d100- Somewhat Sinister Settlement Secrets

Quick Table today with some “Rumors” or “Hooks” to provide a little more unsettling depth to some of those Settlements. I’ve endeavored to use the portion prior to the sainted em dash as a bit of a cue or clue, with the second half hopefully providing hints to the mysterious intrigue behind it. Spicing up some of those isolated Villages or Hamlets with a little strangeness or mystery can sometimes have the side effect of centering Adventure or the Player Focus within them, but that can be a nice change of pace sometimes.

d100 - Some City Streets

When Adventure whisks the Characters into Urban Environments, I often find it convenient to have some serviceable Street Names at hand. Navigating those places can get a little more interesting by using Landmarks, and in their own way, those Named Thoroughfares serve this function well. They are also immensely useful for when the Players have the rare good sense to query a Local or NPC for Directions. I’ve provided a starting point with two-hundred here, the left-most ones are perhaps more appropriate for the more Sinister or Shady sections of a settlement (after all, quite a bit of excitement tends to happen in those places,) and I threw in another hundred Embellishments that might work to dress up a few descriptions as the Players make their way around.

d100 - Some Cities & Settlements

When painstakingly placing a happy Haven or convenient Village somewhere in a World, I often find myself needing a few things. Names are nearly always necessary, but I also like to think a little bit about what sorts of Resources might have informed the establishment of the place. Especially as a Campaign might shift more toward the Domain Tier, it becomes pretty handy to have some ready ideas for the useful Imports/Exports or other features that might be present and play a larger role. Some entries are obvious Natural Resources, but I like to sprinkle in some less tangible Cultural Resources as well from time to time to keep things interesting. These can inform Rumors, serve as a source of Adventure, and answer those pesky Player questions that crop up from time to time: Where can we find the best quality Falcons? Where is a Sage that has made this obscure topic their life’s work? Where can we sell all these ingots of Tin for a tidy profit?

I’ve also included a handy-dandy generator that I spun up to test out the Naming Stems as well below!

Voronoi Diagrams and the City Crawl

I tend to prefer using Voronoi Tesselations/Diagrams for my Urban Adventures/City Crawls instead of the traditional Grids or Hex Maps. They just feel more organic to me, and can really capture how sometimes it takes longer to move from one dense/crowded/difficulty planned area to another. Distances are seldom in a straight line in Cities, and it's easy to get turned around or lost in an unfamiliar Urban Center without a Guide. I dislike relying as much on measuring out precise distances these days, instead preferring to think of navigating Cities more in terms of resource consumption and procedural checks.

Unlike in a Standard Dungeon, Food/Water/Light should be relatively easy or at hand (provided the characters are not utterly destitute) so the resources we’re dealing with are generally TIME and MONEY. TIME to meet deadlines assocaited with hooks/rumors/adventure, and MONEY paid to Guides or for Information to reduce TIME. As the old adage goes: They are often one in the same. Also throwing another wrench in the works are Produral Checks: Bad Weather, Encounters, and other unusual Events that can breathe life into an area (a neighborhood wide Celebration clogging the streets, Hue and Cry from a Crime udnerway, etc.)

Here’s a quick way to generate a Voronoi City Map for a Crawl that produces something like this:

First, locate a map you like or create one. The example above uses this twitter account: https://twitter.com/metropologeny

(you can generally right click on an image here, and “Open in a New Tab” to obtain a URL to use in the next step).

Next, go here: http://cfbrasz.github.io/Voronoi.html

Paste the URL from the twitter account in the “Display Image with URL” box. Then, if you prefer, you can use your mouse to place points and divide the map into districts/neighborhoods/sections/quarters, or if your lazy, you can uncheck the “Update diagram on mouse move” check box, and then place a number in the Add box and click Generate until you see something that looks interesting or usable.

I like going with “20” sites, for ease of randomization with our handy, ubiquitous icosahedron, but for sparser/denser maps other site amounts might work a little better.

And there you have it: Fairly quick Voronoi City Crawl Map!

You can number the sites (those dots make them a little easier to identify), whip together some Exciting/Evocative Smells, some interesting NPCs with Professions that can help you intuit the primary shops or industry of an area, or perhaps a City Dweller Event as a “hook” or ongoing item of interest, and tailor a few Encounter/Event Tables to the different regions to give it some real flavor and flair. You could even stock them like Dungeon Rooms (Encounter, Hazard, Treasure, etc.) with some judicious reskinning.

I am very tempted to start working on a few more Tables that can help with Urban Crawls. One can never have enough random inspiration to cut down on tedious preparation!

d100 Table - Three Hundred Smells & Scents by Type (for Yoon-Suin or anywhere really)

Foraging through a few orphan folders, I found another d100 table that has been languishing at the end of some content on my Yoon-Suin Resources page and decided to whip it into a single-page for more convenient use. Although I believe it was originally designed to assist with navigating city-blocks in Yoon-Suin, I frankly feel that this could be helpful for a variety of situations that need a little nose, even if does err a little on the exotic.

We often default to stressing sight and sound impressions when describing things, but a gentle reminder to remember how things and situations smell never hurts. It’s worth considering adding a trigger for this to an Overloaded Encounter Die/Wandering Monster Check, and I’d love to see more adventure authors use a little 👃 icon and a concise olfactory fact occasionally in their room descriptions. Odors can be a wonderful shorthand for the evocation of all kinds of memories and can easily trigger unexpected routes of play. They can also serve as a method of navigation for when the last torch sputters out: This is the room that smelled like eggs? OK, I think there’s a door to the left that leads to the one that smelt more like burning books. Or if you’d like, they can be used in conjunction with some other generators, like my Herb & Plant Generator or even to apply a bouquet to potions (I try to keep taste/smell/appearance consistent for identification purposes).

My hope is that even just having some potential smell inspiration ready at hand could help spur an occasional reminder to add a soupçon more sensory substance when describing a scene.

Hope this ends up passing the sniff test! If you feel that something a little more “traditionally vanilla” fantasy would be more useful, just let me know!

These City-Dwellers Are... (d100 Table)

As a follow up to a previous post (These Village-folk Are...), not all local-color need be campestral. The exciting urban sprawl of a fantasy city can be a tempting destination post-delve to unload all that lovely lifted loot and purloined plunder. Let us breathe a little life into our Blocks & Boroughs as well:

Need a quick map? I have been enjoying experimenting with this wonderful Medieval Fantasy City Generator. I’d almost be tempted to give each of the different districts it designates a little bit of strategic embroidering as the players move between wards.