City Build, City Play

An accidental Part One

Ok, time to eat some crow. Fresh off my post from last week responding to Realm Builder Guy about whether or not Knave was a finished game, I find myself really needing some rules for playing in a city, which Knave does not provide. Now, I think it’s only fair to point out that many other games fail to provide much in the way of procedural city play either. Certainly, there are tons of fantasy cities out there, and even a good deal of fantasy city sourcebooks. I’m especially fond of the Nocturnal Table for generating city encounters.

But how do you play in a city? From an adventure game perspective, the city is where you stop playing: it’s the safe haven where you you retreat from the dungeon or the wilderness to heal your wounds, sell your treasure, and re-provision. If you did nothing else in the city than this, you could still have a perfectly rewarding adventure game. Tristram in the original Diablo functions in this way.

But even our very first example of a home base in RPGs, the eponymous Keep on the Borderlands, has hidden dangers and opportunities for adventure, despite its safe haven status. Further, some of the very best fantasy adventure stories that inspired our games feature all sorts of city adventures, from Howard’s ‘Tower of the Elephant’ to every Leiber story set in Lankhmar. We just can’t help ourselves: we want to know who else is in the common room of the tavern, and next thing you know there are a dozen plot threads for the PCs to tug on. So while the adventure game loop demands a return to civilization and safety, our imaginations and our own knowledge of cities undermine that safe haven status. Braunstein, the first proto-rpg, takes place entirely inside a town.

Now there are plenty of town-with-a-problem style adventures that give you everything you need. But my campaign has spent almost all its play time inside one city or another and what I need is a structure for both making cities and running cities. I’ve seen systems for treating cities like a dungeon crawl, but I’m not looking for exploring an enemy city or a haunted ruin of a city. I’m also not necessarily looking for encounter tables. There are plenty of those. I want a procedure, the kind of procedure that Knave gives to travel and delving, but focused on exploration and choices. I want something that maintains the adventure game turn structure with similar resource management, but I want it to be something I can toss if my players only need the safe haven status. So I need something impactful, structured, and optional.

Key to this, I think, is that idea of the safe haven. I think of that Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story where they return from raiding the Thieves’ Guild only to find their paramours have been murdered. The characters had a safe haven, but lost it due to their actions. We can see a city like Lankhmar as full of potential dangers that may become actual at any time. Since adventure games are about choices and consequences, adventuring in the city should come with the possibility of losing your sense of safety: poke your nose in the wrong place and the city (or at least parts of it) will rise up against you.

Also important is cost of living. Knave provides a cost of living table (p. 38) for players to spend their ill-gotten gains on and to give an idea of appropriate bribes, but I think this should also tie in to city structure and adventuring. Cost of living can be mapped to areas of the city and should affect both danger and mobility. That is, the difference between a character’s dress and the neighborhood they’re moving through should change reaction rolls.

Finally, time, the most important resource, must be accounted for. Time in a dungeon or the wilderness represents depletion of resources necessary to survival. How does time affect city adventuring and in what units should we track it?

Of course, in addition to building a city procedure, we also need the city itself. I love big beautiful maps as much as the next nerd, but when it comes to city play, I don’t find them extraordinarily helpful. A map of city streets and buildings does not quite spur play in the way rooms and corridors or wilderness hexes do. We need a city map that asks to be played with at the table in the same way those other kinds of maps do.

So it looks as if I’ve written myself into a multi-part post. I think the tools for city play are implicit in Knave’s system, they just need elucidation. I’ve messed around with city tables on this blog before, but found those tools unwieldy at the table. My goal here is something intuitive and fun to structure both game prep and game play.

You know you want to play GTA at the table. We just have to figure out how.