Street Guide Without Streets

Cities in adventure games demand a different logic than underground or wilderness adventures. The house-to-house detail that has traditionally characterized city supplements doesn't work and isn't needed, as Zak S first figured out in Vornheim.

Is all of this strictly necessary?

Wildernesses or dungeons are places where access is difficult (so mapping them is fun),but cities are places usually set up so that access is easy through a network of streets (so mapping them is pointless). There is discovery, but it doesn't follow geographical lines. The exceptions to openness -- forbidden cities of privilege; no-go slums of peril -- prove the rule. These areas cease to work as cities do in an adventure game, and begin to work as dungeons, like the hoary cliches of the monster-infested urban sewers or necropolis.

In my own Muleteers campaign, built from Joe Bloch's works, the Grey City counterpoises the tentpole dungeon of the Mad Archmage. Visits to the city sometimes end in impatience to get on with the adventuring, but still can take up to half of a four-hour session. But even though I'm using a detailed street map of the place, the geography never seems to stick, I don't keep a good idea of what shops are where, what they are like, and so on.

This suggests that I need a way to write down and systematize what matters in the city experience.

The Muleteers use the city for the following activities:

1. Buying equipment
2. Selling and identifying treasure finds
3. Leveling up (taking one day per new level, in my rules)
4. Carousing and other means of spending money for experience
5. Brokering deals with religious, trade, scholarly and government bodies
6. In the campaign's early days (less so now, as action has concentrated onto the megadungeon and frontier village), mini-misadventures from random encounters in the streets

For the first five, the journey and exact location are not as important as what can be done there. The random happenings (#6) do sometimes spill out into a full-fledged chase, but for this only a vague sense of geography is needed: the city is divided into districts; each district's streets all connect to each other and the process of finding out where things are is usually trivial; only between districts are there changes of atmosphere, walls and divisions.

The result is this template and guide (click to enlarge):

You'll see that with access to private and secret establishments, there is a process of discovery in the city too, but it works differently. The examples give an idea how: random encounters and establishments, if treated right, give clues and leads to others. This can be expanded to whole districts of social elites being off-limits unless you know the right people. I'm going to try this method at the next city phase of our adventures and see how it turns out.

Dungeonteller: Amazing Pictorial Play Aid

You should know, if you don't already, that I'm a big fan of graphically enabled, boiled down adventure game rules; also, that a good chunk of this blog is about my attempts to create such rules; also, that I'm not the greatest freehand artist, which I compensate by using an Isotype-style design aesthetic, so I stand perpetually in awe of works like Kata Kumbas with their gorgeous illustrated equipment shops and catalogues.

Another enviable work, just released  by Doug Anderson of the Blue Boxer Rebellion blog, is the kid-friendly player pack (pdf) for his RPG Dungeonteller.

One page rules supplements, you say? Procedural rules for the whole game are a spacious, breezy one page. The rest is content, including great character illustrations, and equipment-shops with price tags. Many neat touches, including different font sizes to make your character's good skills really stand out. Advancement, resolution, basic equipment - everything for players is here, on an ample and very readable two-sided character sheet.

A more conventional presentation of the full Dungeonteller game can be found here (pdf), including a nice little tutorial scenario. Both downloads are free.

Real Spellbooks

Not exactly the kind Jack Chick had in mind ...

but play aids that would save trips through the rulebooks by organizing each spell-using character's library into pages.

I know there have been various spell card decks here and there through the ages. Stuart's pocketmod spellbook is almost what I'm after, but I want the ability to easily add in spells and have different books for different characters.

And I've already got spell cards for my system...

Then I remembered the CCG flash in the pan of 2005: Zatch Bell. Its gimmick: your collectible deck was stored and played from inside a little spellbook binder with 16 sleeve-pages for the cards. This is perfect.

 It doesn't seem to be available through UK retailers ... good thing I'm going to GenCon Indy, huh?

Equipment and Weapon Cards - System-Free

I realized yesterday that it might be more useful if I left off all the One Page prices, weights, and rules assumptions from these cards, so that you can put on them whatever's appropriate in your rules system and campaign.

The weapon kits, of course, can't be system neutral entirely. For example, the "civilian" kit for wizards has a crossbow, the "rogue" kit for thieves has a bow and arrows, choices not supported by AD&D. I also included the mace in the "cleric" kit but some DMs may allow religion-specific weapons. You may want to substitute appropriate weapons (darts, sling) or just say that the weapon is for hirelings or other party members to use.

Hope these are useful!

Starting Equipment Kit Cards

In my last few runs of the One Page system, I could feel time dragging as players (some completely inexperienced, some very savvy) waded through the equipment list to select stuff. I want to get it down to 15 minutes or so. Sure, I could use pre-gens, but part of the reason to have super-simple character options is to give the experience of rolling up a character.

This is just the six standard packages of adventuring gear I let characters start with for free, in card format.  I see this as making set-up much quicker. The cards make it obvious that the job is to distribute all the standard adventuring gear and backups among the party.

Weapons, etc. coming up next.

Character sheet and player aids

For the curious, the 2 page character sheets and 3 pages of play aids from our Gencon crawl are here (Google docs).

I have modified them somewhat since the game, mainly putting more complete stats for common weapons and armor onto the equipment sheet, and adding a henchmen table (in the game I used a number of pre-gens from the Meatshields utility).

Some of the notes may be a little cryptic, but people generally figured stuff out, asking along the way.

Yes, the d6 pips and encumbrance system are a blatant hommage. Probably by the time I release Assayers' Guild Characters I'll have figured out an alternate display system.