I Am An Idiot, And Forgot A Couple.

Ah, yes. My absolute favorite game-city of all freaking time.

It's danged near perfect for a tabletop campaign. Already stocked with NPCs, adventure ideas, locations, an interactive map and tons of mood and feel. Plus, players are likely to be familiar with the setting, and additional info is readily available.

C'mon. Tommy Vercetti can't keep the town forever.

Of course, I also have a copy of Vice Squad: Miami Nights, which not only wraps up feel and flavor into a delicious package, it has one of my favorite elements in a setting book. There's a section called "Never A Dull Moment", which is nothing more or less than an array of little flavor-setting incidents to spring on your players. Everything from getting your car tagged to chance run-ins with important NPCs, every one of them adds flavor and life to the setting.

Aces.

You know, I do prefer warmer climes...

Ludometrophilia

I didn't take Latin in high school but I think the above means "Love of game-cities". If not, I welcome correction.

Yesterday we went to Greenwood and hit up the Half-Price Books. I passed on the $20.00 copy of Ex Machina and went for something a little older:

R. Talsorian's Night City sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. Although it's good stuff for sure, CP 2020 isn't really my best choice for cyberpunk gaming. However, I couldn't pass up this little nugget of joy for five bucks and change, especially since it still had the color poster-map. Snag!

I've only skimmed it so far, but I find it pleasant and probably really useful (what I will henceforth term "The Thomas Factor"). It details hundreds of locations in Night City, gives an overview of how the city works, groups locations by type on a recurring map and gives a random encounter chart and interesting NPCs for each section of the city. Neat! The tone is chatty and informal, and it has a lot of flavor without being drenched in it.

Looking at it on the drive home got me to thinking about the other city-themed gamebooks that I own, and especially about how much I like that sort of thing: visitor's guides to places that don't exist.

The Edge is another one of those favorites. Much of Over The Edge, Jonathan Tweet's charmingly surreal 1992 game, is given over to describing the city and its people. It's a bizarre, cosmopolitan town on a semi-secret mediterranean island called Al Amarja, and it has everything from ex-CIA guys and mad scientists to mutants, aliens and zombies. It paints a colorful picture of a weird and multi-cultural society, and it does it by breaking the city down into manageable chunks. This book, too, gives random encounter charts for each "barrio" or neighborhood, although OTE's charts are more clever than Night City's. Reading it truly gives the sense of a balmy, weird metropolis on an island somewere. Strangely, I have never run this game.


San Angelo: City of Heroes, by the way, ROCKED. Do you like comics? Here, I'll let this guy say it for me:

"I keep getting requests for an Astro City RPG; we're not planning to do one - but I think any Astro City fans who want such a game should at least try out San Angelo. It's an intricate, involving, well-realized gaming world, and the emphasis on the reality of the surroundings and the humanity of the characters may make it just what they're looking for."

-- Kurt Busiek, creator of Astro City

Busiek nailed it -- this city feels real. It feels alive. It has a history, it has a future. You can really, truly tell that people live there, and furthermore, that your PCs can show up and make a difference. It needs a bigger map, but it's still aces.

I.C.E.'s Cyberspace was my cyberpunk game of choice Back In The Day, and while the default setting was ostensibly San Francisco, this little gem was published as an alternate stomping ground. It focuses not on Chicago itself but on the New Edison corp.'s Chicago Arcology, a self-contained city-within-a-city built around a shopping mall. It has its own gangs, its own neightborhoods (kind of), its own mass transit, its own secrets. Night City has one of these, too, but Chicago Arcology is all about its own microcosm.

Plus, it every few pages or so, the book gives you little news-fax headlines to peruse -- they range from the factual and serious to the satirical and ridiculous, capturing that "MediaBreak" feel that RoboCop made so tasty.

White Wolf's The Chaos Factor supplement for Mage: The Ascension attempted to detail Mexico City as a game setting and bored me.

Were I enterprising, I'd write one of these of my own -- maybe a city guide to Ranseur City, chief metropolis of my Traveller subsector's capital, with its corporate starship construction offices and media production facilities and robot-controlled air/raft taxis and its extensive computer networks and neat antigrav restaurants.

But I'm not an enterprising sort.

Plus, who besides me would use it?

Shelzar Shadizar Lankhmar Waterdeep

Listen --

I.

Love.

Cities.

Somethin' about 'em, I dunno what. The people, the bustle, the energy, the architecture. I really dig it. Faithful readers of this blog most lofty will recall, with a warm glow in their eager bellies, that I have spoken before of Mexico City and how much the place moves me. Aye, thou hast!

Er. Hath! Umn. Which-...whichever. Anyway, I like cities, and I have a thing about the ones that don't really exist.

In fact, about 8-10 years ago, I had a series of dreams about a city in particular, unnamed and out of space and time, modern and beautiful and alive with its own character despite being no more than a night's subconscious fancy. Almost like a a dream-city out of a Lovecraft story, but, you know, not malevolent and madness-inducing. Like, no doom, or seaweed.

I also like running micro-campaigns for my wife. She's partway through a ten-day work week and she deserves a little somethin' to blow off steam as soon as that jag is over. Ergo, I'm thinking about running such a game for her pretty soon, and sticking it squarely in an urban setting. I'm opting for fantasy as my genre of choice, if for no other reason than that I feel like it, so there.

Although I've created (or, at least, started to create) several FRPG cities in the past, I'm in no mood to futz and fumble with that particular honey-trap; my fingers will get sticky with layout and street names and concepts ad guilds and so on and so forth and nothing will get done. Screw that. I'm shoppin' off the rack.

Four ready-made fantasy cities come to mind. All four are well-established in one form or another, with lots of info available for the harried (or lazy) GM.

I just gotta pick one.

This...won't be easy.

SHELZAR: City Of Sins

From White Wolf's "Scarred Lands" line. Definitely influenced by Howard's Shadizar, full of naughtiness and peril. Right on.

Pros: I have the book; Amber's been wanting to do someting in the Scarred Lands; if I decide to use Microlite20, the stats are all ready to go.

Cons: I dunno that I'd actually use some of the stuff, like the sex constructs and the gibbering mouther employed for...uh...naughtiness.


SHADIZAR - City Of Wickedness

The original, from Robert E. Howard's typewriter! Lusty, pulpy goodness -- a language I speak well enough.

Pros: Hyboria!; kind of open to interpretation, as I don't have too much reference material; nice map from Mongoose Publishing.

Cons: I don't have the boxed set, so I'd have to make up a lot of the stuff myself (not so bad, but again, the goal is to use existing stuff, not go hanging myself up in the throes of creation).


LANKHMAR - City Of Adventure

More pulp from the mind of Fritz Leiber. Nexus of craziness!

Pros: Lots of info available; Thieves' Guild a plus; some old TSR adventures in the closet; underground city of sentient rats!

Cons: I don't have a map; I don't have a main reference book; I don't have a lot of time to re-read a buncha Leiber, as much as I'd like to.



WATERDEEP - City Of Elminst- uh, Splendors

The Forgotten Realms: Everything, The Kitchen Sink, Ten Brands Of Dish Soap and Another Sink Just In Case.

Pros: We have the old, big-ass AD&D 2nd Ed. boxed set, complete with big-ass map and big-ass info; Realms allows for transition to other types of themes and adventures if we feel like it; Amber likes her some Faerun.

Cons: Big-ass boxed set to read.


Good options all, and you can see why it's tricky. But my quest ends not there: two other things must be decided.

One is what system to use. I'm thinking easy, so it's either gonna be M20, D6 or Stories System. Low-prep is the key, but I still hafta decide.

The other...does she even want to play?

Hey! Look! A phone!