Urban Campaigns: Advice?

[virgil]

I tried to search the backposts, and couldn't find much. How much difference is there in running an urban campaign in D&D as compared to a more typical dungeon crawl or overland tribe-fight? The size of the settlement affects the scope, and the overall level is based more on the power of the residents than the plots themselves (largely). Do urban campaigns look more like Shadowrun with a Ren-faire aesthetic, or is there an expectation of interacting with city politics more due to the fact the upper class are more vulnerable to stabbing than corporations?

[Occluded Sun]

Much, much less concern over resupply and logistics. Although most groups, in my experience, don't bother tracking those sorts of details anyway.

[Blicero]

It also depends, for example, on if you are doing late era Tome stuff where daily resource management is super minimal, or if you are doing early era 3.0 stuff where daily resource management is very prevalent. Since city adventures tend to allow players more control in the rate at which they have encounters.

[Dogbert]

1) Unless you're running an animu game, cities are not supposed to be lawless. Your typical band of murderous hobos trapped in a city for more than 2 sessions will quickly turn the game into Grand Theft Dragon.

2) There's no level-relevant swag in cities. In my personal experience, 9 out of 10 DMs froth at the mouth at the mention of "magic shops", and even if they were such shops in your fictitious city, shopping for a scroll of Trap the Soul and a 9-Lives Stealer Blade sounds like a stretch of WSOD to me even if your kingdom is all for Second Ammendmend solutions.

3) Unless you're playing 4 and 5E, the amount of monsters that you can plausible put inside a city's walls dramatically diminishes as the party goes up in level. Enemies will be humanoid in the majority.

Those are the main three off the top of my head atm.

[Antariuk]

I agree with Dogbert, but I think we can expand on his point 3) a bit:

While you might have problems with the plausibility of dozens of liches and mature dragons running wild within the walls of a 'normal' city, you also get the opportunity to introduce a huge cadre of weird - and interesting - NPCs, much more so than in your average wilderness exploration. The movers and shakers within such a city could and should be a bit more than just your run-of-the-mill aristocrats and retired adventurers. Shapeshifting monsters like araneas or rakshasas are just the tip of the iceberg here. And coming up with a reason for some kind of masquerade that has to be maintained by those who are in the know isn't hard in the context of D&D's cosmology.


Other than that, the major points have all been posted already. Resource access is probably the most important aspect for your average game since an encounter's difficulty really shifts when folks can afterwards simply walk two blocks and buy some healing and restorations with spare pocket money.

Divination and information gathering also becomes pretty important. At low levels, this is a place where rogues can actually shine a bit, if not for long. If you really want you could introduce some adventuring or minigames regarding access to libraries and such, but I'd be careful with that since it really should be easy to read up on the history of Kharx, the Grey Dread, while in the city.

[kzt]

An encounter's difficulty also shifts when the entire town guard and higher level supporting players can get called out on your ass if you create a "scene".

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Google is great - I think it's also very important to decide what kind of urban campaign you want to run (grimdark, shadowrun, terry pratchet etc), and then decide *how* the city is shaped/works/ and create other details to support that.

Also, tons of threads on this in other forums out there:

http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... n-campaign

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthre ... d-threats)

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/e ... adventures

http://www.dungeonmastering.com/gaming- ... -campaigns

Ptolus is also a whole campaign world of... One City. If you're doing Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep has a campaign book for it. I remember skimming it 10 years ago and thinking it was ok, but I have no idea how useful it really would be now.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Thinking about it, there are also some good supplements to running D&D campaigns in a city, but I can't for the life of me remember what they are called, and certainly not the 3.0 Cityscape book, which was a piece of shit.

[Orca]

One of the big differences is that the number of recurring characters is likely to be much higher. It can be handy to keep a list where people can see it on a whiteboard or something, maybe with a descriptive word or two or a printed out picture stuck next to the name.

[Antariuk]

Ptolus is also a whole campaign world of... One City. If you're doing Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep has a campaign book for it. I remember skimming it 10 years ago and thinking it was ok, but I have no idea how useful it really would be now.

Ptolus and Waterdeep: City of Splendors both suffer from very limited accessibility. Mining them for ideas requires you to read them almost from cover to cover, and in the process you drown in tons of boring details. Not to mention that Ptolus is what, over 600 pages?

I'd rather use the Necromancer Games books Bard's Gate or Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers instead. Especially Hollowfaust is pretty cool, Bard's Gate is kinda standard fare but still a lot less pretentious than so many WotC supplements.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

Ptolus is also a whole campaign world of... One City. If you're doing Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep has a campaign book for it. I remember skimming it 10 years ago and thinking it was ok, but I have no idea how useful it really would be now.

Ptolus and Waterdeep: City of Splendors both suffer from very limited accessibility. Mining them for ideas requires you to read them almost from cover to cover, and in the process you drown in tons of boring details. Not to mention that Ptolus is what, over 600 pages?

I'd rather use the Necromancer Games books Bard's Gate or Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers instead. Especially Hollowfaust is pretty cool, Bard's Gate is kinda standard fare but still a lot less pretentious than so many WotC supplements.

I was more suggesting Ptolus or Waterdeep as settings to be played in as a full campaign vs using them for inspiration for another campaign.

That said, I'll look up Bard's Gate and Hollowfaust, as I'm always on the lookout for full writeups of cities.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

double post

[Blicero]

Stylistically diametric to books like Ptolus or City of Splendors is stuff like Vornheim or Yoon-Suin that rely more on tables and procedural content generation than they do on exhaustive detail delivery. I've looked through Ptolus a bit, and the effort of comprehending and internalizing it does not quite seem worth it to me, even if you are planning on running a full campaign set in it. Vornheim and Yoon-Suin do a lot more with a lot less.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

I tried to search the backposts, and couldn't find much. How much difference is there in running an urban campaign in D&D as compared to a more typical dungeon crawl or overland tribe-fight? The size of the settlement affects the scope, and the overall level is based more on the power of the residents than the plots themselves (largely). Do urban campaigns look more like Shadowrun with a Ren-faire aesthetic, or is there an expectation of interacting with city politics more due to the fact the upper class are more vulnerable to stabbing than corporations?

The book I have been thinking about is Cityworks, a FFG d20 book part of their Legends and Lairs series, written by none other than Mike Mearls. I actually own it and gave it a reread. I would describe the book as adequate for giving advice for running D&D urban game. It does feel like it could have had more inspiration or advice, just a tich more meat...

[hyzmarca]

2) There's no level-relevant swag in cities. In my personal experience, 9 out of 10 DMs froth at the mouth at the mention of "magic shops", and even if they were such shops in your fictitious city, shopping for a scroll of Trap the Soul and a 9-Lives Stealer Blade sounds like a stretch of WSOD to me even if your kingdom is all for Second Ammendmend solutions.

That's what the mobsters are for. Sure, the legal magic shops probably don't have any super-illegal gear, but the Beholder Mafia probably does. So you go to the Eyefather and he says "someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this as a gift. "

I agree with Dogbert, but I think we can expand on his point 3) a bit:

While you might have problems with the plausibility of dozens of liches and mature dragons running wild within the walls of a 'normal' city

I have to disagree. Liches probably should be common in sufficiently large cities, certainly any city large enough to have major university or a substantial library. Since Liches all about gaining and hoarding knowledge, they're going to go where the knowledge is. And that really isn't dusty old tombs, for the most part. That's cities. University cities, for sure. Any place where scholars gather, you should be able to find liches nearby.


Dragons are another issue, of course, but metalics can naturally shape-shift at will. You're unlikely to find a red dragon, because it would cause a "holy fuck, a red dragon" reaction. But a gold dragon is a different story. The guy who serves your beer could be a gold dragon pretending to be a human. Because adventurers always gather in taverns and drunk people tend to be more talkative than they should be, so disguising yourself as a bartender is a great way keep up with what's happening.

Really, D&D urban settings that are supposed to be more than just a place to rest and get info between dungeons tend to be very cosmopolitan for a reason. If you want to do a full 1-20 city campaign, it needs to be in some place that's very cosmopolitan.