries us from room to room looking for the room which contains these things. Similarly, in the hexcrawl we go from hex to hex seeking locations filled with interest.
So if you’re a fantasy adventurer who has just walked through the gates of a city… what are you looking for?
a) a place to dispose of loot. This involves searching through markets and people for those that value the loot, and negotiating a price.
b) a source of goods or services to purchase. Again, this involves searching through people.
c) someone to fight, or have a social conflict with. Gang violence, political intrigue, trying to corner a market, or maybe settle and inheritance.
d) transport, a trip across the mountains, or a place on a ship.
e) architecture, this sight has secrets built into it, those ancient ruins of rumor, that buried temple of plot tokens.
f) duty, reporting to one’s boss, visiting the court of the king, or the head chapter of one’s order.
It is a collection of people, to navigate, and do one’s business with.
It needn’t be so well organized that a stranger can find their way without consulting a native.
Hodgell and Hammett come to mind as having some useful descriptions.
A visitor will not have been exposed to all the illnesses which the natives have become accustomed to. I very much like the idea of turning the illness slider, which much fantasy keeps low, up to normal or cinematic. Which may mean thinking about stuff like cure disease and purify food and drink.
The very first D&D adventure I ever encountered, before I’d even played the game, was a folder full of handwritten notes given to me by an older relative, containing a city adventure dating from the late 70s/early 80s. It had an accompanying map on a giant sheet of very fine grid paper showing the whole town building by building, but with only numbers, no names. The set-up was that the players were sent to assassinate the city’s ruler, and there were various clues and directions and helpful or unhelpful factions and NPCs scattered around. From the notes it was pretty clear that the players were expected to wander the streets and buildings exactly like a dungeon, and like in a dungeon, the whole place was riddled with trouble – thieves, police trying to arrest the party, shopkeepers accusing them of theft, beggars giving them enigmatic notes, wishing fountains filled with gold and guarded by water weirds, haunted buildings, monsters lurking in warehouses, unstable buildings, NPCs who pretend to be friendly before robbing the party.
Traditionally, dungeons are where players go to find treasure, and cities are where they come to spend it. For the former the DM sets a gauntlet of tricks, traps and obstacles, so why not do the same for the latter? A medieval city was a maze of streets without street signs and unmarked buildings. A teemingly hostile, violent and magic-filled swords & sorcery setting makes it infinitely worse – does the sign of the dagger mean a knife-seller, an inn, or an assassin’s guild? The players are usually searching for rarer commodities like fine armour and weapons, healing, spellcasting, alchemists, sages and information-sellers, but they have no idea where in the city these things might be. They can ask for directions but they don’t know how accurate they’ll be, and they still have to pass by whatever hazards lie on the way. In between visits to the city the DM changes things here and there – shops close down or change hands, one faction ousts another, racial hatreds flare – a riot blocks this street, such-and-such a bridge has fallen into the river, the man who conned you at the market has packed up and left. Forget realism; for an adventure, things need to be dense and dangerous and outrageous.
This is one of the two things that make me skeptical that open-table urbancrawl is a realistic concept. The other is the idea of having a safe base to return to between adventures that can be assumed to be unaffected by the direct results of those adventures, which even if you have a home district in the city just doesn’t seem true; if you get into a fight with the thieves’ guild n the far side of town, they’re going to pursue everyone involved back to your base, and if a player doesn’t return, their character is still going to get caught in that counterattack.
Basically, it seems like you need a safe, neutral territory for inactive PCs to live for the open table to work, and urbancrawls have no way of offering that.
Auroch, how does outside of the city strike you?
If the population eats, they need food. Which perhaps means the city proper is surrounded by a territory with enough economic activity in it that no show PCs can be assumed to be supporting themselves with casual labor. Maybe each PC has found a different down time spot, maybe even a half sessions travel or more away from where the action is happening.
@Auroch: I wonder to what extent that continuity gap between sessions can be handled through sufficiently robust supporting systems. For example, I used the Escaping the Dungeon mini-system for handling continuity issues in my OD&D campaign based around (mega)dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls.
One thing I thought would come in handy would be some kind of, “Why isn’t Bob helping us this week?” system. I suspect this would be even more useful in an urbanrcrawl setting since Bob should just be hanging out a couple of doors away.
(Although if you’re integrating your urbancrawl with a dungeoncrawl and/or hexcrawl, then it’s easy enough to say, “You knock on Bob’s door, but his mistress tells you he signed on with the Blue Wanderers and they went down into the dungeons below Castle Blackmoor a couple days ago.”
I used to travel (backpack. Some tourguide work) in Asia quite a bit. Whenever I arrived in a new town or city, and had gotten settled in, I would pick a direction that looked interesting and follow that road for an hour or two or three (unless I got distracted by something interesting in a different direction). Dinner was whatever street food or mom-and-pop place looked interesting or smelt good. I’d stop and talk with people when I felt like it (yeah, spoke the lingo), and ask about their town and how they lived.
Getting home I would retrace my steps, as my sense of direction must have been surgically removed or something, so had to be careful not to get completely lost.
This is how I see urban exploration. Not sure how it would translate to a game setting unless I was making the players draw their own map of the city over several game sessions.
Thinking some more about crawling in a city, and your comments about scale (how many distinct “encounters” should be in one “area”) — I’m pondering an analogy with, for example, a hexcrawl in which each hex might have one or two keyed encounters, but several hexes might be grouped together for purposes of wandering encounter tables, for instance. (So, you’d have one random encounter table for the western part of the Forest Of Doom, although that area would comprise multiple hexes with one keyed encounter per hex.)
I have less of a problem with more than one keyed encounter per urban “region” than you seem to, but maybe that’s because I’m not thinking in the same way about HOW I would be using this system. This series is kind of sparking ideas in me, which is cool, but doesn’t really have much application for me right now (it would have been useful for my last major game, if the PCs had ever actually traveled to the major city that they kept threatening to go to, but never did).
The way I think I’d use a system like this (given that I’m not running an open table style game) is twofold: first, to handle initial exploration of a large town or city, where the PCs are looking around for resources (inns, moneychangers, magic shops, fences, guilds, etc.). And second, to sort of procedurally generate content (and random encounters) for the city through player interaction.
The notion of an open table ‘crawl game with an urban focus (or at least a major urban component) seems a little odd to me — can you provide a little more detail on just what purpose the “Platonic ideal” of the urban hexcrawl system would serve for you?
I started to consider that final question a little bit in my comment on Part 1.
Some examples we can probably all relate to:
– looking for a specific person (I’ll meet you outside the mall at 5!)
– looking for a place where you can buy a thing, or with something worth buying (we’ve recently all done Christmas shopping, yes?)
– looking for a specific address (easier these days will smartphones, but sometimes you still end up calling you friend and saying “yes I’m standing right here and I can’t see it!)
So chances are your looking for a person, an address, or you’re browsing for something.
In a game, the person may want to be found, or they may not – urban chases happen a lot in movies but are hard to pull off in games. I would want a good urbancrawl system to help with that. (Some of the scenes in the Bourne movies would be a great inspiration, with glimpses of the person caught in the crowd. You can flip this around too – if you spot someone in a crowd before they spot you, it makes it easier to escape from them).
You recognise people in a crowd by their appearance and their behaviour. If either thing is unusual they are much easier to find. If both things are typical then you might see a few people matching their description before you find the right one.
When looking a for a specific address you normally have directions. Maybe you have a description of the property too (the one with the red door). Sometimes directions are hard to follow. Sometimes you follow them but still can’t find the place because it’s hidden some way (the entrance is round the back etc).
When you’re shpping you’re looking for a type of proprietor. Society has visual (and sometimes sound) cues to help you. Here in the UK, most public houses still have hanging signs with a picture of the name (The Lion and Lobster is near me and the sign is… memorable). Pharmacists have an almost internationally recognised symbol. Barbers (and the past, barber-surgeons) have the red and white stripes.. A shop will have it’s wares on display either outside or in the window… unless it’s very exclusive or taboo (there’s a shop by that name near me too, with frosted windows…)
Once you’ve find the right type of place you still have to decide if it is the one for you. You go in, have a look around, maybe talk to the shopkeep. Then you either buy or go the next shop. You might go back to the first one again. All pretty mundane stuff but it has a structure that could also apply to more exciting situations.
Going back the question of scale, when I first thought of ‘neighbourhood’ I was thinking a collection of three or five small streets. An area that size has a cohesive character, the residents will all know it very well and there will be a sense of community. Before the city existed or expanded , this would have been a separate hamlet Their most common needs will all be found within that area (a grocers, a source of water, somewhere to dump garbage – wow, my school urban geography lessons are all coming back to me). For less frequent needs like clothes or furniture they will go further to other parts of the city. A step up from a neighbourhood is a district, ward, parish or borough.
Here’s a geography glossary that might be helpful: http://geographyfieldwork.com/urban_geography_glossary.htm
Reading through your part two post gave me a though – how about “the junction” as the functional scale? At Each junction you can see into several different streets. At a glance you can get an idea of the character of each street and the sort of people and places there. You can make a choice about where to go next.
I see the crowds and buildings on the same level as the furniture and dressing in a dungeon room. In a dungeon crawl, the DM typically says something like “This is a 20 by 30 foot room with stone walls. There is a pit in the centre of the room and three chests lined against the north wall. On the wast wall there are two doors, one wooden and one made of iron. You here the sound of rushing water.
In an urbancrawl the DM might say “you are in a well-to-do neighbourhood with five streets. The houses are large with private gardens and iron gates – one stands out as incredibly grand, another looks crumbling and might be deserted. The people in the streets are all well dressed and there are several city watchmen on patrol. There is a square with a statue of a cyclops and a very old man resting on a bench”.
or maybe: “this is a poor but busy and noisy neighbourhood with run-down wooden buildings. There are lots of food merchants with stalls and carts in the streets. One merchant is selling very colourful, unusual-looking fruit. You also pass a shop with a very strong-looking door and a sign that says “by appointment only”. You can’t tell what it sells, but you see a man in a red robe and turban entering.
As you can see, I’ve tried to cover both 1) usual things for that neighbourhood and b) unusual things. (because the PCs might be looking for something typical – like a merchant selling rope – or something distinctive- like a wizard.
Each stroll though a neighbourhood might take 10 minutes and then the PC’s can decide if they want to interact with any of the things they have seen, look moire closely for something they haven’t seen yet but which might be here, or move onto the next neighbourhood.
Just to repeat – I’m using ‘neighbourhood’ to mean 3 to 5 streets plus maybe one square, with a close community and everything in easy walking distance. If neighbourhood means something larger to your players, then maybe ‘group of streets’ or another term could be substituted.
Crikey, I know the Lion and Lobster! And I know Taboo, although of course I’ve never been inside.
Generally what I do for city crawling is name the streets and use them as “hexes” each of my streets will have shops/tavern/squares/fountains/statues/whatever attached. You can follow the streets, use them for directions etc, etc. Even have hidden alleyways linking two previously unlinked streets the PCs can find through either spot checks or knowledge (local) or gather information checks, much like secret passages.
Interesting. Your comment twisted the CSIO example of navigation-by-street and made me really see how it could be handled as an enriched pointcrawl: The streets of the city become the “connections” of the pointcrawl, but those connections are enriched with their own content (in a manner similar to the way I handle trails and roads in my hexcrawl campaigns, although that’s an essay for another time).
The need to key every single street becomes exponentially difficult as the size of the city grows, but we could potentially resolve this difficulty by considering the way that we conceptually map cities in our own minds: We don’t memorize every single street, instead we have a loose network of the major thoroughfares and a loose sense of what fills in the space between those thoroughfares.
Your note about finding previously unknown links between the thoroughfares would allow people to delver into the lesser streets. It reminds me of the shortcut system I used in my proposal for a hijacking game structure.
In a couple of days I’ll be discussing an urbancrawl structure based around neighborhoods. What’s interesting about this thoroughfare system is how easily it could be used to enrich that structure (with the neighborhoods being defined as the space between thoroughfares).
“So if you’re a fantasy adventurer who has just walked through the gates of a city… what are you looking for?” I submit that we are searching for services. Which is in essence, people, NPC, and the things they can do for us. The closest thing to a city-exploration would be a car ride, always in the background of your action of moving with a destination. Would any RPG have a structure like that (sorry if addressed elsewhere, still haven´t finished the series).
Beginning development on my own Urbancrawl, I’ve got a good angle as to why and that it will be easily repeated.
My family members got some dogs a few months back and in order to keep them in line, they have got to be walked. So now I’m a dogwalker.
I think this lets someone do an urbancrawl under a street by street level. More block by block (if you understand the difference).
How does this vary from what is described here? Not sure. but i think a very different POV from vehicular based transportation because 10 minutes is about 2 blocks, as opposed to 2 miles with stoplights.
Finding that cute corgi I saw waddling around is fun but challenging. Do the Rabbits trigger my dogs? Seeing the Coyote is potentially dangerous (at least to the pups). Does the Jogger want to pet my yip dogs? All of which might happen in a few blocks.