SPOILERS FOR CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP

Call of the Netherdeep is a campaign set in Exandria, the world of Critical Role created by Matthew Mercer.

I have virtually no knowledge of Critical Role.

I haven’t read the comic books or the tie-in novels. I haven’t watched the animated series. Of the original show itself, I’ve watched a number of clips, a couple of episodes, and Matthew Colville’s phenomenal recap of the Season 1 finale. (Which still brings tears to my eyes.)

I haven’t even had the time to dive into the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount or the Tal’dorei Campaign Setting.

Nonetheless, Call of the Netherdeep is something that I’ve wanted Wizards of the Coast to do for awhile now: Release a sourcebook for a campaign world (e.g., Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount) and then support it with a full campaign book. (Ravnica, Theros, etc. They’d all be more useful with an accompanying campaign book.)

In any case, this review tackles Call of the Netherdeep on its own terms and only its own terms.

OVERVIEW

Call of the Netherdeep starts the PCs at 3^rd level (and eventually wraps up as they hit 12^th level). Things kick off in the coastal village of Jigow, where the PCs have arrived just in time to enjoy the Festival of Merit. While enjoying the festival games, they fall into rivalry with another group of adventurers who are also competing. As the festival draws to a close, both groups race through the Emerald Grotto, an underwater obstacle course, in order to claim a magical spear that has been stuck into the side of a shark.

When the shark is killed, its death throes knock open an underwater temple that has been lost since the time of the Calamity (a semi-legendary apocalypse). Inside the temple, either the PCs or their rivals claim the Jewel of Three Prayers, an artifact which once belonged to Alyxion the Apotheon.

The PCs are then sent to Bazzoxan, a small city that was built around Betrayers’ Rise, a huge temple complex dedicated to the Betrayer Gods and squatting atop a vast dungeon. The Rise had been abandoned since the Calamity, but would-be explorers delved too deep and awoke Abyssal portals. Bazzoxan is now a military compound — the front line in a war against demons and abominations streaming up from below.

While in Bazzoxan, the PCs will run into scholars belonging to three different factions from the distant city of Ank’Harel who have come to Bazzoxan because [SPOILERS FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER, TELL THE PLAYERS NOTHING]. Heading into the depths of Betrayers’ Rise themselves, the PCs discover another temple that adds extra magical mojo to the Jewel of Three Prayers.

Following one or more of the scholars back to Ank’Harel, the PCs join their faction. After completing a series of faction missions, the PCs are eventually granted access to the ruins of Cael Morrow, a city which was destroyed during the Calamity and now lies sunken below an underground sea beneath Ank’Harel.

Within Cael Morrow, the PCs eventually discover (and enter) the transdimensional prison in which Alyxion the Apotheon has been held since his “death” during the Calamity. Within this prison, the PCs explore manifestations of Alyxion’s memories, learning the true story of what happen to him. In short:

• He was born under the red moon of Ruidus, which is considered bad luck.
• He entire life was, in fact, an endless string of bad luck.
• During the Calamity he prayed to the gods three times for assistance to save those in peril, and three times the gods answered his prayer (creating the Jewel of Three Prayers).
• When Gruumsh attempted to destroy all life on the continent of Marquet with a single blow of his spear, the Apotheon countered the blow with his semi-divine power. Cael Morrow was destroyed, but the rest of the continent was spared.
• The fury of Gruumsh’s blow, combined with Alyxion’s parry and the destruction of Cael Morrow, ripped open an interdimensional space into which the strange energies of Ruidus flowed. This was the Netherdeep, and it became Alyxion’s prison.

Recently the Netherdeep has been leaking, its strange energies escaping in the form of ruidium – a reddish crystal that is both immensely powerful and also corrupting. The PCs have been encountering ruidium since the beginning of the campaign, and it turns out the factions in Ank’Harel want access to its source so that they can either exploit it or destroy it (depending on their individual agendas).

At the campaign’s finale, the PCs confront the Alyxion in three different forms, ultimately deciding whether to kill the Apotheon, redeem him, or unleash him. A decision which will have consequences for all of Exandria.

THE RIVALS

So if we strip away the Critical Role tie-in, what’s the log line for Call of the Netherdeep? What’s the pitch? Why would you pick this campaign over any other campaign?

Well, as you can see from the summary, this is an epic adventure: From humble beginnings, the PCs journey across vast distances to save the world.

There are, of course, any number of such campaigns, but Call of the Netherdeep is a well-formed one. The transition from the gothic depths of Betrayers’ Rise directly to the sun-drenched streets of Ank’Harel, for example, is beautifully vivid, and speaks to the varied and richly realized milestones in the PCs’ journey. The underwater themes of the adventure — in the Emerald Grotto, Cael Morrow, and the Netherdeep —  also give it a distinctive flair.

But Call of the Netherdeep’s truly unique calling card is the Rivals: Five NPCs who form their own adventuring party and dog the PCs’ heels throughout the campaign.

So my elevator pitch for Call of the Netherdeep would be:

It’s an epic adventure, like the Lord of the Rings. But you have a group of rivals who are competing with you for glory.

The best thing about the Rivals are the rivals themselves: Ayo Jabe, Dermot Wurder, Galsariad Ardyth, Irvan Wastewalker, and Maggie Keeneyes. Each is given a great backstory and strong personality, which are then expertly presented in three or four paragraph briefings. Each is also given an individual goal to pursue.

The result is very easy to pick up and play, with lots of varied opportunities for cool interactions. In fact, if you paired these up with character sheets, you’d have a great party of pregenerated PCs, which speaks to just how solid these characters are.

The Rivals are then given a really great introduction, being individually introduced during the festival games in Jigow, so that the players have a chance to form one-on-one relationships with them (instead of the Rivals just becoming an undifferentiated mob).

Unfortunately, in practice, the Rivals are then marred (possibly crippled) by the adventure’s execution.

The core problem is that the campaign is railroaded. Or, more accurately, that it’s railroaded badly. We’ll discuss this in more detail momentarily, but as far as the Rivals are concerned, this railroading hamstrings their ability to actually have a rivalry. A rivalry generally requires you and your rival to be in competition to achieve a common goal and/or to demonstrate your superiority in a field of endeavor.

But like most bad railroads, Call of the Netherdeep (a) scripts predetermined outcomes and (b) struggles with presenting a clear, actionable agenda.

So the rivalry largely works at the beginning of the campaign — when the PCs and the Rivals are both clearly aimed at winning the Emerald Grotto race — but then rapidly falls apart. You can’t race to achieve a goal before your rivals do when the campaign has failed to define what your goal is. Nor can you meaningfully race someone if they’re scripted to show up in the next cutscene.

The other major problem is that the relationship between the Rivals and the PCs is defined entirely by attitude: The Rivals are Friendly, Indifferent, or Hostile.

This gauge is basically designed to produce fail-states in the rivalry.

If the Rivals are Hostile, for example, they are constantly framed up to either:

• try to steal the magical artifact from the PCs; and/or
• attack the PCs and try to kill them.

In my experience, there are two Unforgivable Sins that an NPC can commit:

1. They can kill a PC’s pet.
2. They can steal the PC’s shit.

Anything else (even assassination attempts) can probably be forgiven, but if an NPC does either of these things? The PCs will never forgive them and will almost certainly kill them on sight.

So if the Rivals go Hostile, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the PCs will kill them very early in the campaign. And then, obviously, no more rivalry.

On the other hand, if the Rivals go Friendly, the logical outcome is that they’ll offer to work with the PCs. As Call of the Netherdeep says:

If [Ayo Jabe] gets the sense that the characters have stumbled onto something big, her eyes grow wide. She decides that she and her group want a piece of the action and proposes that they travel with the characters, saying that there’s safety in numbers. A character makes a successful DC 13 Wisdom (Insight) check realizes that she isn’t hiding anything and wants nothing more than to be part of a grand adventure.

It seems rather likely that the PCs will agree with Ayo Jabe’s logic… and now you have five GMPCs to deal with.

This, honestly, feels like a huge headache to me. Even running one NPC companion can create issues with spotlight time and bias (perceived and actual), as I discuss in more detail here. But the really big problem is combat balance: Running 5^th Edition D&D for a group of ten PCs is infamously difficult because the action economy means results in any encounter with a small number of opponents (one or two or three) just getting absolutely curb-stomped.

Crucially, Call of the Netherdeep is not designed for this: The encounters are neither CR-balanced for ten party members, nor are they designed for large groups. Betrayers’ Rise, for example, is made up entirely of encounters with 1-3 opponents, and will be absolutely steamrolled if the PCs and Rivals have teamed up.

The campaign clearly knows it has a problem here, so — even though it explicitly mentions that Ayo Jabe will offer to work with the PCs — it just silently assumes that the PCs won’t do that.

Problem solved, right?

No.

Rather the opposite, actually, because the book, as part of its bad railroading, just blithely includes multiple pre-scripted scenes which assume that the Rivals are definitely not working with the PCs.

This is actually something that Call of the Netherdeep does quite often, and it’s honestly kind of bizarre: An NPC will approach the PCs, offer to work with them… and then the book just assumes that they don’t do that.

Maybe the authors have just literally never had players willing to work with NPCs before?

Regardless, the result is badly broken.

To sum up: The Rivals are incredibly cool. But if you run them the way the book tells you to, then somewhere around Chapter 2 they will end up either:

• dead;
• no longer rivals of the PCs; and/or
• breaking the campaign.

I think we can mark this down as “rough around the edges.”

Go to Part 2: The Dungeons

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Go to Part 1

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

You know that saying that “there are eight million stories in the naked city?”

That’s 100% true. There’s no easy way to narrow down what an urban campaign “should” be, because it CAN be an infinite number of things. You might have:

• A node-based conspiracy game, like the one from Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire.
• A crew-based game focused around heists and scores, like Blades in the Dark.
• Faction-based intrigue, like in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
• A secret agent thriller, using the conspyramid from Night’s Black Agents.
• The city as a homebase in a hexcrawl campaign.
• A police procedural, featuring episodic mysteries.
• Org-based intrigue, with the city as the backdrop for a campaign using Reign.

And so forth.

But no matter what campaign structure I’m using, and regardless of whether I’m running Waterdeep, Dweredell, Hong Kong, or Los Angeles, there are a few techniques I’ve learned that can help bring the city to vivid life.

WHAT TO PREP

This guide assumes that the city is either the setting for the entire campaign or, at the very least, a place that the PCs are going to be exploring for awhile. If the PCs are just visiting the city (flying in for a single adventure, for example), you may still find some of this material useful, but you’ll want to scale it down (and almost certainly focus your prep around what you know the PCs will be doing there).

I’m also assuming that we’re talking about an actual city. For smaller communities – villages, remote space stations, etc. – some of these techniques may, once again, be useful in a stripped-down state. But, in my experience, they’re actually very distinct (and probably merit their own discussion at some point).

With that in mind, here’s what you want to prep for a city setting.

First, the map. If it’s a city in the real world, track down a street map. Google Maps or Apple Maps will be invaluable resources, but I wouldn’t recommend relying on them as your primary map. You really want something that lets you come to grips with the city in its totality.

If it’s a city you’re creating, you’ll obviously need to draw the map. (Or generate one. The tools for this are getting better all the time.) Don’t feel like you need to detail every single street or building. But you will want to break the city down into districts and to know the major routes that connect those districts.

Design Tip: When thinking about routes, it can be easy to default to “road.” But that’s often not the case, and a city’s unique character can be defined by its transportation: The London Underground. The Venetian canals. New York ferries.

Similarly, emphasize the fantastic nature of your speculative settings with fabulist transportation routes: Zeppelin towers. Etheric railways. Fairy roads.

Second, on that note, you want to break the city down into neighborhoods/districts. I find the sweet spot for a new city to be somewhere between six and twelve. You want enough divisions to give the city texture – so that being in Oldtown feels different than being in South Market or the Docks – but not so many that either you or the players are overwhelmed.

(Over time, for larger cities, you may discover that you want to create sub-districts within these broader areas, particularly in regions of the city where the PCs spend a lot of time. For example, in a New York City campaign you might start with the five boroughs – Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island – plus the Gold Coast in Jersey. Later, you might break Manhattan into Harlem, the Upper East Side, Lower East Side, etc. And maybe after that, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you’d want to track even finer distinctions in the Lower East Side like the East Village, Chinatown, Alphabet City, etc. Even when you’ve reached the point where, for example, you’ve got Manhattan split up into forty-two separate neighborhoods, you’ll still want to keep the high-level districts distinct in your mind and the minds of your players. They’ll remain useful tools.)

For each district, you’ll want to describe its general character. This can be as simple as a couple of sentences, but you can dive into more detail like:

• What types of businesses are found there?
• What’s the architecture?
• What ethnicities or other population types live there?
• What’s the history of the district?

In addition to this general description, you will want a specific list of landmarks in the district. You might be able to get away with just one, but you’ll probably want to have at least three per district.

Sometimes when we talk about “landmarks” we get trapped thinking strictly about statues or big, famous buildings. But for our purposes this is really just “things in the district.” So if you put the Lion’s Purr tavern in a district, you can also add it to the landmarks list.

If your city becomes detailed enough, you may want to break out a separate list of “major landmarks” for each district for the sake of utility, but even this list will likely be (and arguably should be) esoteric, focusing on the sites that have become relevant to you, your players, and the campaign as much as the big stuff that would make a generic tourist’s guide.

For each district you’re also going to want scenic encounters. These might be procedural encounters (i.e., random encounters) or they might be handcrafted (in which case you’ll need to periodically restock them as they get used up).

The key thing that makes the urban environment feel distinct from other adventure locales is the constant activity. You want the players to feel like there’s stuff happening all the time and just out of sight. As we’ll see, this is the primary function of these scenic encounters. In addition, we distinguish them by district because we want the different areas of town to feel distinct: The stuff that happens in Oldtown is, once again, different than what you see on the streets of South Market.

A few practical tips for prepping these encounters without getting overwhelmed:

• In a pinch, you can just use city-wide encounters and rely on improvisation to “color” them to whatever location the PCs are currently in. (“Ruffians” at the Docks might be a group of drunken sailors. The same encounter in the Trades Ward might be Xanatharian gangsters shaking down a local businessowner for protection money.)
• You might have city-wide encounters, but one of the entries on your encounter table is “District Encounter,” and each district has one or two unique encounters triggered by this entry.
• You can have encounters “shared” by multiple districts. For example, you might have the “Ruffians” encounter in the Dock Ward, Trades Ward, and North Ward, but not in the very respectable Castle Ward. Conversely, you might encounter a banker in the Castle Ward or Trades Ward, but not the Sea Ward. (Or you might just be much less likely to do so.) For a detailed example of how you can set this up on a table, check out Waterdeep: City Encounters.

The last thing you’ll want to prep for the city is a list of services.

Exactly which services you’ll want to list is going to be very dependent on the campaign you’re prepping. If the PCs are wandering adventurers coming to the city for the first time, for example, you’ll likely want to have a list of inns. If the PCs live in the city, on the other hand, maybe that’s not so important.

Some common categories here, however, include:

• Hotels/inns
• Bars/taverns
• Shopping
• Banking
• Hospitals/healing
• Legal services
• Gambling
• Entertainment
• Specialists (locksmiths, magi, assassins, bodyguards, etc.)

Before you get lost in the weeds here, it’s important to remember that you’re not trying to list every single example of each service in the city. In many cases, you probably can’t. Take Galveston, TX, for example, a modest town with a population of 50,000. It has dozens of hotels and more than a hundred bars. Even if you wanted to prep all those options, would it really be useful at the table?

What is useful at the table is having enough options so that the players can make a meaningful choice. For example, in the Eternal Lies campaign, the PCs visit a number of cities around the world. For each city, I prepped three hotels: A high-class, middle-class, and low-class option. This both mirrored the likely criteria the players would be using to decide on their accommodations and tied into a meaningful choice within the structure the campaign (i.e., how the investigators were spending their limited pool of resources in each city.)

You can see what that prep looked like here.

(This class-based division can be a useful one for a number of different services: Are you going to a classy restaurant or a dive bar? A flea market in Chinatown or a swanky store on Fifth Avenue? But you may find other criteria are more relevant to your campaign. Prep accordingly.)

Remember to cross-reference these services into the district listings as landmarks (either minor or major).

At this point you might be asking yourself: Do I really need to prep all this stuff? Can I just improvise it instead?

Sure.

But make sure you take notes. A defining aspect of the urban environment is its persistency. You build the city up in the players’ imagination over time by showing them the same locations and geography again and again and again:  You’re going down Tavern Row or Chicago Avenue. On the way to the museum, you pass that weird Italian-Korean fusion restaurant where you first met Felicia. On the way back to your hotel, you’re near the statue of George Washington when the thunderstorm breaks and rain begins pouring down.

And as you’re taking these notes, you’ll find this structure – map, district, landmarks, services, etc. – useful for organizing them and using them. No matter how much or how little you prep to begin with, in fact, your notes on the city will continue to expand and grow as you play – adding new locations through both adventure prep and improvisation.

Go to Part 2: Life in the City