Auditing my home campaign city for urban game-playability

Reading Dwiz’s magisterial 6-part series on running cities I was struck how I recognise a lot of as things I have arrived at over trial and error with the Ducal House campaign – but what have I missed, where can it be improved?

We have put in a lot of time in cities over the campaign; the color coding below is all the sessions that are non-Thenya – anything un-highlighted is Thenya. This is 76 of 130 sessions in Thenya, 372 of 593 hours of play – so we have spent nearly 2/3 of the campaign in the city.

I was grinning reading Dwiz’s posts because it is based off a Watabous fantasy city generator map and I used the districts created from that map.

The building of a fantasy city

Testing Thenya against the guidance for level design we do have locations with people in them; frequently those were initially generated as randomly rolled up locations and then their implied inhabitant got a name, a race and maybe a personality trait or two if they did not have an obvious faction affiliation and outlook based on their occupation/habitation.

Districts got some traits, majority populations and a bit of attitude based on the major buildings there.

What feels like my major break with Dwiz’s workflow is that I did not go with ‘for sure there are some pubs’ – I went and set up a bunch of taverns at various levels – the fancy one, the guildmans one, the guardsmans one, the sorcerers one, etc. On a second look, this actually fits pretty neatly with their advice about ‘mileage’. Assumption of a generic tavern being about works fine for a short-stay city but from the (in highsight massively underestimated) time I thought we would spend in Thenya at the start, I figured having a dozen or so distinct locations would come good over time.

I have historically run up districts more quickly than Dwiz’s guidance because a thing that personally annoys me is when a place should be famous for a thing – and that thing was never mentioned until you arrive there which makes it a bit of a damp squib. Where this has really come into its own is mostly for craft-works of various kinds or major concentrations of sages – things were folk will go ‘hey, where would we find out about X’ while elsewhere. It pleases me when the barkeep or some hireling can go – “there is a famous district of arguing academics in that city there” and it makes the world feel a bit more real.

The thing that I now see I am doing wrong is that I figure out my factions, their bases and so on but I fail to make that figurehead NPC someone memorable and cool. This is something that I need to just do as a matter of course; no faction without an NPC.

Gameability audit

The point about how to get across the sheer breadth of information available about a settlement was partly mitigated for this campaign by it being a place theoretically familiar to the players so ‘I should know how to find an X’ is a reasonable first channel.

The ‘flow’ of sessions is pretty different since Thenya is not a site for recuperation and resupply, it is where many of the their resources are located and the problems they are dealing with surface.

Flow was more typically
– gather hooks and rumours over meals or by chattering with the clan
– decide what they were doing and what was needed to resolve it – from quizzing an NPC to killing things
– travel to sites about the city, travel time usually negligible unless there were exceptional circumstances
– do the things then typically return to the palace to reconvene and restart loop

Often there was a ‘post breakfast’ ‘afternoon’ and maybe ‘after dinner’ cycle of this. Time was the currency being spent rather than rations or torches.

Effectively this is a *lot* of the campaign being spent on the ‘research’ downtime action – some of it delegated, some of it relatively lightly played through but a lot of it being delved into in depth with visits to odd wizards, arcanist families, old libraries and some temples and oracles.

This is almost ‘the palace’ in place of a settlement and the city as the dungeon, just with lots of rooms being visited that were low threat. I would have initially said Thenya is not a megacity; it is not a place where the players are ‘crawling’ because they are at hazard. This city is their home and for the most part safe for them to traverse. Much of the city is elided as streets of miscellaneous small shops and residences. However, it is more that the campaign is uncovering hidden ‘rooms’ in this urban dungeon so they can slay the monsters within them, so maybe it is in fact a megacity by this model.

I think there are some lessons here about threading and prep-to-impact I can take away; partially for Thenya but definitely for other campaigns which more closely follow the ‘strangers come to town’ model.