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So now you have a stack of notes about the city. How do you actually use them during play?

The key is that virtually all actions in the city boil down to either finding information or going to a location.

For finding information, check out Rulings in Practice: Gathering Information for an in-depth look. Finding the information will almost always involve going somewhere. Often the information the PCs are looking for will be (either directly or indirectly) a location, too – a service they need, a resource, the place where their enemy is hiding out, etc.

Once the PCs are heading to a location, look at your notes for the district they’re going to. Then:

1. Name the district and point to it on the map. (“You head over to the Docks.”)
2. Mention a landmark – a major street they travel down, a building they pass, an art installation, etc. (“Passing down Fishwives’ Lane, the smell of gutted tuna thick in the air…”)
3. Make an encounter check for a scenic encounter. (Or, alternatively, automatically run an encounter.) (“…you see a dragonborn fishmonger offering to sell freshly harvested oyster pearls. He says one of them is a rare rainbow pearl, a sign of good luck.”)
4. Describe the location they arrive at. (“Dominic’s hovel is tucked into a narrow side street just past the red docks. There’s smoke coming out of the crooked chimney, so somebody must be home.”)

Advanced Technique: Make the encounter check first. If an encounter is indicated, you can then choose to frame the encounter at either the landmark or the destination itself. It’s a convenient way of adding context to procedurally generated content, and can also be a great way of adding unexpected complications to whatever location the PCs are heading to.

And that’s all it takes.

The districts and landmarks weave together the geographical fabric of the city. The encounters provide a low-level of activity not directly connected to the PCs or what they’re immediately engaged with, creating the sensation that the city is in constant motion.

By the same token, this doesn’t need to be a straitjacket. Maybe you mention two  or three landmarks instead of just one. Maybe you complicate things by checking for encounters in each district the PCs pass through. Or, conversely, once you’ve established the life of the city as a pervasive presence at the table, you may find that effective pacing demands fast-forwarding past an encounter and cutting straight to the action.

Follow this procedure rigorously for a couple or three sessions to make sure you’ve really internalized it, but then do what feels right, knowing that you can always return to this procedure as a safe and effective foundation.

INTRODUCING THE CITY

Now that we’ve established our basic procedure, let’s take a closer look at our first session: How do we go about introducing a city to the players?

If one or more of the PCs live in the city or are otherwise familiar with it, particularly if it’s going to be the focal setting of the entire campaign, I will prep a short player briefing to orient them. This will include:

• The map.
• Two or three sentences describing each district.
• Maybe one page of common services (list of taverns, list of weaponsmiths, etc.).

Give this briefing to the players before or during Session 0 so that it can inform character creation.

As with most such handouts, five pages is probably the longest you’d want to make this. Any longer and, in my experience, most players won’t actually process the information. (Paradoxically, the more information you try to cram into the handout, the less information about the city the players will actually take away from it.)

It may also be useful to note that this player briefing largely mirrors the material you’ve prepped for yourself. If you’re doing minimal prep yourself, you can often just strip out the random encounter tables and be good to go.

But what about the adventurer at the gate scenario, where a PC is coming to the city for the first time?

Generally, I will still give them the map. Even if the PCs technically wouldn’t have one, it’s just too useful as an easy point of common reference at the table. (I will often print out poster-size version of the map and hang them on the wall of the gaming room, using a laser point to indicate locations.)

Advanced Technique: If you’d rather run a streetcrawl until the PCs have taken action to orient themselves within the city (which might be literally obtaining a diegetic map, but could also simply be sufficiently exploring the city, closely questioning a local, visiting every district, or something else along those lines), that can be a very immersive technique. In a peaceful city, however, you may not find that the streetcrawl to be particularly compelling.

At this point, focus on the players’ goals, but use those goals as a vector for the player briefing.

For example, if the players say that they’re going to spend a day or two getting to know the city, that’s super simple: You can just give them the player briefing.

But maybe they say something like, “Let’s find an inn.”

Depending on what their goal is, you might call for some kind of skill check to see if they can find it – Streetwise, Charisma (Investigation), Library Use, something like that.

Advanced Technique: Even if they’ll definitely find the thing they’re looking for, you might still call for the skill check and use fail forward techniques to make the check meaningful. Maybe on a success they can find a really good deal and/or on a failure they get marked as rubes by pickpockets.

If it’s a common service, present them with the multiple options you prepped earlier. (High-, middle-, and low-class for hotels, for example). Specifically call out the different districts these services are in. If they went looking for a weapons shop, you might say, “There’s an elven bowyer in Emerald Hill or dwarven crafters in the Guildsman District.” You’re not just saying, “These districts exist.” You’re inviting the players to make a choice based on these districts. That’s significant. The districts are now an active part of the players’ thinking about the setting. The more they do that, the more the city comes alive in their imagination.

As this point, the PCs are going to pick a location to go to – either a common service they’ve selected or some specific location that brought them to town in the first place (e.g., the tower of the High Mage Ghulak). This is simple: Just use the urban procedure we detailed above… but with one important addition!

For the district of the location they choose, include the description of the district from the player briefing. You can probably work these two or three sentences into the description of their journey to the inn or tower or whatever.

As the players work their way through their shopping list (or whatever brought them to the city), you’ll be organically building up their understanding of the city over time. The scenic encounters, landmarks, and the locations found in the adventure scenarios you’re running will gradually draw them further and further into the setting, resulting in them setting goals that are increasingly specific (“let’s find the leader of the Red Bandit pickpockets who tried to rob us” or “that abandoned lighthouse looks cool, let’s go check it out”).

In play, this might look something like this:

• The PCs enter a new town and go looking for an inn.
• “People milling around the gate suggest three choices: The Lion’s Purr in Midtown, the Wandering Sword in the Merchant District, or the Wallowed Pig in the Penury Ward.”
• The players select the Wandering Sword.
• “You head south into the Merchant District. Most of the buildings here are two stories high – small businesses with apartments for the owners above them. You notice that there’s an abandoned lighthouse standing in the middle of town… which is a weird place for a lighthouse to be. You find the Wandering Sword on Southward Street.”
• At this point you can describe the Wandering Sword and have a short scene there while the PCs arrange for their rooms. They decide to check out that lighthouse.
• On the way to the lighthouse, you describe them passing through the market square (another landmark in the Merchant District). As they leave the market, they have a random encounter with Red Bandits who attempt to waylay them.
• After dispatching the Red Bandits, they proceed to the lighthouse (which is a small adventure site you’ve prepped).
• When they return to their rooms at the Wandering Sword, the encounter check is negative, so you simply describe them passing through the Market Square again (it’s night now, so the stalls are deserted).
• Discussing their plans for the next day, the PCs decide to find the Red Bandit’s gang house. So the next morning you call for a Gather Information check and, when they succeed, say, “You ask around and discover it’s an open secret that the Red Bandits control a dilapidated apartment building in Penury Ward, which is officially known as Laketon, but had been riddled with poverty for generations.” (You’ve snuck in a little extra district briefing there.)
• The PCs head for the apartment building.
• “You head down Tabernacle Way [landmark] into Penury Ward. Passing the Church of the Bloody Saint [landmark], you’re approached by several of the beggars who camp in the church’s yard.” The beggars here are a random encounter and suggested that the Church of the Bloody Saint would be a good landmark to use here. After a short roleplaying scene with the beggars (during which you might seed other rumors or information about the city), the PCs continue to the apartment building.

And so forth.

Once the players are familiar with a district, of course, you can obviously stop briefing them on the district. At this point, the newcomers have acclimated to the city and you simplify back into the standard urban procedure.

OPTION: BACKGROUND EVENTS

A final option you can add to your cities to give them even greater depth are background events.

These are events running in parallel with the campaign, but which don’t directly affect the PCs. They include stuff like:

• The mayor has been indicted on corruption charges.
• Hyperdyne Industries has bought out Cobalt Enterprises.
• Another Redjack murder has happened in the Penury Ward.
• All of the department store Santa Clauses vanished into thin air simultaneously at 12:02 PM.

They appear as newspaper headlines or as random gossip when the PCs are chatting with an NPC. Layering these into your urban-based campaign is a great way of adding even more depth to the city.

Of particular note here are factions, which are often a part of many urban campaigns. Describing the offscreen actions of these factions through background events weaves them into the life of the city, making them a pervasive part of the environment and enhancing the actions directly affecting the PCs as part of the campaign by making the factions vast in their scope.

FURTHER READING
Thinking About Urbancrawls
Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire
Dragon Heist: The Alexandrian Remix