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

A great post over at the Reef: The Surest Way to Become a Better Game Master.

Spoilers:

STFU AND LISTEN TO THE PLAYERS

She approaches the issue with a slew of anecdotes about games gone wrong (and also games gone right). I’ll back it up with a bit of theorycraft that I’ve mentioned here before: Your players have a pretty good idea of what they’ll find interesting and entertaining. Let them pursue the goals and plans they want to pursue and you’re far more likely to meet with success than if you try to second guess what they “really” want.

You don’t need to take on total responsibility for the game. In fact, you shouldn’t.

Also of value are the follow-ups she and her husband wrote:

How to Do This (in Practical Terms)
Why It’s Generally a Bad Idea to Say No
Answering Other Objections

As I mentioned recently in The Principles of RPG Villainy, it’s amazing how often saying “don’t railroad your players” results in people agreeing that it’s a bad idea while simultaneously trying to justify why they do it all the time.

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

Go to Part 1

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:

1. Keyed Locations
2. Geographic Movement
3. 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?

Go to Part 3: Vertical Integration