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I’ve been asked for this enough times that I finally just bit the bullet and did it: Here are versions of the Stone of Golorr with one, two, and none of its eyes.

I ended up commissioning a physical prop of the Stone of Golorr when I ran Dragon Heist, so this wasn’t a high priority for me. But, as I say, it’s been heavily requested. I am by no means a master of Photoshop, but I thought this turned out well enough that others might find value in it.

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NEIGHBORHOODS

High District: Located on the bluff above the city, stretching away from the High Hall. Filled with tall, narrow houses festooned with balconies. There was a time when only nobles were allowed to live in the High District. This prohibition was long ago weakened and then abolished entirely, but the High District remains the demesne of Elturgard’s richest citizens.

Dock District: Below the bluff, the east side of Elturel is the Dock District. This was the oldest part of the lower city, the edge of which was once marked by the Short Loop River (which began from the spring beneath High Hall and ran down the length of the bluff before plunging over the Maiden’s Leap to an incredibly short tributary that looped around to the Chionthar). The river is now more or less gone, having been transformed into the modern canal system which radically expanded the Elturian docks.

In the 14^th century, the Dock District was “all dirt, business, and utilitarian buildings” (Forgotten Realms Adventures). The businesses are still here, but a century of empire-building has brought great wealth into the city and classed the joint up a bit. Most notably, all the streets have been cobbled with the same pale cream stone as the High District. (Despite this, the lower class in Elturel is still known as “mucksuckers,” a nickname which originally referred to their boots getting stuck in the thick mud of the Dock District streets.)

Westerly: The west side of the city began gentrifying in the late-14^th century and became home to Elturel’s burgeoning middle class. It has more two- and three-story houses than the Dock District, and it tends to eschew the “smellier” businesses (like tanneries) that remain east of the gorge. The small West Docks became slightly preferred by travelers and this was even briefly ensconced into Elturian law, resulting in a lot of inns and travelhouses sprouting up in the southern end of Westerly.

THE MAZE

The bluff on which the High Hall stands is basically a honeycomb of subterranean passages and vaults. This vast labyrinth extends under the streets of the lower city, too. Parts of this complex consist of natural caverns (the full extent of which have never been mapped and which most likely connected to the Underdark before the city was scooped into Hell), but there’s also been extensive tunneling and construction over the last few hundred years.

Stuff down here includes:

• Warehouses hewn out of the solid rock, holding food and supplies that would allow Elturel’s population to swell with refugees to more than half a million and nevertheless support them for at least three months in the case of a siege.
• Armories, some of them secret.
• The Dungeon of the Inquisitor, a subterranean maze which served as Elturgard’s prison.
• Mines, most of which were worked by prisoners from the Dungeon of the Inquisitor.
• Behemoth’s Run, a deep section of the Maze beneath the Dock District which appears to have been tunneled out by huge creatures. Some prisoners claim that you can sometimes hear the vicious roars of the behemoths echoing.
• Smugglers dens, some of which originally had tunnels running out the city (and which would now abruptly open out in mid-air about the Dock of Fallen Cities).

LOCAL COLOR

Unity Tributes, as described in Part 4B, are small sculptures of the Companion or depictions of the twin sun heraldry of the Order of the Companion. Many of these shrines are now surrounded by effigies as Elturians leave small idols depicting themselves in the hope of receiving good fortune.

Driftglobes are small, glowing ball of magical light that float through the air. They are referred to as “little companions,” although their use in Elturel actually predates the Companion by at least a century. They’re relatively expensive, but rather popular with Elturians. They also basically last forever, so Elturel has slowly accumulated a lot of them over the years. They can be found lighting homes, businesses, and so forth. PCs might find them drifting forlornly in the middle of the street or floating in the middle of burnt wreckage. Or they might pop out surprisingly intact as they’re digging through rubble.

Gallops, Canters, and Trots. Elturians often use these riding terms as synonyms for “street.” So rather than, say, Dockside Way or Market Road, there’s the Dockside Trot and Market Gallop. Most thoroughfares still use “street” (like Maidensbridge Street), but here and there you’ll see this bit of local color.

“Recall the Creed.” Even Elturians who haven’t sworn the oath to uphold the Creed Resolute will often say things like “recall the Creed” to invoke actions that are ethically or morally right (even if they’re difficult).

Taverns and Inns. By ancient statute, no inn was allowed to serve food or drink in Elturel. Nor could they share the same building as a tavern.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

For random encounters in Elturel (whether streetcrawling or pointcrawling), we’re going to use the encounters from Descent Into Avernus and also Encounters in Avernus (from the DMs Guild). Here’s a unified encounter table, which I’ve fleshed out with a few encounters with various factions in the city:

NECROMANTIC MIST: See DIA p. 68. In this encounter necromantic mist has filled a street and/or building, transforming the corpses within it into undead creations.

Because we’ve implemented some significant changes to the lore of Elturel (see Part 5), you’ll want to re-contextualize many of these encounters to be consistent with the new vision of the city. For example:

• In “Hellrider Uprising,” swap out the generic demons for Hell Knights fighting their former comrades.
• In “Keeper of the Keys,” make the chain devil a devil raider (who’s come to town to loot the plentiful source of new keys for his collection).
• The dead master or parent of the “Kid Warlock” could have been a victim of the Zarielite purge of Elturian wizards.
• The vrock from “Vrock Philosophy” can pontificate on the metaphysics of Elturel’s current predicament: He loves watching cities sink into the Dock of Fallen Cities. The moment when the souls are quenched en masse in the waters of the Styx is a rare wonder of ultimate beauty.

I think these changes would be fairly easy to make on the fly, but your mileage may vary and it wouldn’t take much effort to preflight these. Either way, I recommend frequently thinking about how the encounters could potentially feature one or more of the factions active in the city. These are described at the beginning of Part 5, but a pertinent review:

• Devil Raiders: Opportunistic, independent devils raiding Elturel before its ultimate destruction could be independent operators (like the chain devil described above) or used as foreshadowing of the Avernian Warlords (see Part 7E).
• Hell Knights: These encounters can establish that the High Knights transformed into the Hell Knights; the destruction of high-level spellcasters; and/or the continued corruption of the Hellriders and Order of the Companion. (Recommendations for Hell Knight stats are given in Part 7G.)
• Zarielite Cultists: Highlight that many of these cultists came to Elturel as a sort of pilgrimage AND that the Elturian government has been riddled with Zarielites for decades. They’re mostly just reveling now, but questioning them can fill in a lot of gaps about how Elturel fell and also what’s been happening here since the city arrived in Hell.
• Ikaia’s Followers: Not all of whom need be his Sons or Daughters; there are a number of humans who have more less pledged fealty to someone who they feel can protect them in the midst of all this insanity. These encounters are most likely to happen in the east side of the city.
• Ravengard’s Peacekeepers: Should probably give the sense that they are overwhelmed, but trying hard. More likely to be encountered in the west side of the city, but if encountered in the east are likely to be overwhelmed (cut off from their comrades when Torm’s Bridges were taken).
• Liashandra’s Demons: This faction primarily exists to justify using demon stat blocks in Hell, but you do have some opportunity to establish the larger planar-political situation of the Blood War and the motives behind Zariel’s Elturian recruitment drive. There’s also a slim opportunity for some enemy-of-my-enemy action, as Liashandra’s primary mission is to sabotage the Fall of Elturel, so feel free to tack in that direction for demonic encounters.

Tip: You can use the street generator, random business table, and floor plan generator from the Streetcrawling Tools to quickly contextualize these encounters as needed. Try not to pause the action for this. Frequently you can start the encounter and then multitask, using the generators in the background.

Go to Part 5C-C: Elturel Locations

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Now that the PCs have gotten their bearings and received the map of fallen Elturel, we’ll switch from streetcrawling (as described in Part 5B) and begin navigating the city using a pointcrawl structure.

Pointcrawls are fairly straightforward. You can see how the point-map above has a number of keyed locations (points), connected in a node-map. PCs at one of the points can travel to any connected point.

The most literal application of a pointcrawl system is to model wilderness travel along a trail system (i.e., the connections between points are literally wilderness trails running between those locations). You might find similar utility if you were running a Neverwhere-style adventure set amidst a fantastical subway system. In either case, the pointcrawl is a player-known structure. Trivially so, in fact, because the point-map has a one-to-one correspondence with the game world: The characters can see the wilderness trails or subway tunnel that they’re following.

In the city, however, the pointcrawl system is an abstraction. It attempts to capture conceptual navigation – the way we think about traveling through a city – in a way that’s useful for the GM prepping and running the material. I believe that it can best succeed at this as a player-unknown structure. In other words, the point-map above is NOT the map of Elturel seen by the players: They interact with the city naturalistically; they don’t see the points and may not even know that a pointcrawl structure is being used.

So how does that work?

When the players indicate a navigational intention, the GM basically acts as an “interpreter” who translates that intention into the pointcrawl system, uses the pointcrawl system to resolve it, and then describes the outcome to them in terms of the fiction.

This works because we naturally think of navigating a city in broad terms. “We need to head west to Lyndale Avenue and then take that south into Edina.” What was the exact route we took west to Lyndale? Did we take 36^th or 38^th or 42^nd or 46^th? We don’t really care. (And, if we did, we’d probably still be using the streetcrawl system, right?) Particularly in a pre-GPS era, navigation was even more likely to funnel into landmarks and major thoroughfares: Cross the river at such-and-such a bridge, head east to the cathedral, and then cut south through Littlehut… and so forth.

The points of the pointcrawl match the mental model we use to navigate through a city.

If you’re still struggling to grok this, you can see the effect perhaps most clearly in Elturel at Torm’s Bridges. Here the conceptual and literal geographical navigation of the city are basically unified; the funnel effect is as literal as possible: If you want to cross the gorge between the western and eastern halves of the city, you’re going to pass through the bridges.

This conceptually remains true even when the literal geographical funnel is not so precise: If the PCs decide to head south from their arrival point to the Docks, they’re going to pass through Shiarra’s Market. Yes, it’s technically possible to take a different route that avoids the market, but in the absence of intentionality the point-map represents the general “flow” of the city.

(And in the case of intentionality, check out “Shortcuts & Side Routes,” below.)

Things you’re likely to say while running an urban pointcrawl:

• “Crossing Waterloo Bridge, you head south past the London Eye to Lambeth Palace.” (The PCs are leaving a vampire den somewhere near Covent Garden. Waterloo Bridge, the London Eye, and Lambeth Palace are all points on the point-map.)
• “You leave Delver’s Square and head up towards Oldtown. You pass Emerald Hill on your right, and you see the dawn hawks circling above it. Then you climb the ramp up into Oldtown and head down to the Administration Building.” (Delver’s Square, Emerald Hill, the Oldtown ramp, and the Administration building are all points. Oldtown is a neighborhood that contains many points.)
• “You leave Trollskull Alley, head south through the City of the Dead, and enter the Trade Ward. You take Nephranter’s Street through the Court of the White Bull and then south to the Caravan Court.” (The PCs are very familiar with the city here, so the GM summarizes by neighborhood – City of the Dead, Trade District – until they’re close to the target. The Court of the White Bull and Caravan Court are the nodes here; Nephranter Street is simply a way of contextualizing the journey. The GM could just as easily say, “…and enter the Trade Ward near the Court of the White Bull, taking Salabar Street down to the Caravan Court.” or “…and enter the Trade Ward, passing through the Court of the White Bull and crossing through the bustling crowds of River Street before reaching Caravan Court.”)

In all of these examples we’re assuming that the PCs already have some familiarity (or perhaps a great deal of familiarity) with the city. When they’re exploring a city for the first time – particularly a hazardous city filled with dangers like hell-bound Elturel – you’ll want to devote more attention to (and most likely have the PCs meaningfully interact with) each point as they encounter it for the first time.

BASIC POINTCRAWL PROCEDURES

The basic procedures for a pointcrawl are very simple.

STEP 1 – MOVE TO POINT: Assume moving to another point takes 10-15 minutes.

Design Note: Obviously you’d want to vary this for pointcrawls at different scales. You can also have connections of different lengths, indicating the travel time along a particular route by writing a small number next to the route, but this is probably overkill for Elturel.

STEP 2 – RANDOM ENCOUNTER: Check for a random encounter (see below).

Design Note: I recommend using a fairly high probability, much like the encounter checks for a streetcrawl described in Part 5B. Descent Into Avernus recommends a 1 in 2 chance of an encounter and that’s probably pretty solid.

If you were using a pointcrawl system in a less adventuresome city and/or one that the PCs have become more familiar with, you can step down either the frequency or intensity of encounters. (Encounters in a typical city can often just be a bit of local street color; they don’t always have to be meaty interactions. In this post I discuss how I would handle encounters in Waterdeep, triggering an encounter for whatever neighborhood the PCs were going to.)

STEP 3 – ARRIVAL: The PCs arrive at the next node.

If the PCs are in a point on the point-map, you can simply follow this procedure. If for some reason they’ve slipped “off” the point-map, simply funnel them logically into the point-map and continue from there. (You might be able to just assume they’re “at” the nearest point on the map; e.g., they may not be at the cathedral, but they’re close enough that they’re basically coming “from the cathedral” as far as other points are concerned. Alternatively, if you want to get all formal with it, you can think of their current location as a “temporary node” and think about how it would attach to the point-map.)

ADVANCED POINTCRAWL PROCEDURES

Here are a couple of advanced pointcrawl techniques that you may find useful in Elturel. (You can probably also ignore them entirely.) Their use may be more immediately obvious in player-known pointcrawls (where players can directly invoke them), but they can also be useful tools for GMs looking to interpret PC actions into a player-unknown pointcrawl.

SHORTCUTS & SIDE ROUTES: The PCs want to move from one point to another without moving through the points between.  (For example, they want to go south to the Docks without passing through Shiarra’s Market.) What happens?

In some pointcrawls this might not be possible; in the wilderness it probably requires trailblazing. In a city, though, it usually just means getting off the major thoroughfares and circling around on side streets. In a safe city where time isn’t a factor, this probably just happens. Otherwise, use these guidelines:

Simple Side Routes:

• Determine an appropriate base time. (If they’re trying to go the long way around to bypass something, you can probably set this to whatever the travel time would have been going the normal way. If they’re trying to save time by using an unorthodox shortcut, eyeball the best case scenario.)
• Make a random encounter check.
• Make an appropriate skill check (probably Wisdom, possibly Wisdom (Stealth) if their goal is to avoid attention). Each check they make adds an extra chunk of time (probably 5 minutes in Elturel).
• If the check is a success, they arrive at their intended node.
• If the check is a failure, then they’re lost and will need to make another check. If they were trying to avoid trouble, the trouble finds them. Either way, they’ll need to repeat the random encounter check and the skill check until they succeed.

Detailed Side Routes: Alternatively, you can run this process using the streetcrawling rules. Their goal is charting out the alternate route, and this is probably a distant goal (requiring them to crawl through multiple chunks of the map).

This is probably overkill, and in a player-unknown pointcrawl like Elturel it may be difficult to smoothly transition between the streetcrawl and pointcrawl structures. But this approach may prove useful in certain circumstances.

HIDDEN ROUTES: A hidden route in a pointcrawl is simply a connection between two points that is not immediately obvious; i.e., the PCs have to find the route before they can use it. In a wilderness it might be the illusory druid paths. In a city it might be linked teleportation circles or perhaps the sewers.

Hidden routes are often discovered as part of a scenario or while exploring a particular point (i.e., you’re poking around the crypts beneath the cathedral and discover a tunnel heading to the harbor). In some cases it might be as easy as making an Intelligence (Investigation) or Wisdom (Perception) check to find the route.

If the PCs go looking for hidden routes in Elturel, I recommend pointing them in the direction of the Maze — the subterranean tunnels and storehouses that lie beneath the streets. Although it’s possible to include hidden routes on a point-map (I recommend a dotted line), in this case you can probably just improvise if it comes up in play.

Go to Part 5C-B: A Very Brief Gazette of Elturel

Go to Part 1

As with our previous installment of these capsule reviews, my goal is to just give a very high overview of my thoughts/impressions of each book. These reviews were written as part of my survey of Descent Into Avernus-related material on the Dungeon Masters Guild while working on the Alexandrian Remix of the campaign. Unless otherwise noted, the material has not been playtested.

You may also want to review this Guide to Grades at the Alexandrian. The short version: My general philosophy is that 90% of everything is crap, and crap gets an F. I’m primarily interested in grading the 10% of the pile that’s potentially worth your time. Anything from A+ to C- is, honestly, worth checking out if the material sounds interesting to you. If I give something a D it’s pretty shaky. F, in my opinion, should be avoided entirely.

WARLORDS OF AVERNUS: This supplement caught my attention particularly because I’m hoping to beef up the warlords of Avernus (we have title!), and it delivers quite nicely with four new warlords with very cool concepts supported by a full suite of stat blocks. I would have perhaps liked just a touch more flavor (more fully drawn personalities for the gang members in addition to those given for the warlords themselves), but Rodrigo Kuerten has presented a really great, tight package with high utility. Warlords of Avernus is very much worth $2.

• Grade: B-

BALDUR’S GATE – CITY ENCOUNTERS: When I was running Dragon Heist, I got a huge amount of quality play from Waterdeep: City Encounters (lead design by Will Doyle). That book contains 75 different encounter types, most of which have 3-6 variations, and a random table that splits them up across the different neighborhoods of the city. Borrowing a technique I brainstormed while writing Thinking About Urbancrawls, whenever the PCs went somewhere in the city I would just roll a random encounter for the neighborhood they were going to. It filled the city with life.

So when I saw that there was a Baldur’s Gate: City Encounters book, I snapped it up right quick. Unfortunately, this book (lead design by Justice Arman and Anthony Joyce) is considerably less useful than the Waterdeep version. It includes two sets of encounters: Neighborhood Encounters and Tension Encounters.

The Neighborhood Encounters consist of one encounter for each neighborhood in the city, which is just enough, in my opinion, to not be particularly useful. If I sort of squint at it sideways I can sort of see how you could theoretically have a one-encounter-per-neighborhood structure where the first time PCs enter or pass through a neighborhood you’d use the encounter, which would establish the tone/environment of that neighborhood for the group. (But the encounters here don’t really do that.)

The Tension Encounters are potentially more interesting: They present a five step scale modeling the current level of “tension” in the city and then support this scale with different encounters that can be had at each tension level. How the PCs choose to resolve the encounters can then affect whether the city tips more towards chaos or order!

Conceptually this sounds great, and could provide a great contrapuntal development as the PCs are pursuing their investigation and getting tangled up in Portyr politics. But there are significant problems in practice: First, the scale is supposedly between Order and Chaos, but the actual scale has Pandemonium on one side (with the Cult of the Dead Three performing blood sacrifices in the streets) and Martial Law on the other side (with a corrupted Flaming Fist declaring martial law and instituting pogroms while politicians are assassinated in the streets). It’s thematically incoherent, largely negating the whole point of the exercise.

Second, while promising a system by which the tension meter would change over time, the effort to provide such a system apparently ran aground, with the designers ultimately just throwing their hands up and saying “the DM decides what impact, if any, the encounters in aggregate had on the level of tension in Baldur’s Gate.”

Third, a lot of the tension encounters are kind of nonsensical. Like, there’s one where the PCs are walking down the street when Liara suddenly draws up next to them in a chariot, gives a speech declaring herself Grand Duke of Baldur’s Gate (not how that works), and then offers a ludicrously paltry 250 gp bounty to anybody in the crowd who assassinates any remaining dukes in town.

On that note, the biggest problem I have with the book is that many of the encounters aren’t encounters: They’re scenario hooks to much larger scenarios that the GM would then need to design. (Random encounters spawning unintended scenarios and digressions is a thing that can happen, but they shouldn’t be half-baked into the design.)

The book also includes a neighborhood map of Baldur’s Gate which, for reasons I don’t really understand, doesn’t match any other extant maps of Baldur’s Gate.

• Grade: D

MONSTER LOOT – DESCENT INTO AVERNUS: I snagged Monster Loot: Descent Into Avernus because it seemed to directly address something that I feel is, in fact, generally lacking in the 5^th Edition adventures I’ve seen: Loot. In short, Anne Gregersen supplies a loot listing for every encounter in the campaign.

The book includes two major new mechanics for equipment: First, the option to harvest body parts from foes. Second, broken items that don’t work until you repair them. Unfortunately, it’s largely on the shoals of these two mechanics that the book runs aground.

The problem with the broken mechanic, primarily, is that it’s just massively overused. Virtually every single weapon and piece of armor listed has been broken. On the one hand, this is relatively easy to just ignore. On the other hand, it feels indicative of a certain skittishness in letting the PCs get “good loot” that’s kind of antithetical to what I wanted the book for.

With a book specifically dedicated to customizing loot lists for every NPC, I was really hoping to see some unusual, eclectic, and flavorful stuff. Instead, in almost every case, it’s just “the weapons they’re carrying, the armor they’re wearing, and it’s all broken.” Which, frankly, I don’t really need. That stuff is already in the stat block.

Where Monster Loot: Descent Into Avernus really unleashes, though, are those harvesting rules: You can skin flesh, yank teeth, and cut off tails that do all kinds of crazy stuff. I was actually really interested in this because I find hunter-based play interesting in my open tables and I’m always wishing I had better support for it. But in this specific instance I found the result slightly… distasteful.

The book says that “harvesting body parts, such as hide and flesh, from humanoid creatures is not something this document covers because we don’t encourage adventurers to tear into the bodies of people.” But it means that in the most literal sense of the humanoid monster type. The book happily provides you the details on skinning angels and all kinds of intelligent creatures (including bipedal intelligent creatures).

At just $2.95 I flirted with giving this one a D, but ultimately I think I’m not going to bother having this at the table when I run the campaign. So, unfortunately…

• Grade: F

THE HELLRIDERS’ KEEP: This supplement adds a new location to Elturel. Conceptually it’s great. Not only does making Elturel a richer location for the PCs to explore make a lot of sense, but Carter VanHuss very astutely notes that the published adventure doesn’t cleanly clue the PCs into the true history of the Hellriders and designs this scenario to remedy that. The descriptions of the environment are really good, with lots of little details that are not only specific, but also packed full of lore. Exploring this space will immersively draw players into the world.

Unfortunately, the book does get a little hamstrung by a couple of structural issues. First, the hook is just another, “NPC tells the PCs to go some place, the PCs go there” affair. To some extent, I can see how his hands were tied by the published campaign itself, but it feels like with a little extra effort several hooks could have been more organically woven into the campaign to make PCs aware of the Hellriders’ Keep.

The more significant problem is the lack of a map: The entire structure of the adventure is exploring the castle, but the two maps in the product are instead battlemaps. Individual areas are keyed and an effort is made to describe how they relate to each other, but without a map it’s all needlessly confusing.

Despite this, I think it’s worth grabbing a copy of this if you’re going to run Descent Into Avernus (even if you will end up needing to draw a map).

• Grade: C

MONSTER HUNTS – AVERNUS: This book promised to be a bunch of plug ‘n play side quests for use with Descent Into Avernus. I thought this would be a slam dunk in terms of usefulness, providing all kinds of awesome content for fleshing out a hexcrawl of Avernus.

Unfortunately, not one of the one-page scenarios is actually set in Avernus. In this case, “for use with Descent Into Avernus” means that it uses the stat blocks from the appendices of Descent Into Avernus.

Ignoring the disappointing bait ‘n switch (which renders the book completely unusable for what I wanted it for), the scenarios themselves are also very poorly designed (so that I wouldn’t want to use them for anything): For example, most of the dungeon maps, instead of being keyed, are described in rambling, unfocused paragraphs. The text is frequently filled with prima facie nonsense (like a claim in the first scenario that it will take PCs forty minutes to walk two city blocks). And it’s almost impressive how many times they try to force a railroad on PCs even when they’re just exploring a simple dungeon.

The book also promises an “easy to use hunting system,” but I can find nothing of the sort. Instead, the majority of the scenarios lead off with some form of “make this skill check to find tracks or skip the rest of this adventure.”

• Grade: F

HELLTUREL: James Introcaso has really hit the nail on the head with Hellturel. This 32-page supplement presents four new locations for Elturel, nicely fleshing out the city for PCs who want to explore it. Not only are the locations well-designed, they are connected using node-based scenario design so that exploring one location will provide leads pointing to the others.

The only thing I would have liked to have seen would be some guidance for how clues could be added to the locations described in Descent Into Avernus in order to also link them to the locations in Hellturel. That creates a little bit of extra lifting. There are also some minor continuity glitches (for example, the first location says the Order of the Gauntlet has moved to the second location, but at the second location there’s only one member of the Order of the Gauntlet and, as far as I can tell, no indication of what happened to the rest of them) that probably needs to be cleaned up.

But, as I say, really good stuff. Recommended.

• Grade: B-

More DMs Guild Capsule Reviews – Go to the Avernus Remix

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These tools are designed to augment the streetcrawling scenario structure used in Part 5B of the Remix. Most of them are procedural content generators that will help you fill in details of the city as the PCs crawl through it.

RANDOM BUSINESSES

The Random Businesses table is not designed to generate every single building in the city. Instead, roll on the table once per street and use the result to contextualize the street as the PCs move down it (e.g., “You turn right at the corner. On the next street you see the remains of a goldsmith’s shop on the right. A fire has gutted it.”). You might interpret the result as a single notable business, or as characterizing the type of business done on the street (e.g., a street with several blacksmiths).

Make sure to record the results on your map, in case the PCs double back.

The table found here is a fairly crude tool. It most notably excludes businesses likely to be found in specific areas of the city (like the Docks) that the PCs aren’t starting out in. (You won’t find chandlers or fishermen here.) You could also improve it by:

• Expanding the table to include more types of businesses.
• Customizing the results by neighborhood.
• Adjusting the results to more accurately model the likelihood of encountering different types of businesses.
• Perhaps biasing the results of your next roll by the previous roll. (So that, for example, the tanneries are less likely to be crowded in right next to the perfumers.)

I recommend checking out Midkemia Press’ Cities or Chaosium’s Thieves’ World as premiere resources if you want more sophisticated tables while having someone else do the work for you.

No Businesses: This usually means a purely residential street. It could also mean a green space of some kind.

Alternative: For a busier and more cosmopolitan feel, continue rolling on the table until you generate a “No Businesses” result.

BUILDING DAMAGE: Roll on the Building Damage table to determine the condition of a building. You can roll on a table whenever the PCs enter or inspect a particular building. You should also roll on the table when generating a street.

When generating a street, you can additionally roll a d6 to determine if the damage generated on the Building Damage table applies to the specific business you generated, a separate building on the street, or if the entire street has been effected. (If the original building generation roll resulted in a residential street with no businesses, then any result of 1-5 means that a specific residence has been damaged.)

Tip: I specifically designed these tables to use different types of dice. This makes it easy to generate an entire street in a single throw of the dice: Simply roll a d%, d8, and d6 simultaneously and then walk through the results using the appropriate die type for each table.

RANDOM FLOORPLANS

One of the challenges of running a streetcrawl is that the PCs may decide at any time to enter a random building. Here’s a quick method for generating simple floorplans on the fly.

ROLLING THE DICE: As with the street generator, this is a tablemat system. Take a handful of d4’s and roll them onto a sheet of paper. Most buildings are square, so you can just consider the edges of the paper to be the outer walls of the building.

The location where each die lands is a corner with a number of walls extending from that corner equal to the number rolled on the dice. The more dice you roll, the more complicated the interior of the building will be (and complexity generally equates to size). For simple cottages, a single d4 is often sufficient. Here’s an example using 3d4:

Tip: If a die rolls outside the “walls” of your building, you can ignore it, reroll it, or use it as an indicator of an irregularity in the otherwise square profile of your building. Whatever works.

After drawing your walls, you can remove the dice and add doors wherever it seems appropriate. For example:

I placed the doors here while imagining a residence (with a short entry hall leading from the front door and a master suite in the upper left corner; you can fill in the other rooms easily). But we could imagine randomly rolling a 77 on the Random Businesses table and then needing to generate the layout for a bowyer:

Here you can see how the same randomly generated walls can just as easily give us a shopfront with a door leading into a private residence at the back of the building. The master suite remains in the upper left, but here we find a bedroom with a large closet in the lower right. (Or maybe your imagination might make that a kitchen with attached larder.)

STAIR DICE: Roll a six-sided die as a d3 in addition to the intersection dice to determine the number of floors in the building. If there are multiple floors, where the die lands can be treated as the location of the staircase. If the raw number on the d6 is odd, then the building has a basement (included in the total number of floors). If it is even, then it does not.

You can increase the maximum number of floors, of course, by increasing the size of the die used and interpreting the results in the same way. (Rolling a d8 as a d4, a d10 as a d5, a d12 as a d6, and so forth.)

Rolling 2d3-1 produces a nice bell curve for the number of floors and a building with multiple stairs. (You can limit the number of buildings with multiple stairs by including multiple stairs only if the dice roll doubles, and otherwise placing the stairs at whichever die rolled higher.)

Rolling 2d3-2 (min. 1) produces the homes found in a mid-20^th century American suburb if you assume there’s always a basement.

RANDOM NPCs

If you need a random NPC:

1. Roll on the Random Businesses table to generate their profession.
2. If you get a result of “No Businesses,” roll on the Other Jobs table below.
3. Pull a name from the Elturian Names list.

Tip: This is, once again, a fairly crude tool. If you want the gold standard for this sort of thing, try to track down a copy of Central Casting: Heroes of Legend by Jennell Jaquays.

GENERATING A CRISIS: Roll on the NPC Crisis table below to see what type of crisis the NPC is facing (if any) due to Elturel’s fall into Hell. If the PCs run into an entire group of NPCs, you can probably just roll once to determine the entire group’s need.

No Current Need: The NPC probably isn’t happy, but they have a place of safety and they’re well-supplied.

Food & Water: Self-explanatory.

Injured: The NPC has been injured by collapsing structures, fires, looters, devils, or some other form of misadventure.

Trapped: Most likely due to a building collapsing on or around them.

Escort: The NPC needs to get some place (a place of sanctuary, to rejoin their family, etc.) and wants the PCs to escort them there safely. If in doubt, use one of the locations in Part 5C (the NPC effectively becomes a hook for that location).

Under Attack: The NPC is currently being attacked (or hunted) by criminals, devils, or something else.

Roll Again Twice: I’d recommend against stacking this result.

Tip: Structurally, these crises are a way of drawing the PCs deeper into the city. The more need they see, the more important what they’re doing becomes. The more people they help, the more emotionally invested they become. And the act of solving these problems will force them to explore the city and draw them towards the major locations.

FRACTAL STREET LAYOUT

An advanced technique while streetcrawling is to treat the system as having fractal complexity.

By default, you can just think of the system as generating and navigating specific streets. But you could also use it to generate the “major streets” of a larger neighborhood. (For example, this could be useful when the PCs are navigating towards a Distant Goal, as described in Part 5B.) Within each of these “major blocks” you can imagine myriad side streets, and, in fact, you can drill in and generate those side streets by treating each major block as the boundaries of a locality.

For example, you might start by generating a street map that looks like this:

You could then select one of those major blocks and generate the local side streets:

And you can take this even further, using the same system to generate footpaths, alleys, or even the outlines of specific buildings on an individual block. (The latter is a great way of getting non-standard building outlines that you can then use as a seed for random floor plans.) If you did that here, it might look like this:

When I demonstrate this system for new GMs, I’m sometimes told that this fractal approach isn’t realistic. “Cities don’t work like this,” one gentleman told me. If you’re feeling the same way reading this, then you might want to know that I pulled a fast one here. Although these are street layouts which could be trivially created using the street generator, in this case I didn’t actually use the generator: I just traced the streets for Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

And you can see, looking at that map, how the other individual blocks have similar levels of detail hidden away inside of them. (And that’s even before we crack open the satellite view and street views and really start looking at the details.) This is a good reminder that the real world is always an endless font of inspiration, even for our most audaciously fantastical creations.

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