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.
