The pair of questions I keep coming back to are: Why are the PCs urbancrawling? And what are they actually doing when they “crawl”?
And I think the reason I’m struggling with those questions is because, in an urban environment, their answers are very dependent on the specific context of the PCs’ actions.
This dependence is the result of the city being an extremely dynamic place: In a dungeon there’s generally just one interesting thing happening in a room. In the wilderness the interesting thing is separated from other interesting things by miles or leagues of scenery. But in the city there’s so much activity so densely packed that any given block (or even building) will often have dozens of different things happening in it. The question of which of those things you’ll end up engaging with is highly dependent on the experiences that you choose to seek out.
Having recognized this Gordian knot, we now have to seek the sword that can slice through it. And I think the key here is to stop thinking of the city as a monolithic entity and start thinking of it as being made up of diverse parts. We need to manage the dynamic nature of the city by breaking it apart into distinct layers. The city is not a single urbancrawl, but rather a multitude of urbancrawls that lie on top of each other in a simultaneous coexistence.
LAYER 0: THE GAZETTEER AND THE MAP
Let’s start with the base of the city: The gazetteer. This is the Baedaeker’s travel guide version of the city. It’s the list of useful shops, taverns, inns, and Important Public Locations.
The gazetteer isn’t an urbancrawl. Although it might be interesting to build some of this stuff into an “Explore the City” urbancrawl layer for those completely new to the city, the stuff in the gazetteer constitutes the elements of the city that will generally be visited through targeted travel. For ease of reference, putting these locations in a gazetteer format makes the most sense.
The other thing you’re going to want forming the foundation of your city is the map. And you’re going to want to split that map up into naturalistic divisions. For ease of reference, I’ll refer to them as districts, but in the game world they could be anything: Neighborhoods, wards, sectors, gang territory, streets, or whatever. You’re aiming for districts that make sense to the characters actually living in the city (they’re labels or divisions that they would recognize and talk about). But you’re also aiming for a districting concept that scales to the amount of material you’re planning to include in each layer of the urbancrawl. (This is just like a hexcrawl: If you find yourself frequently keying multiple entries into a single district, your scale is probably too large. If you find yourself with a lot of empty districts, your scale is probably too small.)
THE URBANCRAWL LAYERS
Over the top of this foundation – the gazetteer and the map – you’re going to layer in your urbancrawls.
Unlike a dungeoncrawl, the goal of an urbancrawl doesn’t default to treasure hunting. It defaults to finding something interesting. If the PCs are fairly ignorant of what the city has to offer (or are simply looking for new opportunities), then this idea of “finding something interesting” can remain fairly generic. But as the PCs learn more about the city, the action will inevitably become contextualized: Instead of saying, “Let’s see what’s going on in the Longbotttom neighborhood.” they’ll start saying things like, “We need to find out if there’s a blood den near Powderhorn Park.” or “Maybe we can figure out what the Halfling Mafia has been up to.”
Each urbancrawl layer basically boils down to one way in which the content of the city can be contextualized. In a given city, for example, you might have separate urbancrawl levels for:
- Vampire blood dens.
- Patrons who can give them jobs.
- The activities of a criminal gang.
- Potential targets for lucrative heists.
- Purely random encounters that provide “color”.
Each of these urbancrawls would (ideally) have interesting material keyed in every district of the city. So if the PCs go poking around the Longbottom neighborhood they might find the local vampire den. Or get contacted by agents of Lord Melbourne. Or run into mafiosos hassling local businesses. Or discover that a local merchant family currently holds the Neferelli Diamond. Or get their pockets picked by goblin urchins.
(Having five full layers like this would probably represent a really dense urbancrawl. It would require a lot of prep, but it would also deliver hundreds of hours of play. My guess, though, is that you probably only need 2 or 3 layers to get a really dynamic urbancrawl started.)
THE THIRD DIMENSION
This basic structure of urbancrawl layers is probably sufficient for running a simple urbancrawl. But I’m going to propose that you can add significant depth to your city by extending its urbancrawl layers into a third dimension.
You’re going to take one of your existing urbancrawls and you’re going to add layers to it. These deeper layers won’t necessarily be complete (in the sense that they’ll fill every district in the city with content), so it may be more convenient to think of them as “hidden nodes”.
The idea is that these hidden nodes can’t be directly or immediately accessed by anybody ‘crawling the city. Instead, they can generally only be accessed in one of two ways:
First, districts in the “lower levels” of the urbancrawl may contain clues that will point directly at these hidden nodes. For example, PCs raiding a vampire blood den may discover correspondence from Count Ormu implicating him as a vampire lord.
Second, these hidden nodes can be “exposed” to people ‘crawling the city if certain conditions are met. These conditions would generally take the form of “clearing” lower level nodes. For example, if various adventuring parties take out three of the blood dens in the city, Count Ormu’s network may be sufficiently disrupted to expose his involvement.
This second condition is particularly important for open tables because it solves the “I didn’t get the clues from the first half of this mystery” problem: If you’ve got the clues pointing at Count Ormu, great. If you don’t, but the blood den networks have been sufficiently disrupted by other groups, then Count Ormu becomes available to you through general ‘crawling.
In conceptualizing these hidden nodes, it may be useful to reflect once again on Kenneth Hite’s Conspyramid from Night’s Black Agents, which provided the most immediate inspiration for this added dimension:
You don’t necessarily need to engage in the same rigid hierarchy or chains of communication (the geographic component of the urbancrawl will cover a lot of the same bases), but it also can’t hurt, right?
Of course, the third dimension of some urbancrawls will be more conceptual rather than organizational: Different targets for heists, for example, may not be directly connected, but you can still add additional levels to a heist-based urbancrawl layer (representing the attention of more powerful clients or security arrangements which have been exposed or simply a pacing mechanic for heists over time).
I really love the idea of the conspyramid. When combined with your idea of stacking urban crawls it really seems to provide a great accessible way to further an overarching plot while still allowing for dynamic open tables.
That was my biggest concern of this urban crawl concept – that you would never be able to have deep story and plot. That the open table requirement would stifle that and make plots seem cheaper somehow.
Loving the series so far.
Your first list I might instead call hooks, things of interest to PCs. Cities must rationalize such things, even if the PCs knew nothing of a hook they must accurately witness the hook in action.
I also am greatly enjoying the conspyramid, continuing with the vampire examples it seems fruitful to want to detail the pyramid in both directions(drill into habitats of the top and bottom before the middle), but provide detail throughout as needed. Many shapes besides pyramids could also work, such on concentric hexagon rings around a central hexagon or ‘node’.
This is great. It’s really helpful to think of the crawl in layers. That’s something that can be added to the city on the fly and really make even a game in a non-metropolis practically infinite while still retaining the ease of use of a hexcrawl structure.
I can’t help but think of this from a graph perspective, with the base map providing a graph of the “geographic” nodes. Then crawl story-lines can be depicted as sub-graphs highlighting the involved nodes. In my head these overlay like the layers of utilities in the architecture diagrams of a house (plumbing, electrical, etc.). Layers could be used to represent :
– subcultures or organizations (slave smuggling ring, vampire dens, underground cult, etc.),
– plot lines (This pawn shop->that noblewoman’s stolen broach->that young thief->orphans’ hideout->a young prince thought lost at sea as a baby, rescued and raised in the gutters),
– social networks (constable in this sector that barkeep that caravan driver, etc.).
You can even develop an ongoing social/relationship graph for the adventurers, as a reference for points where you can inject story hooks and to give them a mnemonic reference for managing all the people they know across the city. Now you’re still crawling, but instead of 10’x10′ corridors, you’re crawling relationship webs, jumping from layer to layer at common nodes ([this pub rumor] led us to stake out [that location] where we saw [this man] who has secret meetings with [this woman] who works in [this district], etc.) Instead of deciding left, right, or straight, we’re now deciding do I follow that wagon, check out that man’s shop, or talk to his wife’s seamstress?
I love the concept, but there’s a definite “enough rope” vibe here. Realistically I’m sure I’m in danger of over-reaching…
Oops, that was supposed to be
– social networks (constable in this sector [cousin of] that barkeep [married to sister of] that caravan driver, etc.).
Great post! One thing that this makes me think is that it would be great to have some urbancrawl layers tied to PC class. So a thief would notice criminal activity in any neighborhood, a cleric would notice signs of religious activity and so on. Could be a nice to way to pique players’ interest, by making the exploration partly a reflection of the character choices.
Class-based variance in the ‘crawl results would fit well with an old school campaign. Also ties in well with the Midkemia/Thieves’ World assumption that the party always splits up when they hit town.
Very interesting thoughts.
The first thing that came to mind for me in considering the multiple layers angle is how well this aligns with traditional ‘crawl language–dungeon crawling in particular. I wonder if one might get some mileage out of thinking about the layers in terms of dungeon levels. Specifically, I am thinking of transitional points from one layer to another.
For example: The lowly thieves’ guild fence who is secretly a vampire’s ghoul, funneling stolen items of interest to her true master; The helpful sage whom PCs turn to for research, who has recently been taken in by an investment scam perpetrated by a merchant who has since been replaced by a doppelganger. These serve as “stairways” in the diagram, allowing 1- or 2-way access.
Bonus points for how naturally [xandering] comes to this kind of dungeon map.
Oh! You’re completely right! I hadn’t even thought about directly applying jaquaying-think to the third dimension, but it would absolutely seem to give rich and rewarding results. Nice!
I really like where you’re going with this. I had some ideas on this front I was pretty pleased with, but I feel like you’re building up to a much better general structure.
@goatunit That’s really thought provoking and definitely worth pursuing. And, like deeper dungeon levels, it’s not unreasonable that the deeper plots would be more dangerous, which helps with some pacing issues.
Cheers!
Kinak
Layers reminded me of geographic information systems (GIS). Instead of creating event tables for each area, you could map out factors like crime rates, wealth and faction influences and use all of these as probabilities when determining random events. More than one might become active at the same time, resulting in interesting combinations.
I have been cogitating and mucking around with this for some time. What I ended up with was a system of factions (monsters, organisations, service providers, power groups etc), projections of factions (encounters with the factions outside their lairs, rostered and random, or clues like rumours or events that lead to faction lairs), and general player goals that link to faction projections (shopping, selling, carousing, exploring, information gathering, seeking a place or person, looking for theft opportunities, self promotion, recruiting, looking for work).
So consider, I have a guild of merchants who are also ware rats. They have a meeting house, homes each with servants, treasury and a safe place to transform into rats, warehouses and caravans. They have a roster that will put them visiting a warehouse, caravan at the markets, or the guild hall. Also a roster for going about in rat form spying on people, stealing information and sometimes sabotaging.
Shopping will lead players to the caravans, and encounters in the markets may lead players to the warehouses for wholesale goods. They may also directly involve a merchant in one form or the other. The warehouse may also lead the shoppers to wanting to know more about the merchant, to join the guild or perhaps investigate the guild hall.
The shopping has some simple default actions: find a place to shop, having found one seek a better place to shop or purchase goods.
You can do the same for the other player goals, and I have done for my city of Steelmire, where I have evil corrupting the straight church, my ware rate merchants, a dryder hiding in the sewers running a faction, creatures in the harbour with light factional connections to people on land, a very tight thieves guild and a nascent rebellion waiting to form. The players have entered the city to reconnoiter the growing evil. They have become engaged in several crawls as a result revolving around player goals and it seems to work pretty well.