Rules for Citycrawling

Let me tell you about a game my father played with me as a child. It started when we were walking home from grade school in winter, through the Greenwich Village towards the East Village where I lived with my mother in a six floor walk-up opposite Saint Mark's Church. He would pull a hat over my eyes to blindfold me. He would take a couple of quick turns and walk me around until I was "lost" (disoriented), and then he would put me in front of something, and lift the hat, shielding with his hands the rest of my view, so that I could only see what was right before my eyes. 

Although we had never walked very far, and I had been over every street dozens of times, I had never seen (noticed) any of the things he showed me. A marble bust of a polish general. A colonial looking house with huge roman columns. Once he took me inside a store and when he lifted the hat there was an airplane in there. It was a rule that he would never tell me where we had been afterwards. Cut off entirely from the map of the streets as I knew them, these glimpses gave me the sense that i was seeing an entirely different city, a hidden city, like a palimpsest lying beneath the city I knew and peeking out here and there when the hat came up. What could I do build in my mind but spin out a whole alternate city built from these glimpses of things that were in truth hidden in plain sight? This alter-New York loomed large in my imagination.

Eventually the game had to stop when my direction sense got good enough that he couldn't get me "lost" even if he spun me like a top and took many quick turns. But when I got older I played the game by myself, getting myself lost in less familiar terrain to great profit. I found too that I could lift the hat, so to speak, on myself by just looking at what was right in front of my nose, and by searching out the weird tucked-away spots, the hidden worlds, the queer and inviting side-paths of urban life. And what I found was that that other city was never far, because cities are limitless storehouses of secrets, bursting with wonders if only one stops to look. 

The Model of Dungeon Crawl

I've been thinking for a long time about how to run and design cities in a retro-game sandbox way. I've been reading older rpg city material off and on for years. I've also been running occasional games of the City State of the Invincible Overlord for my kids and their cousins. And now, at long last, one of my two groups has finally made it up to Zyan Above for some proper adventuring. So I thought it was time to pull together something in the way of technique. 

As I talked about here, the City State of the Invincible Overlord provides one model for running a fantasy city. It takes what I would call a "street-based" approach. In CSIO, streets generally have their own name, and many have their own special encounters. You also move through the city streets like corridors in a dungeon with encounters on a turn-based system. And there's a gorgeous map. It has the same openness that location-based adventuring has, but much more, since the "dungeon" of the city is less deadly and much more open. Because it's so focused on streets, there aren't neighborhoods with write-ups, because the focus is more fine-grained. This is similar to the way that dungeons often only loosely have thematically different quadrants.  

One thing I like about this approach is that it takes a tried and true open-gaming model and tries to reimagine and repurpose it for citycrawling. It also works for discovery and exploration. Just like I explore the map of the dungeon, moving through corridors, opening room by room, so too I explore the map of the city. For example, like other Judge's Guild products, the CSIO came with both player and DM maps, so that the players could fill them in, jotting down notes on the temples, guilds, establishments, and so on they discover. 

Although untapped, by extension from the dungeon, this also suggests a possible model for uncovering hidden locations in cities, insofar as procedures exist for uncovering secret doors and hidden areas in dungeon exploration. Perhaps one could try something similar here extending the dungeon model further. 

But the problem with this approach, for what I want, is that there's no way I could build a city that feels sufficiently big to scratch my metropolis of the dreamlands itch if I insisted on treating it in this exhaustive way. The entire CSIO map, for example, would only be the size of part of a single neighborhood in the city I've been imagining. 

A second problem is that I don't yet have a city map, and I'm not up to drawing one myself. This technique depends almost entirely on having a beautiful and interesting map. 

A third problem is that a map-focused approach doesn't have rules for getting lost. The simplest most fun version of using this technique would probably involve giving the players their own map of the city so that we didn't get bogged down in narrating details of the map. But in that case, the players would always know where they were.

A fourth problem is that by taking the street as the level of analysis, it loses something of the texture of a city. I want an approach that emphasizes the different feel of  different neighborhoods. I want a city with neighborhoods that feel as different as the East Village feels from Washington Heights or Red Hook or Astoria, or, to take a different city, as a different as Friendship feels from Polish Hill or Mount Lebanon. (Of course, one could recapture this through a well-designed map, but one could also try a different approach that built in the neighborhood as a unit more directly.) 

The Model of Procedural Generation

From early on, a different model competed with the completist dungeon-crawl model of the CSIO. This model involved procedural generation, either on the fly or in preparation for the game. There probably are precursors to this, but there are two relatively early products I know of that apply procedural generation techniques familiar from dungeon construction to cities. If you know more in the comments, then please let me know. 

The first is Midkemia system, first presented (I think) in the second edition of Cities, which involves a rich technique for randomly "stocking" a street with various shops and residences by rolling dice, with some neat rules for businesses clustering on a given street. Here we could see them applying the sorts of methods the Dungeon Master's Guide gave us for randomly generating dungeon rooms and stocking them via rolling on tables. 

The second came in Lankhmar: City of Adventure, which borrowed the procedural generation of dungeons using geomorphs: cut out dungeon chunks cleverly designed so that one can assemble them in any number of combinations by laying down connecting tiles. Lankhmar used a city geomorph to map the mazy slum of alleyways that connect buildings in a sort of city-within-a-city way in Lankhmar. The thought was that there was no way or point in mapping them, and that their jerry-rigged structures shift often as well, so better to capture the mazy, infinite, and shifting feel of it it with procedural generation. In a delicious coup, the gorgeous Lankhmar map left blank spots to indicate where one entered geomorph space, so that you would generate a chase through the streets after a cutpurse (say) in this fashion, and players could know in advance when they stepping into an area with this sort of procedure. 

Again, what I like about this is that it takes tried and true techniques from open-world dungeon crawling and design, and repurposes them to work on the city environment. 

The early OSR fastened on techniques like these to deal with city crawling, focusing on procedural methods of generating city environments, although without much awareness of the early hobby precursors. Vornheim was intended to capture an infinite city, of which its author, the abuser Zak Smith, grudgingly drew a map of on the inside cover, while telling the reader not to use it. Instead, streets were to be procedurally generated using a (too) cute system that involved writing words, with a separate die drop system for generating buildings and streets. This was supplemented by copious random tables did the rest of the work, along with illustrative examples of buildings and the like. [New copies of this book are not for sale any more, so discussing it will not produce profits for its author.]

The reason why this procedural generation approach won't work for me, as flexible and wonderful as these techniques can be, is that if you procedurally generate locations on the fly, you systematically disable the pleasure of uncovering something hidden, since it's all made up as you go along. As a player (not a character), I can only find something if it's already there to be found. Furthermore, if the map is infinite and generated on the fly, then although it sure will feel big, there also will be no such thing as coming to know it. And my love of cities is all about coming to know them, and this is what I want to capture in my city crawling rules. 

The Model of the Pointcrawl

Another model we could try in this context is the pointcrawl. The term "pointcrawl" was coined by Chris Kutalik for techniques that use points of interest connected to one another by abstract paths one moves along. The pointcrawl abstracts movement through a much larger space where not everything is of equal interest, and so where a micro-focus on the environment is not fun. It also mirrors the way one orients oneself in a wilderness space, navigating by landmarks, trails, paths of least resistance, and the like. 

This is promising since it would allow exploration while focusing prep energy as a DM on a set number of notable locations, with possibly multiple things there, e.g. a location could be a single notable bathhouse, or it could be a theater row, or a bustling square with numerous establishments. If we wanted to focus on different neighborhoods, we could make each it's own pointcrawl. A pointcrawl models in abstract ways the distance between things without presupposing that one has a gorgeous map sufficient to capture the fascination and interest of players. So that's a plus too.

There is an obstacle to this otherwise promising approach in the city context in that one can usually reach a location in a city without being forced to move through any given location by going a slightly roundabout way. Thus cities don't really have the chokepoint feature of pointcrawl maps. But one can handle this by simply giving players the option of not interacting with points they pass through. 

To make this work, we'll also need rules for getting lost on a pointcrawl, and a way to model off the beaten path or "hidden locations" in each neighborhood, which are often not literally hidden (although sometimes they are), but rather places that are easy to miss secret locations. Luckily, I have a system for this I developed for the sewer crawl in issue 3 of Through Ultan's Door, that uses a system of floating hidden nodes on the pointcrawl. I'll repurpose that here.

My Citycrawling System (V.1)

City Size

The number of neighborhoods, and locations in a given neighborhood, depends on the size of the city. There are the same number of hidden locations per neighborhood as regular locations, and the number must correspond to a die size (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, etc. unless you use funny DCC dice). The hidden locations are ordered in a numbered list in terms of how hard they are to find, the higher the number, the harder it is to stumble on them. 

• Small City: 3-5 neighborhoods; 4 nodes and hidden location per neighborhood 
• Middling City: 4-6 neighborhoods; 6 nodes and hidden location per neighborhood 
• Large City: 5-7 neighborhoods; 8 nodes and hidden locations per neighborhood
• Metropolis (the size of Zyan): 6-8 neighborhoods: 10 nodes and hidden locations per neighborhood
• Megalopolis: 7-10 neighborhoods: 12 nodes and hidden locations per neighborhood

At the bottom end you have a city with three neighborhoods, 12 notable and 12 hidden locations. At the top end you have a city with a staggering 10 neighborhoods with 120 notable and 120 hidden locations. Zyan is on the big side, with 6 neighborhoods, and so 60 notable locations and 60 hidden locations. While prepping a giant city like this is a lot of work, the idea is that it could sustain years of possible play, a whole campaign in a single city. (And should players just visit, I want them to be like: HOLY HELL that's a proper city of the dreamlands.) This number feels right to me.

Encounters

When entering a neighborhood roll an encounter check. Also roll an encounter check when moving from any node to another other node. Encounters in cities are somewhat less perilous (although they can be dangerous), less to give pressure to exploration, and more to provide color, introduce NPCs, and provide hooks for adventure. Encounter checks occur 2 in 6. 

Searching for Secret Locations

The party can at any time lift the metaphorical hat from their eyes as they move between nodes in the pointcrawl by wandering down less known byways to their destination or by taking the time to pay special attention to what is in front of their noses. When they do so, they incur an additional encounter check and can roll to see if they have discovered a hidden location with a 1 in 6 chance. 

If they discover a hidden location, roll the die of the size corresponding to the number of hidden locations in the neighborhoods. Cross off hidden locations from the list as players discover them. If you re-roll an already discovered location, take the lowest (easiest to find) remaining undiscovered location on the list. Write the location down in its present location as a new node on your pointcrawl.

What stops players from gaming the system by just searching limitlessly for secret locations? Nothing; if they want to have a session that's full of city encounters and stumbling upon less known locations that sounds like a fun session to me! A hidden location is not like a secret room full of treasure. It's more like a hook for adventuring and exploration. If players want to uncover more of those, God bless.  

Getting Lost

When entering a neighborhood, or moving between locations in it, check to see if the party becomes lost. Roll a die corresponding to the number of locations in the neighborhood (4=1d4, 6=1d6, etc.). The chance of becoming lost is initially very high, n-1/n (so 3 in 4, 5 in 6, 7 in 8, etc.). Decrease that chance by 1 for each location the party has visited in the neighborhood. When the number is 0, the party knows their way around well enough that they can no longer become lost in that neighborhood. (This necessitates a minimal book-keeping for each neighborhood, with a score equal to the number of locations the party has visited in that neighborhood.) 

If the party is lost, that's not necessarily a bad thing. First give them a free roll to see if they stumble upon a secret location, since getting lost is the best way to find something off the beaten path. Next roll an encounter check. Finally, if they don't find a hidden location, dice randomly to see at what (non-hidden) location the party arrives, the spot where they can ask for directions and get their bearing. 

Hiring Transportation or a Guide

I discussed methods of transit in Zyan here. Generally speaking, what these means of transport do is allow one to travel to any known (non-hidden) location in the city without undergoing encounter checks to get there. Probably what I'll do is substitute a single 2 in 6 chance of an incident occurring en route, with a different table for each method of transport (Ferry, Palanquin, Carriage, or Nimbus Barque). You can also give them directions to hidden locations that you know.

One can also hire a guide. To find a guide, roll 2d6 modified by +1 in a bustling location, and -1 in a quiet location. On a 7+ you find a guide who knows the neighborhood you want to visit for a fee. You roll on the table of guides to see who you turned up. (As I envision it, the table of guides will have modifiers for how fancy the neighborhood is, and some of the guides will be dubious characters, naturally.) 

The guide will know all the known locations in a neighborhood, and can take the players to any of them, or on a walking tour of the neighborhood that will reveal the entire pointcrawl map. While traveling with the guide your party will not become lost. Some of the guides on the chart will also have a percentage chance to know a hidden location. 

That's all for now. In my next post I'll likely talk about some city exploration based downtime actions. 

The City of Hex: The Late Baroque CSIO

If you read and enjoyed my post on the City State of the Invincible Overlord, you all need to go read this post right now by Jonathan Newell on the Bearded Devil blog. It talks about his method for preparing and running his gorgeously mapped city of Hex.

Bearded Devil, you are bringing into reality what I glimpsed as a possibility only gestured at by the City State of the Invincible Overlord. There's a lot to learn from Jonathan's experiment with Hex. For comparison's purpose, let's start with the City State of the Invincible Overlord. The CSIO has a gorgeous and detailed map, full of cramped shops, narrow alleys, and open plazas.

It uses this street map as the template for play, since it is designed to run at the level of micro-geography of the city. In fact, the map doesn't even divide the city into neighborhoods--as though such distinctions are too large scale to be useful in play. About a third of the buildings are keyed, and every shop, tavern, and temple is filled with leveled NPCs (some colorful) and abounds with rumors and opportunities for adventures. Different streets have their own random encounters mechanic built in giving a sense of the character of the city at the level of streets.

I think this approach was born out of the best kind of creative thinking, extrapolating from early dungeon play, and essentially imagining a sword & sorcery city at dungeon scale, except instead of fighting monsters you get up to capers, heists, arena fighting, bar fights, and general hijinks, a version of what (to paraphrase Jeff Rients) Conan and Lando Calrissian might get up to if they found themselves bored on a hot afternoon in Lankhmar.

The possibility that I glimpsed in the CSIO is of an entire campaign plumbing the depths of an inexhaustible wealth of delicious, imaginative, city material. Where, in some sense, the subject of the game is the city itself, and the goal is a sort of carnal knowledge of the overwhelming built environment, where the players come to literally know the texture of its streets, the little nooks and crannies, and dozens, perhaps hundreds of its myriad secrets. Where the player would know exactly what it looked like to gaze across the Plaza of Profuse Pleasures into the Park of Obscene Statues, or that beneath Boot & Strap on Barter Street, the shop of notorious bootmaker Karugy One-Eye, they might exchange news with bandits and blackguards over a cup of ale and roast pig, provided they weren't elves(!), before coming out in such and such a spot in the undercity.

In the perhaps imperfect language I have recently developed for trying to talk about what's fun about this sort of thing, we can say the CSIO was created with the idea that city exploration might provide the pleasures of secrecy & discovery in a sense modeled on exploring a megadungeon. Since my own infatuation with city exploration IRL is premised on a romantic but absolutely true idea that cities are repositories of endless secrets and anarchic human-wrought wonders, this idea really gripped me. How could it not?

But one deep feature of the CSIO is that it is designed for low prep gaming. It uses an absurdly fiddly, but extraordinarily flexible (once you grasp it) system of generic random encounters (the system is also in the Ready Ref Sheets). This system is intended to combine with the immense system of loosey-goosey location-based rumors and detailed keyed locations to generate endless possibilities for adventure in an improvisational mode. It invites the kind of play I've been using it for with my son and his cousins. Did I mention that in the last session they fast talked their way into Liar Mukang's Pleasure Dome, escaping by a hair's breadth laden with his riches on the back of a gold dragon? And that I did zero prep for that session? I can report that the CSIO works as intended, at least with the 10-13 crowd. [Note: Liar Mukang and his pleasure dome is hell-of-racist. It was a nice teaching moment with the kids. We got to have the fun of the adventure AND talk about orientalism afterwards.]

It is striking that the improvisational style of CSIO is in some tension with the ideal being gestured towards by the detailed micro-geographical approach. There's something hilariously incongruous about juxtaposing the detailed geographical detail and the generic nature of the encounter tables: we go from the notorious bootmaker Karugy One-Eye with 3 levels in fighter and his bigoted ogre wife, complete with the rumor that two drunken rogues are slumped over a staff of power at a horse tie, to this encounter you might roll: a noble wants to hire you. It works perfectly well as a package, with the detailed geography and entries providing a structure that works as a skeleton on which to hang the maximally swingy improvisational encounters and adventures. But one way to look at this combination is as a possible fault line in the CSIO. We can then think of approaches breaking one way or the other.

Vornheim (I know, I know) ditched the micro-geography and keyed locations for a vastly more flavorful set of systems of procedural generation of the physical city itself, underwriting zero prep improvisational play to a higher degree. Logan Knight's Corpathium followed in this direction still further, supplemented with flavorful neighborhood based random encounter tables that moved the unit of the city from the street to the district. The experiment was to see whether we could replace the obsessive micro-geographical detail of the CSIO and its less successful progeny with methods of procedural generation to create the open sense of a truly vast city. Although those attempts succeeded at doing what they were trying to do, and so were a genuine advance, I think they missed the charm of the CSIO, conflating its approach with the boring enumeration of useless information that characterized later city products.

Hex breaks the other way, opting to dial up to 11 the intense, loving pre-generation of physical city as a boundless source of adventure. The game is run as a reverse West Marches campaign, with a shifting cast of players who set their own agendas in a sandbox consisting (almost) exclusively of the city itself for each session by voting in two polls, one to schedule a game and the other to set the agenda for the session (which they can edit to introduce whatever options they want). Jonathan then preps different areas and NPCs in the city as much as he can in advance, as in a West Marches game the DM would prep the portions of the hex map and adventure locations the players planned to visit. This approach of incremental city creation, with the prep racing ahead of the players via polling is an interesting approach. Over time, the city has taken on a life of its own and now is sufficiently developed that Jonathan says he has a pretty good idea what's going on in every neighborhood, and often at the street level. Which is nuts in the best kind of way.

As with the CSIO, Hex has a detailed map, allowing for play that is focused on the texture and microgeography of the city. If the CSIO map is pretty, the one for Hex is drop dead gorgeous. I mean take a look at this map fragment:

The Cultist Quarter & Enigma Heap

Jonathan runs the game with a huge version of the map rolled out on the table, which is how I run CSIO too (albeit with a smaller map). This emphasizes the freedom of movement for the players, and the city as a space to be moved through and explored. Unlike in the CSIO, where a lot of the game is about getting from point A to point B via the streets, Jonathan abstracts from movement between quadrants of the city, zooming at the level of the destination neighborhood. Using the polls to give him advance notice, he preps the descriptions for the streets and keys for the buildings and NPCs. Given how detailed his map is, he is able to print blown up versions of individual neighborhoods. Like so:

He also draws a lot of the crazy neighborhood blocks of clustered buildings that the players are likely to visit. Here are a couple of his drawings. How could you not be curious about each and every store, resident, floor and so on?

I find this aspect of his city especially remarkable. By employing his formidable artistic skills, as well as the aesthetic of a city of visually striking, quirky, simultaneously organic and jury-rigged clusters of buildings into blocks, he is able to give a rich texture to individual city blocks. I've never seen anything like this, but it sure would render memorable all sorts of locations in the city! He can literally just say to his players: this is what it looks like. This is what the prep of an adventure location might look like:

Obviously the city is extraordinarily flavorful, a place abounding in wonders, a sort of Dickensian, fey touched, demon infested, New Crobuzon. I think it would be a total blast to play there. Given my dispositions, imaginative burn out, and lack of mapping and artistic skills, it's clear that I will never be able to accomplish anything like this. Which is why I find this so fascinating. I can't wait to read more about how you run this game Jonathan. Perhaps one day Zyan Above can be a fraction of what you are making here.

City State of The World Emperor: Lessons from a Failed Experiment

Cover art by Jannel Jaquays

Behold Viridistan, City State of the World Emperor, demon ruled metropole of a thousand intrigues! Look upon his Vasthosts of soldiers in fine battle dress, and his Equithrongs of archers, slaying from afar with their red metal arrows that cut like scythes, forged from carbellium drawn from the heart of a vast meteor! And yet, look more closely at the City of Spices' once exquisite alien architecture, and you will see that beneath the fanfare it is crumbling, as though consumed by a gnawing hunger. How riddled is the city with traitors, like a fine mansion, now honeycombed by termites. Look how the enemies of Viridistan--not least the Invincible Overlord!--have grown bold, and win unthinkable victories.

In a lot of ways, the City State of the World Emperor, published in 1980, is better than the City State of the Invincible Overlord that preceded it in 1976. It's conception is amazing. Viridistan is ruled by the self-proclaimed World Emperor, Huatulin Seheitt and his Empress Murielle Eidn. They are the last of the Viridians, an ancient, wicked race, tall and green-skinned scions of "remnants of the quarrelsome gods of the Uttermost Wars, Wild Men of the Confederate Tribes, and mermaids of the Trident Gulf". Emperor Seheitt is also God-Priest of Armadad Bog, a hideous entity of the depths. Part of Seheitt's papal palace is a horror choked submerged dungeon, where Armadad Bog has his watery throne room, dripping in Emeralds. Armadad Bog has enslaved the mermaids of the Trident Gulf, and in the World Emperor's inner chambers stand the tanks for "visiting" mermaids. It's kind of amazing.

And yet, for all its brilliance, the product is a failure. To be clear, I think it's brilliance is great enough that you should probably own it, and if you ever play in the Wilderlands, it will be absolutely essential to your campaign. And yet it doesn't work. I believe that part of the explanation is simple: the main author, Craighton Hippenhammer, felt himself forced to follow the template the CSIO laid down without understanding how that template worked. In fact, as I learned recently by corresponding with him on Facebook, he wasn't much of a gamer, and had only met Bledsaw at the Decatur Public Library where he worked. When he got him on board for the project, Bledsaw had already sketched out portions of the city, and finished some of the key entries, including, I suspect the entries on the city state history and the World Emperor.

Furthermore, as we will see, the template, so perfect for the CSIO made much less sense applied to the CSWE. This is interesting, since it suggests that the way we design our D&D city should depend on the city. Another part of the explanation is that Hippenhammer lacks the wild, banging away at his typewriter, hyped up on 1000 CCs of caffeine, elliptical genius of Bledsaw's terse prose.

Things Bob Bledsaw would never have written:

Sanitation Department
                            Class Align LVL HP AC SL STR INT WIS CON DEX CHAR WPN
Pike the Lefty     FTR   LE     4      20   10  6    18    9      8      11      8       10         Lance
Salman Rudee    FTR   CE     3      16    8   4    11    5      10     8       9        8          Spear

Pike supervises the cleanup crew in the city and arrest residents who continually throw garbage into the streets. Hires rodent specialists when they are needed. PROB 10% of sanitation workers contracting dysentary; 30% PROB contracting fever rash; but pay is good. Salman Rudee, in charge of the Street Scoopers Sections, sees that the constant traffic of animals is cleaned up after; he has a special detachment in each stable area.

This is the kind of fantasy trivia that has no purpose in a gaming product, and of which the CSIO contains exactly 0%. Does Salman Rudee keep a "special detachment" to shovel horseshit? Wow, that's interesting. And Pike the Lefty pays pretty well for rodent specialists...but they might catch dysentary. Classic. Let 1000 adventures bloom.

Even some entries that have real promise lack that Bledsaw verve. Take this one:

Barracks XIV Cavalry (LT)   

                            Class Align LVL HP AC SL STR INT WIS CON DEX CHAR WPN
Sasabonsum        FTR   LE     4      27   7    5   14     11    12    8       9        10         Scimitar     
The Duelist

An accomplished duelist, Sass is collecting the scalps of his victims on the mess hall wall. It is thought that he provokes many of these one-sided duels as a way of alternately feeding his ego and venting his frustrations. Like many other members of the realm army he is somewhat superstitious and will often postpone a duel until the omens and soothsayers feel that the time is right. His one big quirk is that he cannot abide to see any weapon or amor which is not in prime condition. This has saved him and his men on many occasions.

Here's how Bledsaw would have written that same entry:

Accomplished duelist; collects scalps of victims on mess hall wall. Superstitious, consults omens and soothsayers before every duel. He is meticulous about the condition of the arms and armor of his men.

The Bledsaw style version is less bloated. But it's terseness is also full of possibilities. Is Sass a serial killer who slays when the stars are right? Does he have an anal obsession with fastidious armor? Or is he just a grade A asshole? I mean what's up with this guy? This is the kind of entry where every detail lets you riff. An encounter with the Bledsaw version of this guy is going to be memorable; an encounter with the Hippenhammer version is not. The point of a Bledsaw description of an NPC or locale is not to do the imagining for the DM, but to spark her imagination. What you want from a description is just enough interesting material to get improvisation going and no more. It's a neat trick once you see how it's done, and it's not that hard to replicate. (I just did it!) But enough about prose style--on to the next point.

Different Kinds of City Make for Different Kinds of Play 

The City of the State of the World Emperor is not only the enemy of the City State of the Invincible Overlord, it is its opposite. The CSIO is an anarchic mess of a fantasy city, bursting with violent energy and sloppy juxtaposition. It is ruled from above with a light touch. It's the kind of place where you can pick up a rumor about a haunted mansion over on Festival Street while buying some illegal elven wine, and then get robbed by a minotaur on your way over to perform an exorcism. It's that kind of crazy. The City State of the World Emperor stands as order to this chaos.

For example, the text tells that the World Emperor is quietly replacing nobles with demons, about whom it says, "The demons have to look like common men and women, because most CSWE inhabitants do not care for strange differences in their neighbors." That's right, the main objection CSWE inhabitants have to demons is that they look like weird foreigners. The text also tells us that "The World Emperor loves order  and hates disturbances." Public disturbances are put down ruthlessly and will draw guards in 2.5 minutes (less than 3 rounds!). Even the map is rigid, as though someone had taken the CSIO map and smoothed it out, regularizing all its little quirky turns and alleys until a neat order prevailed.

The whole idea of this city is that everything of interest lies beneath the facade of order. It is a city of petty bureaucrats, yes, but also secret societies of cruel aristocrats, endless scheming rivalries between evil clerics and generals, and the plotting of hidden revolutionaries. It is a place where the World Emperor feels the need to maintain the upper hand by replacing his own nobles one by one with demons. And who knows what those infernal bastards want! In it's ancient, bureaucratic, and hierarchical manner, it reminds me most of a city from Tekumel. The same sorts of faction play, and shady patrons, double-dealing, and inscrutable cultural politics will be at the center of gaming in Viridistan.

The text, perhaps written by Hippenhammer, tries to stress this to players. He offers them this advice:

Gathering Information

Talk with everybody, being especially friendly with the employees of inns, taverns, and eateries. If possible, get them drunk, or otherwise in an open frame of mind. Observing marketplace activity can be extremely helpful. Encourage the relating of rumors, new and old. Learn about sudden unusual behavior. Concentrate on getting to know persons of one's own rank, position, and interests. Talk with the right people. Books and libraries (the literary kind) may also be advantageous. 

In Virdistan it's about who you know, and from among this subset, the tiny universe of those you can trust. It's all a game of cat in mouse in this ancient city of brooding secrets. This is a fun premise for play. CSWE tries to foster this with its tables of encounters, so different from those in the CSIO. It's all "Someone has urgent private information for a player," or "So and so is desperately searching for a prophet," or "A child is squeezing into a small space to spy on someone," or "The guards want to ask you some questions." It doesn't quite work, because it isn't quite the stuff of adventures, but one can imagine a good version of the encounter tables that would do better. CSWE also introduces an awful mini-game for "establishing comaraderie", reminiscent of the sexist mini-game for picking up women in CSIO, where the players has to perform a set sequence of actions to gain "levels" of comaraderie with an NPC. For example, two jokes plus a drink gets you "Level 1". Again, we could imagine less mechanically awkward and more productive rules for acquiring contacts in the city. (The Nightmares Underneath has some excellent ideas about this kind of thing.)

Hippenhammer was compelled to include entries for endless shops, military barracks, petty bureaucrats, and taverns over two separate books numbering 160 pages (with a third separate book for the Wilderlands Campaign Hexmap 6!). Furthermore, the locations leave blanks for the Judge to fill in their street locations. It doesn't bother putting them on the map, because, frankly, who cares where they are. Getting from point A to point B is not an adventure in itself, nor can one visit a notorious bootmaster married to a bigoted ogress to get shoe repairs. This lack of location gives the lie to the whole enterprise: the truth is that there is no point in this city to the micro-geographical knowledge provided by the CSIO.

And since the establishments aren't themselves sources of adventure, there's no point to detailing them all either. Hippenhammer told me in our brief Facebook conversation that he had trouble understanding why he was filling in all these trivial detail in the seemingly endless numbered locations. Partly this may be a lack of understanding of the model provided by the CSIO, but I think it may partly be a real lack of fit with the city as described. Seen from this perspective, one main problem with the CSWE is that it mechanically applies a template that is suitable for the specific style of play of the CSIO to a city better suited to a different style of play.

It is possible to imagine a better executed version of the template, that has the quirky Bledsaw energy in all the location entries, but tries to hew closer to the concept of Viridistan. Perhaps, instead of rumors, the entries for the establishments might say what secrets the owners of the establishment know, and who their allies and rivals are. This would certainly be neat, a sort of micro-geography of hidden knowledge and webs of relations. But this information would not see nearly as much play as the entries in the CSIO, since walking around the city is not an adventure in itself, so there is much less opportunity to bring the potters and glass-blowers of the city into the fabric of adventure on the fly. Still, I think it maybe could work.

But a more obvious approach for this city than detailing all the shop owners, would be to focus on the description of factions, of central players, of secret societies, and hidden and remarkable locations. We need tables of schemes, and hidden purposes. ("What does the intercepted message say?" "How is he being blackmailed?") On this approach, coming to know Viridistan is not coming to know its byways and alleys, much less its rooftop mazes. Instead, to know this city is to know its secret schemes and the people behind them. With Bledsaw quality prose, this approach could have produced an amazing city supplement more suited to running games in The City of Spices.

Because play is the thing, a city supplement must focus relentlessly on the facts necessary to enable the Judge's improvisation in this style of play. The ultimate limitation of the City State of the World Emperor is that it doesn't do this.

Druillet, who else?

City State of the Invincible Overlord: The City as Dungeon Crawl

The City State of the Invincible Overlord is a boisterous sword and sorcery city. It wears its pulp and weird tales roots proudly. It is the product of shameless pastiche. What would happen if Conan were in Lankhmar, and tried to steal an elven jewel from the Temple of Pegana? If that premise sounds appealing, then you just might like this city.

The City State of the Invincible Overlord (CSIO) is one of the gems of the early hobby. It was published in 1976 by Judge's Guild. The map for CSIO was sold originally out of the trunk of Bill Bledsaw's mustang at Gencon IX, along with subscriptions for future installments with a map key and rules for play in the city. Eventually it was sold as a package number, with a guidebook to the city, rules for encounters, ancillary dungeon maps, and the campaign hexmap #1 of their famous Wilderlands setting. 

The heart of the product is the map of the City State. It is absolutely gorgeous, a thing of real beauty. It's set in a pleasingly complex geography, surrounding the Estuary of Roglaroon, and the Mermist Swamps, giving it a sort of seedy port feel. The map names every major street and plaza, and you can trace the many back alleys, and envision their twists an turns. It also shows you every single building in the city. Many (roughly 1 in 4) of these buildings have names and keyed entries.

The reason that the map is the heart of the CSIO is that it approaches the city as a giant dungeon. The idea is that it is full, dripping, almost implausibly exploding, with adventure. Just walking from one neighborhood to another in order to visit some shops will embroil a party in numerous exploits. The way that a dungeon map is the heart of a dungeon crawl adventure, and is a kind of known environment (to the DM), coiled like a spring with possibilities, and filled with fun to be had around every turn--this is like that--except bigger, more open, and so looser, and more free wheeling, dependent on chance and a greater level of improvisation.

When I say that the city is lovingly detailed, so that you can know every corner and alley way, and can catalogue at least a large fraction of its more interesting establishments, I don't mean that it is like a fantasy encyclopedia. Unlike many other city products of a later vintage, moved by a similar fantasy of totally knowing a city, the CSIO has no patience for extensive trivia. The entries are organized by street name. They are terse and suggestive of a whole scene of action, and have the flavor of something banged out in a fevered pitch on a typewriter. Here is a sample shop entry, under Barter Street. It is, in fact, the second entry in the book:

Boot & Strap
                              Class  Align Lvl HP AC SL STR INT WIS CON DEX CHAR WPN
Karugy One-Eye     FTR   CE     3     13  7    5    13    9      8      14      14     14        +1 Dagger

Notorious Bootmaster -- 28 pairs PROB 20% of fit, 3 GP each (double for Dwarves). Large Battle Axe over counter; Strongbox: 14 SP, 28 CP, 1-6 GP on person. Aliadar, huge Ogre wife: HD 4+1 HP:26 AC:5. Trapdoor to pit opening into tunnels below the city. Four kegs of wine, flask of oil, roast pig, cloak hanging on peg has key to strongbox. Map to 3000 GP hidden in the Despot Ruins. Customers include Bandits, Thieves, and Ogres, NA: 1-6, LVL 1-6 Sign over door 'Elves & Halflings Axe on Sight in Shop'. Rumor: Adolescent Wench is being dragged by her hair south on Slash Street by an Ogre named Gothmag. Rumor: Two drunken Rogues Possessing a Staff of Power are slumped over a horse tie (actually two dying Sages). 

This is pretty good stuff. A one-eyed notorious bootmaster and his huge, bigoted, ogre wife have a front shop selling boots. It smells of a pig roast and always seems full up with a rough customers, drinking wine, and gossiping. In reality, it conceals an entryway into the undercity, and these patrons are all smugglers, kidnappers, and bandits, who stop on their way out after work to get a plate of roast pork and a cup of wine from the underground roasting pit tended by the brutal ogre matron.

Notice that Karugy is a bootmaster who happens to have levels as a fighter. Now you might think this was specific to the criminal operation in this establishment--he is, after all, married to an ogress--but you'd be wrong. Every potter and barmaid in the City-State has levels in some class, usually fighter or thief. The assumption seems to be that everyone can hold their own, and the PCs are nothing special. This is also one of the many ways that the CSIO takes the mechanics of D&D incredibly literally, perhaps more literally than intended.

Notice too the system of rumors. Most entries have one, but this entry, being full of gossiping miscreants, has two. The rumors provides the dungeon master with something to slip in to the conversation if the opportunity presents itself, providing a sudden adventure seed to be followed up on should the players be interested. In this case, the rumors are probably what the cliental are discussing when the PCs enter the shop. Obviously this feature has to be handled with discretion and a light touch by the DM. It is something to liven up the scene, something we can assume the NPCs know about, and the source of potential good fun. But it should be used sparingly and introduced organically as makes sense.

These rumors like almost everything in the CSIO are designed to introduce adventure primarily by providing tools for DM improvisation. But the main tool for improvisational play is the elaborate system for city encounters. You check for an encounter once per turn in the city. There are two sorts of encounter check, rolled on alternate turns. The first is a percentile chance of a special encounter for each named street. It runs from the prosaic, for example, on Barter Street where the Boot & Strap establishment is located:

                                              Barter Street
PROB 38% chance of being surrounded by Street Urchins demanding 1 CP each to go away

To the the fun:

                                              Festival Street
PROB 20% of 'Razing' (Harassment) By Party of Nobles, MA 17-22, LVL1-12; (Attack only if insulted)

To the bizarre:

                                             Prefect Street
PROB 10% of An Efreet Jumping Down From A Roof And Stealing any Item.

This is a neat mechanic that provides a quirky texture to the city, giving identity and life to the different streets, that come complete with vermin infestations, mysterious fogs, festivals, and roustabouts of all kinds.

The second sort of encounter is the more usual 1 in 6 chance, rolled then on a table, or rather a series of tables. Most of the encounters that result are generic, e.g., "A slaver attacks the party out of religious hatred," or, "An Amazon propositions the party to search [for something or someone missing]." In play, I've found this generic quality works very well, allowing one to adapt the encounter to the specifics of the ongoing situation, and providing just enough material to work with for purposes of improvisation. The tables have enough variety that I don't think they would get old. (In full nested combination, the tables produce thousands upon thousands of possible encounters.) They have consistently produced great fun at my table.

However, it took me a long time to grok the system, which worships at the altar of Rube Goldberg. The procedure is this. First you roll on a chart called "Type of Encounter" (1d6) 1: Attacked by surprise 2: Attacked 3: Slanders/Insult 4: Questions Players 5: Propositions Players 6: Special encounter. (There is, apparently, a lot of fighting in the CSIO.)

Special encounters have their own table (in some cases with nested further tables) which is fun, it can be anything from having a brick dropped on your head to having a town crier announce that the city is being attacked by legions of orcs. For 1-5 you then roll on the second chart "Who Encountered" 1-4: Men 5: Unusual 6: Per Quarter.

Each of these results requires you to roll on a separate table. If you roll 1-4 then you next roll on a "Social Level" chart which is a 1d6 and 1d20 giving you a range of possible folks, grouped by fanciness, with healthy quantities of town guard types thrown in to the matrix. There are further charts for a result of 5: Unusual people, and for encounters with 6: Per Quarter which sends you to a shorter table with the sorts of people you would expect to bump in to in the quarter of the city where the encounter happens. There are further charts like "Attack Reasons" or even "Who are the Vigilantes Searching for".

It could happen that you have to make up to 5 rolls, the first to determine that there is an encounter, and four separate rolls on different tables to determine, for example, that "Vigilantes are searching for a dwarf". Another problem is that women are almost never encountered. When they are encountered, they're supposed to initiate this weird mini-game where the PCs can pick them up through repartee rolls supplemented by gifts. This is especially strange in a city where the women encountered almost all have levels and seem to be just as badass as the men. I have the feeling that it is much more in keeping with the CSIO to have a looser and freewheeling sexuality to match the 300 religions that the guidebook tells us are practiced in the city. If ogres are marrying notorious one-eyed boot-makers, and S&M shops abound (see the entries on the fine establishments of Hedonist Street) then clearly anything goes in this city. At any rate, that's how I'd run it with adults.

I have to say, even with all the rolling on sub-tables and layout flaws, it has run like a dream for me at the table. So far I've run 8 (short) sessions with my daughter (9) and her cousins (10 and 13). They have gotten up to some memorable shenanigans. Here is one chain of events, that played out over three sessions, all the product of improvisation using the encounter tables, and the map and key.

When the party first got to the City-State (that's another tale!), one of the first things they stumbled across was auction in Slave Market Plaza. Their reaction to this trafficking in human wares was, "Slavery? Hell no! We are going to make these people pay!" So they came up with the brilliant scheme of selling the beefy half-orc fighter in the party as a slave (for a tidy little sum), and then using him as an inside man to rob his purchaser. I played up the slave-owner's villainy (he was a noble called Lugo the Cruel). In the end, the party fomented a slave revolt, during which they looted his mansion on Twilight Road.

In a later session, one of the slave's they freed, a loyal follower called "Lobster" because of a birthmark on his head, was slain by an attack from an ogre who came barreling out of an alley and took umbrage at the fact that Lobster was in his way. The players had really loved Lobster, and they remembered that a candlemaker named Remy on By Water road had offered to sell them a candle that allowed one to speak with the dead. Along the way they were propositioned by a noble wearing a mask, who said he had seen them fight the ogre, and offered them a hefty sum if they would use the same set of skills to kill a minotaur gladiator,  who was kept in some apartments of the undercity beneath the Sea Hawk Tavern on Regal Street. They agreed to the deal intending to swindle the mysterious noble.

When they had purchased the skull-shaped candle and conversed with Lobster in its eery red light, they asked him two questions. (1) You know the city pretty well, where can we get a fake minotaur head? Answer, "Try the mask maker on Festival Street, near the Plaza of Profuse Pleasures". (2) Is there any way we can bring you back from the dead? Answer, "For three days I dwell on the shores of river styx before I can be ferried across by the boatman Charon. During that time you may beseech Harmakhis, God of the Dead, to release me. He appears each night to receive a sacrifice in the bowels of his temple near the Square of the Gods." When they asked each question, I briefly looked at the map and consulted a couple of entries and voila sweet, sweet adventure hooks appeared. This is the kind of improvisational adventure, focused on the micro-geography of the city, that I think the CSIO is designed to foster.

I am moved by the approach of treating a city as a kind of freewheeling mega-dungeon. It taps into deep fantasies of mine of possessing a kind of carnal knowledge of the secrets of a city, a seemingly endless world of human creation that abounds in secrets and wonders. What can I say, I grew up in the East Village in the 1980's, and fell in love with the labyrinth of ruined splendor called Pittsburgh in the 2000's. How could I not want this?

Sadly, I think to really scratch that itch, the CSIO would need to be four, or even six times as big as it is. When I look at the map, I can't help but think to myself that the city is not big enough to sustain the sort of illusion it produces. The city is larger than life, and it is supposed to be crammed with every possible kind of intrigue and adventure--and 300 religions goddamnit--but it's the size of half the Greenwich Village. I want to prepare for the game by losing myself in the City-State's alleys and byways, to take a taste here and there, knowing that I could never hold it all in my mind. I want the thing to be big enough that the players feel that they could never explore all of it, and for the information they acquire about the city to be a big point of play. I want the shit to be deep.

Since it struggles with information and layout design as it is, to handle that quantity of material, it would need a serious redesign. The ideal form, I think, would be a clickable PDF of the city map, where you could click on each building to pull up the short entry if it has one, and you could fill in it whatever notes and information you want to add. Of course, part of the beauty of the original map is its lovingly hand-drawn, organic quality. We would need to keep the charm of that rather than opting for the smoothed over, artificially lit, hellscape that is produced by most digitized map design. At the very least, there should be more order to the map key, consistent use of the map coordinates to locate keyed buildings, and a quickly accessible index that let's you locate an establishment by name.

Another thing my ideal, fantasized CSIO would contain is excellent art, which it is almost entirely lacking in the original form. The ideal artist for the CSIO would be someone with a good pulp sword & sorcery aesthetic, the kind of thing you see in Conan comics by Ernie Chan or Barry Windsor-Smith, or maybe Stephen Fabian, or the sort of sensibility possessed by the artists currently working on the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.

Erne Chan

In sum, the CSIO is one of the best products of the early wild days of the hobby. Looking at the rules of D&D in a very literal way, and having only dungeon crawling as a model to work with, Bob Bledsaw asked how the play of D&D might be extended to a sword & sorcery city. The City State of The Invincible Overlord is his brilliant if flawed answer. It provides one template for city design: the city as megadungeon, and shows us how it could be done well. Of course, we could do it better still.