The community of Jigow is really cool. A literal jumble of villages which have smashed together as they’ve grown around giant mangrove trees. It’s the chaos of urban growth in real-time as large chunks of the town are literally mobile:
The villages and townships that make up Jigow are loosely divided into three major areas: the Meatwaters, the main dock area on the shores of the Ifoon River; the Wetwalks, a collection of houses on stilts closest to the wetlands and marshes; and the Jumble, the most densely populated region of the city, where houses are built among giant mangrove trees or on the backs of horizonback tortoises and used as traveling homes.
As written, Jigow is a unique and very flavorful community.
Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the cartographer:
To be clear, this map is a beautiful piece of artwork. But instead of presenting the unique city of the text, it presents a very generic community with the same kind of urban planning that we’ve seen in lots of other fantasy city maps.
Only three tortoises? Why is the thick mangrove forest depicted as scattered trees? This is not many communities that have collided, but a single community built around a central common area.
Aesthetics aside, the key is confusing at best. You’ve got the Meatwaters district on the shore, the Wetwalk stilt-houses near the wetlands, and the Jumble between them. But:
- J2 is in the Jumbles and J6 is the Wetwalks. So where is Meatwaters, exactly?
- J5 are the rice paddies on the edge of the wetlands, but J1 is also in the Jumbles… so where are the stilt-houses of the Wetwalks supposed to be?
Jigow, as described, would be a real challenge for a cartographer. (If nothing else, large chunks of the town are mobile.) On top of that, based on the keyed locations, I would assume they were given bad notes to work from. (The turtle tracks are a lovely touch, though.)
I am a huge, huge fan of using city maps to draw players into an immersive urban environment. In the case of Jigow, unfortunately, I would strongly recommend not using the map.
The other option would be to heavily modify the text to accurately reflect the map’s depiction of the city, but given how much more interesting the text’s version of the city is, I think that would be a mistake.
MOTILE LIFE: I want to take a moment to reflect on what I see as the motile life of Jigow. There are clustered “villages” of static structures, but lots of people and even more businesses live and work on the tortoises.
You “commute” to work by having your tortoise head up to the paddy fields. The bakeries follow you, arriving at the Wetwalks midday to sell lunch to laborers taking a break from the high noon heat. When lunch is done, though, the bakeries will head down to the Meatwaters for the mid-afternoon dock breaks.
Having a soiree? It’s likely that you and some or all of your guests will bring your tortoises together in a clutch and drop gangways that will temporarily link your residences into a single big party locale.
At night, you’ll see the bars moving to drop off their drunken patrons (or at least the ones who tip well) so that they don’t have to walk home.
THE FESTIVAL OF MERIT
The campaign starts with the PCs standing in the middle of the Festival of Merit. Locations J1 through J7 are different festival games or challenges, and the festival is introduced like this:
All around you, colorful signs and banners point toward festival booths surrounded by cheering people. On this street alone, you can see a meat-pie eating contest near a shop mounted on the back of a massive tortoise [J1], and on the other side of the road, a banner emblazoned with the words “Riddles and Rhymes: Unbeatable Riddles!” That banner points toward a three-story temple in the center of the Jumble. [J7] The town is yours to explore—where do you want to go?
So the PCs are standing in the street between J1 and J7 and they’re told, “Where do you want to go?”
Obviously they’ll hit J1 and J7, but then the expected experience here is unclear to me. Are they just going to randomly walk around town and hope they run into keyed content? Or is the DM supposed to show them the keyed map and have them just point to which keyed location they want to go to? (That’s not exactly “the town is yours to explore.”)
To put this another way, you want the scale of the PCs’ decision to match the density of the keyed material. You can do street-by-street navigation in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord because there’s content keyed to every street. But that doesn’t work in Jigow because there’s not enough material keyed to make those decisions meaningful.
OPTION 1: FESTIVAL GREEN
One option is to latch onto “all around you, colorful signs and banners point toward festival booths surrounded by cheering people” and collapse the festival down into a single location. (This would probably be J6 on the map if you’re using it.)
Some of the competitions — the harvest race (J5), the Ifolon river plunge (J3) — are specific to other areas of town. For those competitions, create horizonback hawkers in the festival green who ferry people to the other festival centers: You load up onto a horizonback tortoise and the hawkers sell you their wares (drinks, baked goods, trinkets, etc.) while the tortoise walks you through town.
(These hawkers will also be a good exemplar of the motile life of Jigow.)
OPTION 2: FULL FESTIVAL
A more complicated option is to use the Festival game structure described here on the Alexandrian.
The key thing here is to communicate to your players that there’s stuff happening in all three of Jigow’s districts. The meaningful choice for the PCs is now, “What district do you want to go to?”
And you can still present that choice as, “The town is yours to explore—where do you want to go?” Because whatever answer the PCs give, you can parse it through the lens of, “What district are they in?” and pull up the material you’ve keyed to that district.
This means splitting up the festival games described in Call of the Netherdeep, and I would do that by following the natural divisions of Jigow and divvying the games between the three districts:
- Meatwaters: J2, J3
- Jumble: J1, J4, J7
- Wetwalk: J5, J6
You’ll probably also want to add topics of conversation. I’d look to seed these with stuff establishing the festivals’ big finale at the Emerald Grotto; rumors from afar to bring players up to speed on Xhorlas; local color; etc.
Tip: No matter what structure you use to prep the Festival of Merit, you’ll probably want to treat the Emerald Grotto finale as a revelation. Seed three clues throughout the festival so that the players can become aware of it, anticipate it, and get excited about it.
ADDING MORE FESTIVAL EVENTS
Adding more festival games, events, and activities for the players to experience can be a great value add here.
If you’re looking for some fantastical ideas in this vein, you might check out the Numenera Tavern for inspiration. (You’ll likely want to change some science fantasy explanations for straight-up fantasy ones. Although even that may not be necessary if you have an artificer or two tending the games.)
As you’re adding more events, there are a couple things to keep in mind.
First, Call of the Netherdeep does a great job seeding the Rivals into the keyed contests. You’ll want to continue doing that with your new events, while also being cautious not to water the interactions down to the point where they become empty of meaning.
Second, this is a great opportunity to look back at your campaign revelation lists and start seeding in clues. Obviously you still want to keep your campaign pacing in mind (don’t overdo it!), but a little imagination can easily suggest opportunities like:
- A play depicting events from the Calamity.
- A hawker is selling mysterious red gemstones (ruidium) that have been washing up on shore.
- A fortune-teller who “reads the red rays of Ruidus” to tell your future. (It’s a scam.)
And so forth.
MAZE & RIDDLE
The maze and riddle contests in the Festival of Merit are, in my opinion, somewhat flawed in their execution. Two of the riddles, for example, are resolved with an Intelligence and/or Wisdom check. One of them can ONLY be resolved with a skill check (because the player doesn’t have access to the visual images required to solve the riddle.)
Basically, any place in the game where the DM is saying, “Here’s a situation, give me a check” — without the player making any meaningful choice — and the entirely reactive check completely resolves the situation is not a great experience at the table. (The game is playing itself.)
I much prefer the approach taken in the third riddle, for example, in which successful Intelligence checks provide the player with clues, but ultimately the player still needs to find the answer.
I discuss how to handle stuff like this in more detail in Random GM Tip: Rolling for Riddles.
In the book “Seeing Like a State” by the anthropologist James C. Scott, he describes how communities / cities topography were chaotic and illegible to outsiders for good reasons.
That it was a defense mechanism against invaders or agents of coercive authority.
I think with a community like Jigow it would make sense that there are no maps at all, and to successfully navigate it you must have a guide, if you wish to wander outside any area that is a landmark commons.
Do you have any articles that I missed on running mazes or labyrinths? I think combining those elements into an urban setting could be interesting.
The map is such a shame. I understand how there’s not much budget for frills. But as you say, if I was running an adventure, I’d rather have a really interesting map and a few bullet points than pages of prose that aren’t consistent.
I can’t even make out from the map what’s supposed to be turtles. I guess I might wing it by cutting up the map and moving the pieces around… 🙂
I just came to say that I am enjoying reading this remix format much more than the previous ones. Actually, I have Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus, and I never felt the desire to DM any of them. The remixes read as an interesting overview on how to fix the adventures. But I also have Call of the Netherdeep, and this remix is somehow making me wish to run the adventure to my players.
I had my players each create a game or attraction for their character to be naturally good at – like the greased pig catch or the plate-throwing competition.
While I agree that the riddles and the maze in their current form are flawed in their implementation, this is relatively easy to fix:
The box riddle provides additional detail that a DM can divulge without a perception check, thus giving players the information about sea themes and the dragon shaped lock up front. The fact that the riddle also allows for a character to try to pick the lock is a bonus. In my mind, mentioning the additional details without a check is enough to include the box riddle.
The Moon and Star riddle is a shame, because it provides an engaging way to hook players to the lore about Ruidus and thus the whole background lore of the adventure. My solution to this would be to either take and modify an existing constellation map (or try and find some for Tattooine, since they also have two moons and enough fans that a constellation map might exist) so as to provide the visual information, or alternatively break up the clues, as per the third riddle, for example by pointing out that the birds are of two different colours, that they glow and thus are likely to be bright celestial objects instead of being birds, or that the constellation map before them resembles the speckled field of the first line.
As per the maze, here I’d actually just try and find a relatively simple maze and print it off, then give the entering player a minute to look at and memorize the right way through the maze. Then, I’d take the map back, and ask the player to navigate the maze, as I narrate. They still get to make the checks if they are no longer sure, or if they need to backtrack, but they have a way to do the riddle themselves, that should be more engaging and fun, and not simply relying on a simple check.