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In our quest to understand urbancrawls, let’s turn our attention now to the Judges Guild. Despite a recent resurgence, I think that most people still vastly underestimate the seismic influence they had on the early development of the hobby: They were experimental. They were groundbreaking. They were cutting edge. And a lot of the stuff that was revolutionary when they did it had become “business as usual” in the hobby just a few years later. A lot of it remains business as usual even today.

(This was most recently impressed upon me afresh when I realized that the hexcrawling procedures in AD&D were based almost entirely on the material developed by Judges Guild: The structures from OD&D were essentially abandoned completely.)

CITY STATE OF THE INVINCIBLE OVERLORD

City State of the Invincible Overlord is not only the first city supplement ever published, it’s also one of the first adventure modules to be published (being predated only by Palace of the Vampire Queen and the original version of The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth).

The first thing I note as I page through the book is that Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owens have a very clear concept of how this material will actually be used at the table. There’s a definite, utilitarian structure to everything they present. Unfortunately, what their practices actually were – what specific procedures they would have used when running the City-State – are unclear almost to the point of being an enigma.

The key for City State of the Invincible Overlord is organized by street. For example, the description of the city begins with a list of all the notable locations on Barter Street:

Each location entry generally consists of notable NPCs and a brief description. These are not terrible different from what you’d find in a city gazetteer today and not particularly helpful from a structural or procedural standpoint.

There are, however, two points of interest to be found here: First, each street has an encounter keyed to it. For example, Barter Street:

PROB 38% of being surrounded by Street Urchins demanding 1 CP each to go away

According to the standard procedures hidden away on page 5, these encounters are “rolled on alternate turns (on the turn that a normal encounter is not rolled)”. In order to check for the encounter, you roll 1d6. If you roll a 1, you then roll the percentile check of the keyed encounter.

What constitutes a normal encounter is, as far as I can tell, not explained. (We’ll have to turn to the Ready Ref Sheets for that, which we’ll do in a moment.) Also unexplained is what constitutes a turn. In OD&D there were both underworld turns (10 minutes), wilderness turns (1 day), and combat turns (1 minute). (Although, to be fair, OD&D itself is pretty vague about which type of turn is used in many situations.)

For our purposes, this sort of detail isn’t particularly relevant. What would be nice to know, however, is exactly how Bledsaw and Owens handled movement at the table: Were the players, in fact, navigating street-by-street? The fact that specific turn-by-turn time was being kept and encounters being generated based on exactly which street they were on during a particular turn rather strongly suggests that they were. (And this is reinforced by guidelines like, “There is a 20% PROB of blockage by Wagons, Horses, and Goods. A 10% PROB exists of an object being dropped from above per turn. Distances 10-60 feet.”)

The second point of interest is that each keyed location includes a Rumor or Legend, such as:

Legend, the Cauldron-Born: A Lich in the Dearthwood is creating an army of Synthetic Giants.

Or:

Rumor: A Djinn is coming south on Constable’s Street.

These are obviously very similar to the rumors we see later in Keep on the Borderlands and The Village of Hommlet. Taken in its totality, however, I think we discover that City State of the Invincible Overlord provides a much richer and more robust urban environment: The players are expected to truly explore the city in order to retrieve the rumors which will propel them towards adventure. And in the process of that exploration, the city will impose itself upon them in the form of encounters.

This basic structure is then supplemented with a variety of ancillary material: Town criers and vigilantes; a sub-system for being questioned by city guards; an entire method for placing advertisements and determining the response; and so forth. Add in little sub-systems for intoxicants, gambling, and the like and it’s not hard to see that the city was a mish-mash of color, information gathering, and carousing.

MODRON

Fast forward a year and we have Modron: Not to be confused with the polyhedral monsters which would later use the same name, this is actually an often-overlooked city supplement written by Bob Bledsaw and Gary Adams.

It’s notable because it marks an evolution in Bledsaw’s approach to urban supplements: Although encounters are still keyed by street, the gazetteer of locations is now organized by area (Stadium Area, Open Market, The Docks). Rumors and Legends are gone, however, leaving the city as a utilitarian husk colored with the occasional random encounter.

READY REF SHEETS (1978)

In 1978, the second edition of the Ready Ref Sheets finally reveal to us how a “normal encounter” is determined in the city. In practice, it turns out to be an incredibly rich method for procedurally generating urban content.

First, check for an encounter. Encounters have a 1/6 chance every other turn. (Thus matching the same rate as dungeon and wilderness encounters, although once again the length of this “urban turn” is left undefined.)

Second, determine the type of encounter: Attacked by Surprise, Attacked, Slanders/Insults, Questions Player(s), Propositions Player(s), or Special Encounter.

This second step is what really makes the whole system work: Basically everything else in the process simply determines who you’re encountering, but this initial step colors the encounter. (Combine it with the “Attack Reasons” table from pg. 74 of City State of the Invincible Overlord and you’re really cooking with gas.)

This is all the Ready Ref Sheets have to offer us, but I think it’s important: Understanding where the procedural content generators are and how they work in a ‘crawl is vital to keep the ‘crawl vibrant and alive over the course of a campaign.

CITY-STATE OF THE WORLD EMPEROR

City-State of the World Emperor is a really weird product.

First, it has an entire volume dedicated to 80 pages of generic, unnamed shops. And none of these shops are actually keyed to the map: The GM is supposed to place them wherever they find convenient.

The other significant volume of the set is just a giant mish-mash of completely unorganized information. It includes both a table of “Rumors” and a table of “Random Rumors” (although what the distinction is supposed to be between these categories is left completely unexplained).

Gone are the street-based encounters and the rumors keyed to specific locations. In their place, however, Volume II: Shops has a robust “cache” system: Each location indicates how many caches of loot it possesses, and you can use the cache system to determine where it’s hidden; how it’s hidden; and how much is hidden. This is coupled with the following rejoinder:

As a general state of affairs people in the City State of the World Emperor tend to be a level or two higher than those in the City State of the Invincible Overlord owing to the tougher level of competition. Also since more trade flows through Viridistan the level of cash flow and total of treasure are slightly greater. Beware; since the guards and traps are tougher too!

The impression one is left with is very much of a “hack ‘n slash” urban environment and the expectation seems to be that the PCs will be kicking doors down and looting the premises.

Also of note, however, is that Volume III: Guidebook to the City includes an explicit “Play Guide”. This leads off by saying, “It is important that played characters interact with NPCs.” It then includes a robust system for handling rumors, tracking how long abstract interactions with NPCs take, mechanics for “establishing camaraderie”, and play tips for successfully gathering information (“talk with everybody… encourage the relating of rumors… learn about sudden unusual behavior… concentrate on getting to know persons of one’s own rank, position and interests”). So the collection of information is still clearly placed in center of the urban spotlight and it’s particularly interesting to see the mechanistic way in which these interactions are handled. For example:

One rumor (maximum) can be heard per every two hours in an eatery (food or drink). One rumor per hour can be heard in an inn (food, drink, and beds). Three rumors per hour can be heard in a tavern (drink). One hour of conversation equals four turns of interaction if with different people, or six turns of interaction if with one person. Ten interactions equal one turn. One interaction equals two verbal statements (or questions) and two retorts (minimum). About 50% of rumors are true.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE JUDGES GUILD

Here, however, our time with Judges Guild draws to a close. In 1983 they would produce a final city-state product – City State of Tarantis – but this product moved entirely to a modern gazetteer style: These are the books that read like a Baedeker’s guidebook. They provide the backdrop for adventure without really giving us anything in the way of structural clues.

In reviewing what we’ve learned from the Guild, I’ll start by saying that I’m probably not interested in using strict turn-by-turn timekeeping while exploring a city. The kind of street-by-street navigation that seems to be getting advocated here might be interesting for a short while during an “explore the new city” phase, but I don’t think that it would represent effective pacing in the long run. (Featuring, as it almost certainly would, a lot of decisions that nobody at the table really cares about.)

The idea of keying content to specific streets, however, is an interesting one. Consider the possibility of combining this with target-based movement: When the PCs are leaving or arriving at a location, could we check for encounters keyed to those streets in order to provide color to the urban environment as they move through it on their errands?

Go to Part 8: Other Old School Cities

Go to Part 1

The thing I value most about the Old School Renaissance – and the reason I enjoyed exploring the ur-game of OD&D – is that a lot of valuable and experimental mechanics and game structures were functionally abandoned as the hobby and industry kind of dashed headlong towards a post-AD&D / post-Dragonlance homogenization.

So when I’m struggling with something like urbancrawling I find that it can be very useful to dip back into the primordial pool and poke around a bit to see if anything useful pops out.

KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS

It’s interesting to note that the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide doesn’t actually include guidelines for urban adventures: Dungeon adventures, wilderness adventures, aerial adventures, waterborne adventures, underwater adventures, and even planar adventures all get coverage. Urban adventures? Nope.

I believe this is because Gygax primarily saw cities as the hub around which adventures were based: You came back to the city to get supplies and hirelings. You left the city in order to have adventures.

Gygax’s handling of the Keep in Keep on the Borderlands seems to largely confirm this. Five specific points are given under “DM Notes About the Keep”:

I. Specific responses to PCs who break the law.

II. “Floor plans might be useful… exceptionally so in places frequented by adventurers.”

III. Rumors can be gained by talking to people at the Keep. (Example: “Talking with the Taverner might reveal either rumor #18 or #19; he will give the true rumor if his reaction is good.”)

IV. How to enter the Inner Bailey of the Keep and get a special mission from the Castellan.

V. After the adventure material in the module has been used up, you can “continue to center the action of your campaign around the Keep by making it the base for further adventures you devise”. Examples given include leading a war party to fight bandits, becoming traders operating out of the Keep, or exploring the wilderness to find additional adventures in the surrounding area.

(What I love about that fifth point is how casually Gygax drops the idea of three radically different game structures as potential avenues for developing the campaign. It’s very suggestive to me of how different the early GMs were in their approach to the game, compared to later “sequential dungeons” or “follow the plot” styles.)

In other words, the Keep is treated as a place for PCs to shop and as a place to gather information that will point them towards adventure.

THE VILLAGE OF HOMMLET

T1 The Village of Hommlet, also by written by Gygax, was published around the same time that B2 Keep on the Borderlands was published and it shows a consistent methodology: Every building is keyed. The places “frequented by adventurers” are given floorplans. Rumors are keyed to specific individuals (replacing the generic rumor table). Basically, there are only two significant departures.

First, no specific response scenario is given for PCs breaking the law. This, however, seems to flow as a natural consequence of the lack of a central legal authority in Hommlet.

Second, there is a seemingly odd desire to itemize the valuable contents of every single commoner’s hut.

In combination, however, this actually makes sense: Instead of legal response scenarios, a lot of attention is given to alliances and friendships. So you get entries like, “He has 20 gold ingots (50 g.p. value each) hidden away in a secret hollow under the stone wall in front. He has become quite friendly with the magic-user, Burne.” The clear implication, at least to my eyes, is that if you mess with this guy or steal his shit, Burne’s going to come looking for you. (Whereas if you mess with his neighbor, who is a member of the Church of St. Cuthburt, you’ll be dealing with the Church.)

The underlying assumption here (and in a lot of early city modules) seems to be that some significant percentage of PCs are going to be murderhobos: B2 deals with that by specifying centralized legal repercussions. T1 assumes that the PCs will succeed in looting a house or two (and therefore specifies the loot), but also lays out a comprehensive social network that’s going to come looking for their blood.

This is mostly a digression, but it is interesting to note that having these sorts of explicit or semi-explicit structures in place for dealing with murderhobos is an essentially universal aspect in all of the early city modules I’m looking at.

THE FIRST FANTASY CAMPAIGN

Let’s turn our attention from Gygax and instead focus it upon Dave Arneson. Although not published until 1977, the First Fantasy Campaign “attempted to show the development and growth of his campaign as it was originally conceived”.

First, an important note: “By the end of the Fourth year of continuous play Blackmoor covered hundreds of square miles, had a dozen castles, and three separate Judges as my own involvement decreased due to other circumstances. But by then, it was more than able to run itself as a Fantasy campaign and keep more than a hundred people and a dozen Judges as busy then as they are today.”

Even with my experience running an open table supporting 30-40 players, the sheer scale of what the Blackmoor campaign was like in this timeframe is really difficult for me to wrap my head around. And we need to keep in mind its unusual needs and demands as we try to unravel what the city-based game structures of the campaign were.

We’ll start with this: Over the course of its first two years, Blackmoor “grew from a single Castle to include, first, several adjacent Castles (with the forces of Evil lying just off the edge of the world) to an entire Northern Province(s) of the Castle and Crusade Society’s Great Kingdom. As it expanded, each area (Castle’s first and then Provincial Counties) was given a pre-set Army. Later, the players were to organize their own forces based on experience and goodies procured enroute to their Greatness.”

In other words, the early dungeon-based portion of the game was designed to prepare characters for establishing Castles which would be used to raise Armies in order to participate in wargames. “The entire 3^rd Year of the Blackmoor Campaign was to be part of a Great War between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.”

So one of the primary uses for a city in Arneson’s campaign was to supply the Army.

In terms of how the Town of Blackmoor was actually run at the table, however, we are regrettably only given a half page of information.

“This map shows Blackmoor Castle, the town, and immediate area. All those areas named in the first years of play are labeled. Some names were later changed by the players so that Troll Bridge became known as Mello’s Bridge … Also the East Gate became known as Gerri’s Gate (named after Gertrude the Dragon who was killed there by the Baddies.”

The impression I immediately take from this is that the city was highly responsive and could be radically transformed by the actions of the players. This is further confirmed in the next paragraph:

“Buildings 1, 5, 23, 40, Town Inn, Comeback Inn, and Merchant Warehouses are owned or lived in by Minions of the Merchant (run by Dan Nicholson, these quickly became the local Mafia and spread to several areas of the campaign). Buildings 13, 15, 20, 21, 24, 27, 35, 39 were those of the followers of the Great Svenny and the secret society set up by Mello the Hobbit and “Bill” (sort of a counter to the Merchant’s Mafia).”

The overall image is one of powerful, influential organizations being established by the PCs. This is awesome stuff and it really gets my blood pumping. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on for the future (in much the same way that kingdom-building sits atop the hexcrawl structure, this type of Great Society play would naturally sit atop a proper urbancrawl structure), but in terms of the urbancrawl structure itself it is, unfortunately, not terribly informative. Therefore, I’m going to lay Arneson aside (at least for the moment).

Go to Part 7: City States of the Judges Guild

Go to Part 1

Using the experimental hexmap we made for Ptolus (which you might want to open in a second window for easy cross-referencing), imagine that the PCs are staying at the Ghostly Minstrel in hex E3. The GM asks them what they want to do and they say that they want to head south into the Longbottom neighborhood.

What happens next?

TRIGGERING THE KEYED ENCOUNTERS

When it comes to triggering the keyed encounters in an urbancrawl’s key, it seems to me that there are a few different options:

First, there is a chance they might trigger any time that someone travels through the hex. (In other words, even if the PCs are using the “target-based” movement we talked about earlier – when they’re simply moving from one known location to another – you’d still check for encounters in the hexes they pass through.)

Second, the encounters only trigger if the PCs are specifically patrolling or searching or crawling or putting their ear to the ground (or whatever).

(Of course, you could also go both ways by having different odds of triggering encounters depending on the approach the PCs are taking.)

If there is a difference between ‘crawl and non-crawl movement, one way to clearly distinguish between them would be to add some sort of mechanical hook to the ‘crawl based movement: For example, if the PCs want to ‘crawl hex E4 they might have to make a Gather Information check. (This would make an urbancrawl a little more like the old school “clearing the hex” mechanic, in which the PCs would have to specifically state their intention to take a specific action within a specific geographic location.)

This sort of mechanic, however, works best if the players are more aware of the structure: In other words, we’d want them to be able to see the hex they were exploring and know its boundaries. Which leads me to…

NEIGHBORHOODS vs. HEXES

Putting this hypothetical urbancrawl into imaginary practice, I’m almost immediately reconsidering my rejection of keying by neighborhood. Exploring the entire Temple District feels too large, but looking at the Ptolus map and saying “I want to shake things up in the Longbottom neighborhood” feels pretty natural.

Similarly, if I were to look at a neighborhood map of my hometown:

(click for larger version)

Keying content to each community (Nokomis, Powderhorn, Longfellow, etc.) actually feels like a pretty good place to start. And if I ended up wanting more detail than that, I could drill down to individual neighborhoods (so that Powderhorn, for example, would break down into Central, Bryant, Bancroft, Standish, and Corcoran).

Random thought: LANDMARKS. Put a landmark in each neighborhood/community/ward that you’re keying. Like, if you knew the city you’d say things like, “Oh yeah, that’s where Burt’s Tavern is.” Or the Old Clock Tower. Or the Red Sash Brothel or whatever.

CATEGORIZING THE TRIGGER

So the PCs head south into hex E4 and start poking around. They end up triggering the ‘crawl encounter, so I check the key:

E4. BLACKSTOCK PRINTING: Blackstock is one of the few businesses in the city with a functioning, large-scale movable type printing press. (Many of the city’s newssheets are printed here.) What is not widely known is that the press is controlled by six of Aelian Fardream’s clones (who were awakened from temporal stasis due to a strange magical surge several years ago).

In actual practice, my key would probably have more info about Blackstock Printing than that. (In fact, you can find a lot more information on pg. 353 of Ptolus.) But what I’m struggling with is the idea of what it actually means to trigger this particular encounter. Off-hand there a couple possibilities:

First, they could be walking by Blackstock Printing when they spot the same person standing in two different places at the same time. (That’s an interesting hook that might prompt them to investigate.)

Second, we could use something like the scenario included in the Ptolus sourcebook: The Shadow Eyes clone of Aelian Fardream attacks someone in Midtown. The PCs later overhear an eyewitness saying that she’d seen this guy before – at a printing shop in the South Market.

I can see how either of those could be a natural response to “we’re poking around the Longbottom neighborhood”. But what if they had headed southeast and ended up triggering the encounter in hex G4 instead:

G4. POTIONS AND ELIXIRS: A well-stoked alchemical supply and potion store. The sole proprietor is a half-elf sorcerer named Buele Nox.

Harder to see what triggering that encounter actually means. Part of that can simply be explained as the Potions and Elixirs shop not having innate interest, but to some extent I think that’s actually begging the question.

As I struggle to come to grips with what the encounter trigger really means in terms of the urbancrawl, I think I’m coming to the conclusion that part of my problem is that the urban environment simply lends itself naturally to a wider array of categorical experiences than a dungeoncrawl or hexcrawl.

Let me unpack that a bit: The default trigger for an encounter key in the dungeon is simply “entering a room”. Similarly, the default trigger for an encounter key in the hexcrawl is “seeing something on the horizon”.

Or, more generally, they both boil down: “They see something.”

This works in the dungeoncrawl because the border of the room is clearly defined. It works in the hexcrawl because the encounter stands in contrast to the wilderness around it.

The problem with the city (at least to my perception) is that the points of interest to a wandering adventurer are not placed in plain sight and/or immediately contrasted from the surrounding context: The monsters and mysteries and oddities and weirdness are tucked out of sight and generally inaccessible to the average person just walking by.

I’m beginning to suspect that the answer to this conundrum lies in a pair of questions: Why are the PCs urbancrawling? And what are they actually doing when they “crawl”?

Before we delve into those questions, however, I think I want to take a brief detour through some old school inspiration.

Go to Part 6: Old School Inspiration

Go to Part 1

So what we’re going to do here is take a map of Monte Cook’s Ptolus and drape a hex map over it. Then we’re going to pull existing location keys from Cook’s description of the city and we’re going to use them to key the hexes.

I’m choosing Ptolus for this exercise because the city is densely packed with existing material that’s both utilitarian (apothecaries, marketplaces, and the like) and also studded with adventuring potential. The goal is to see if simply creating an urban-themed hexcrawl will provide any insight into an urbancrawling structure.

As I’m writing this, I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work. (And perhaps a secret little hope that it will miraculously turn into a fully functional urbancrawl and solve all my problems.)

THE MAP

(click for larger image)

THE KEY

As you’re looking through this key, remember that the urbancrawl key doesn’t represent all the information that you might prep about the city. For example, you might also prep a list of shop where potions are sold. Or make a note of where the popular (and unpopular) taverns are. (These would all obviously be things that would reside within the boundaries of the hexes, but they wouldn’t be interacted with through the urbancrawl structure.)

It should also be noted that this isn’t a complete key. For example, some of these locations would need full maps along with map keys. I’m not going to bother doing that right now, though, because the primary goal of this exercise is to look at what you’re keying.

A1. ZELLATH KORY’S HOUSE: A small house serving as the homebase for a Sorn cell. (The Sorns are a decentralized assassins’ and mages’ guild.) Zellath Kory is the cell leader.

A2. CASTLE SHARD: A huge castle made from purple stone, housing a massive crystal with strange magical properties. It is ruled by Lord Zavere and Lady Rill.

A3. KADAVER’S: A secret bar for criminals hidden beneath a dilapidated manse.

A4. VLADAAM ESTATE: The noble estate of the Vladaam family. The Vladaams rule over a vast criminal network. The grounds are defended by a pack of warhounds.

B2. PYTHONESS HOUSE: A haunted castle. (Standard dungeon crawl described in the Night of Dissolution adventure.)

B3. CLOCK TOWER: A major landmark in Oldtown, the Clock Tower no longer works. A cellar below the Clock Tower leads to a very old family crypt that once lay under the manor that was built on this previous built on this spot. The crypt provides access to an underground complex known as the Buried City.

B4. SKULK ALLEY: An innocuous looking dead-end alleyway between a pair of buildings. Scrawled on the wall is the skulk symbol. Those who wait in the alley for at least half an hour are approached by Shim, a skulk willing to serve as an information broker and private detective.

B5. THE BOILING POT: A large and well-established slophouse run by a jovial fellow named Dellam Koll.

C1. WELL OF THE SHADOW EYES: A dry and disused well in a dead-end Rivergate alley. At the bottom of the well there’s a secret door leading to the underground Ravenstroke complex, a magical lair created by the wizard Aelian Fardream. It is now controlled by the Shadow Eyes, a magical clone of Fardream.

C2. CHAPEL OF ST. THESSINA: One of the many temples of Lothian found throughout the city. The chapel has been secretly taken over by the Pactlords of the Quaan (who have replaced the priests with doppelgangers and are using the upper levels for a variety of purposes).

C3. GALLOWS SQUARE: A public square where the city’s executions are held.

C4. ROGUE MOON TRADING COMPANY: A three-story building serving as the base of operations for the largest merchant company in Ptolus. (Some people call it the Star of the South Market.) Tamora Riagin runs the office here.

C5. CHON: A clothier/tailor.

D2. RED STALLION PUB: The largest, most popular alehouse in the North Market. Co-owned by Yallis Kether and Utha Aryen. At night, the Red Stallion holds contests for drinking, singing, and throwing darts. (The winners get free drinks the following night.) A former delver named Jurgen Yath can also be found there, willing to sell information about the Dungeon beneath the city.

D3. SADIE’S REST: A memorial park dedicated to Sadie of the Moors. Bron Higger is the caretaker.

D4. RAMORO’S BAKERY: Ramoro Udelis and his wife Carlatia run this South Market bakery. The house itself is old and ill-kept, but the baked goods are excellent. Ramoro’s brother, Pauthan, is a pickpocket who “works” among the bakery’s customers.

D5. THE MYSTERY PUB: A tavern known for elaborate, bizarre, and magical games and entertainments.

E1. KILLRAVEN’S TOWER: An old stone tower that leans precariously to one side and appears to be abandoned. Word on the street is that it’s actually the secret entrance to Kellris Killraven’s underground stronghold. (Killraven is attempting to establish a new crime family in Ptolus.) In reality, however, it has nothing to do with Killraven.

E2. TEMPLE OBSERVATORY OF THE WATCHER OF THE SKIES: The most distinctive portion of this temple is the cylindrical observatory with its giant telescope, used to observe significant events and omens in the skies, particularly the night sky. The temple is run by Helmut Itlestein, also known for being the head of the controversial Republican movement.

E3. GHOSTLY MINSTREL: An inn, pub, and restaurant all in one. It’s become the meeting place of choice for delvers and adventurers. The Minstrel is haunted by an actual undead bard.

E4. BLACKSTOCK PRINTING: Blackstock is one of the few businesses in the city with a functioning, large-scale movable type printing press. (Many of the city’s newssheets are printed here.) What is not widely known is that the press is controlled by six of Aelian Fardream’s clones (who were awakened from temporal stasis due to a strange magical surge several years ago).

E5. COCK PIT: An underground cockfighting arena which has grown into one of the largest illegal gambling dens in Ptolus.

F2. CATTY’S HOUSE: A small house serving as the homebase for a Sorn cell. (The Sorns are a decentralized assassins’ and mages’ guild.) Katrin “Catty” Salla is the cell leader.

F3. TEMPLE OF THE FROG: An abandoned ruin. The vile cultists who once ran this temple were driven out by adventurers six years ago.

F4. KERRIK’S: The proprietor of this bar, Kerrik Tanner, is also a contact point for the Vai assassins.

F5. WOODWORKER’S GUILDHALL: Run by Guildmaster Falen Jenn.

G1. NALL HALL: A cultural center for people from the northern wasteland of Nall or those who have descended from Nallish folk. They hold dances, feasts, and festivals to preserve their traditions – but all are welcome. (At the festival, PCs will be approached by a young woman named Sanne who is trying to find someone to look for her husband, Sebastin. Sebastin disappeared on a delving mission in the Dungeon below the city while using a map that he purchased from someone at the Red Stallion Pub.)

G2. SMOKE SHOP: The Shuul mechanists’ guild sells cutting-edge technological items here – spectacles, watches, spyglasses, magnifying lenses, goggles, precision tools, pills of various kinds, and (their newest creation) the aelectrical lantern. They also sell all manner of firearms and technological weaponry. Crimson Coil cultists have been stealing gunpowder from the shop in order to construct a huge bomb.

G3. TERREK NAL’S HOUSE: Terrek Nal was apprenticed to the mage Golathan Naddershrike. Naddershrike proved a cruel master cursed him with a monstrous appearance, Nal murdered him in rage. After the murder, Nal returned to his family home and remains there in seclusion: The right half of his body is a glaring red and pink, slick with pus and strange excretions. He emits a foul stench too powerful to cover with perfumes. The greatest, change, however, is not physical: Nal now gains sustenance from fear instead of food and drink. When driven to desperation, he ventures out of his house and terrorizes people – he doesn’t harm them, merely frightens them in order to survive. A wealthy businessman who was assaulted three days ago has put a bounty of 500 gp on the monster’s head, describing his assailant as “a twisted man-thing with melted flesh”.

G4. POTIONS AND ELIXIRS: A well-stoked alchemical supply and potion store. The sole proprietor is a half-elf sorcerer named Buele Nox.

G5. MIDDEN HEAPS: A huge trash dump backed up against the southern city wall. The merchants in charge of the heaps charge a small fee for the dumping of trash (and for a little extra won’t bother inspecting it too closely). They’ll also sell scrap and broken items for 5cp per pound. Ratmen, goblins, and even otyughs are known to make their homes amidst the towering piles.

H3. DAYKEEPER’S CHAPEL: The Daykeeper’s Chapel is charged with beginning the ringing of the dawn bells each day (the other chapels take their cue from its beginning). Sister Arsagra Callinthan also oversees a variety of charitable outreach programs into the warrens. At the moment, Sister Arsagra has offered sanctuary to a man named Kobal who is being hunted by the Pale Dogs. (Kobal has discovered that Jirraith is a doppelganger.)

H4. JIRRAITH’S LAIR: The Pale Dogs are the most prominent of the gangs in the Warrens. They’re led by a mysterious man named Jirraith who keeps his “headquarters” in the top floor of an average-looking tenement. He has no bodyguards there, but he has a trained gibbering mouther. Even his lieutenants don’t know that Jirraith is actually a doppelganger.

H5. PORPHYRY HOUSE: A vile whorehouse secretly run by naga mistresses. The whores are actually polymorphed hydra hatchlings.

I2. DOCKMASTER’S TOWER: A strangely-shaped tower that looks out across the Docks. The Dockmaster who lives within maintains all the crew and cargo manifests, inspection reports, and shipping information that pertains to any craft that enters or leaves Ptolus. In fact, an officer from each ship must check in with the Dockmaster immediately upon arrival and immediately before departure. The Dockmaster, however, is grotesquely obese and never leaves the upper level of the tower: He transfers paperwork and messages via a basket on a string outside one window. For anything more, he has a small girl named Secki (age 8) who works for him.

I3. ENNIN HEADQUARTERS: The headquarters of the Ennin slavers (who work with the Pactlords of the Quaan).

Go to Part 5: Using the Ptolus Hexmap

Go to Part 1

One of the things I talked about in the Game Structures series was the vertical integration of game structures. For example:

The hexcrawling structure delivers you to a hex keyed with a dungeon. Entering the dungeon transitions you to the dungeoncrawling structure, which delivers you to a room keyed with a hostile monster. Fighting the monster transitions you to the combat structure, which cycles until you’ve defeated the monster and returns you to the dungeoncrawling structure.

This can be crudely characterized as: “You explore the hexcrawl so that you can find dungeons. You explore dungeons so that you can find things to kill. You kill things so that you can get their treasure.” This is, obviously, a vast over-simplification. But it effectively drills down to a core structure that exemplifies the basic elements that make these scenario structures tick.

So, in a naturalistic sense, we can ask a wandering hero standing at the gates of a city, “What are you looking for?” But we could look at the same question through a structural lens and ask, “How can we vertically integrate the urbancrawl with other scenario structures?” (And what can that tell us about how we need to structure the urbancrawl itself?)

The structure “above” the urbancrawl is pretty easy to figure out: A hexcrawl brings us to the city, delivers us to the gate, and brings us right back to the question, “What are you looking for?”

Which turns our attention to the structure under the urbancrawl. And for that, let’s start by considering existing structures that we could stick in there.

URBANCRAWL TO DUNGEON

What if we treated an urbancrawl just like a hexcrawl? It delivers you to location-based adventures using a dungeoncrawl structure.

This sort of structure could work well for a Ptolus-style or Waterdeep-style “dungeon under the city” scenario, where the goal of your urbancrawling is to find new and potentially lucrative entrances to the city’s literal underworld.

But while this hypothetical structure could serve as an intriguing patina for a megadungeon campaign, it seems to be primarily interested in providing an alternative exit from the urban environment. What I’m interested in, on the other hand, is finding a structure for actual urban adventuring.

Of course, we wouldn’t necessarily need to do literal dungeons: We could deliver up vampire dens or mob houses or whatever. The mental stumbling block I run into, though, is how to reliably trigger these from simple geographic movement in an urban environment. (But it’s definitely something to keep in mind.)

URBANCRAWL TO COMBAT

What if we treated the urbancrawl just like a dungeon? You crawl into a neighborhood and it triggers a combat encounter just like entering a dungeon room.

The problem I see here is contextualizing this string of violence into something interesting. In a dungeon there is an immediate, physical contiguity which can be used to bind multiple encounters together: The goblins in area 4 are working with the other goblins that can be found in areas 5-10.

By contrast, an urbancrawl is distinct from a dungeoncrawl in that it is presenting selected elements of interest from a much larger pool of information. (As opposed to the dungeoncrawl, which generally presents everything inside the dungeon complex.)

Which isn’t to say, of course, that you couldn’t figure out a way to contextualize urbancrawl combat encounters. For example, if we key a vampire in Lowtown and a vampire in Empire Villa it wouldn’t take much imagination to assume they’re both based out of the same blood den. But since that connection is non-geographical, we would need to figure out a way to “escalate” from the ‘crawl-triggered vampire encounters to the blood den.

(This becomes necessary because movement in a city is, generally speaking, not limited.)

It strikes me that this urbancrawl-to-combat structure would probably work really well for a Dirty Harry-style cop campaign: The ‘crawl becomes your patrol, with the various encounters triggered by the ‘crawl serving as potential hooks into larger investigations.

 URBANCRAWL TO MYSTERY

Which brings us to urbancrawls triggering mystery scenarios.

A natural image to pull up here is the cop out on patrol: They walk the streets, spot something suspicious, and the investigation of a crime is triggered. For similar reasons, this might be an interesting structure to explore for a superhero campaign: The classic “Master Planner” story from Amazing Spider-Man #31-33 was triggered by Spider-Man simply spotting some burglars trying to steal atomic equipment and then following a string of clues that eventually led him to an underwater base hidden in New York’s harbor.

This sort of “walking the streets and having something mysterious bump into you” is also quite popular in classic sword and sorcery literature, however. Robert E. Howard uses it in a number of Conan stories, for example, including “Shadows in Zamboula” which opens with a quivering voice declaiming that, “Peril hides in the house of Aram Baksh!” as the titular barbarian is walking down a street.

As I mentioned earlier, however, true mystery scenarios don’t play well with a true ‘crawl structure because they’re not holographic in their goals: You can’t solve the second half of the mystery unless you’ve collected the clues from the first half. So let’s lay mysteries aside for a moment and back up a moment.

URBANCRAWL TO LOCATION

“Peril hides in the house of Aram Baskh!”

Actually, I’m drawn back to that quote. Because what’s really happening here is that Conan is being told, “There’s something interesting in the house of Aram Baksh! You should totally check it out.” (The actual character is saying “don’t go in there, it’s dangerous, other people have died”, but from a structural standpoint the hook is saying the opposite.)

So let’s remove the trappings of the “dungeon” concept and instead just deliver up “locations”. That actually sounds familiar: It’s very similar to how hexcrawls work.

So what if we treated an urbancrawl just like a hexcrawl?

If you go exploring through an urbancrawl, what types of locations does it deliver to you? How does it deliver them? Why are you looking for them?

I have no idea. So let’s make a hex map of Ptolus.

Go to Part 4: Experimental City Hexes