Ready for a major departure from everything I've been arguing in this series so far?
Blades in the Dark, Magical Industrial Revolution, Electric Bastionland, Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, Oz, Hex. Megacity campaigns. In each of these games / settings, there's a single, massive settlement that serves as the centerpiece of the whole campaign. That means the designers had the burden of ensuring that their city has a lot of depth and detail. Enough mileage to carry 20+ sessions all by itself. If you're reading this post right now because you also want to run a megacity campaign, then I recommend you read those books and plunder greedily. They are chock full of awesome ideas. I'm going to highlight some of them.
Hold your horses, city slicker
There's a big caveat on this post. Yes, these ideas are great for one type of campaign, but not most campaigns. Chances are, your game probably features more time spent in dungeons and wilderness, with the players only occasionally making brief visits to a variety of different settlements. And if you're making a city that the players will only ever visit a handful of times, maybe only for 1-4 sessions in total, then it's just not worth implementing some of these awesome ideas. It would be a waste of time and effort, since the players wouldn't get to fully experience it.
To make a comparison, it's similar to the difference between a megadungeon campaign versus a campaign that features the occasional dungeon. The internet is brimming with advice for improving your dungeoncrawling experience, but you have to pay attention to when that advice is universal versus when it's only really applicable to a dungeon you expect to spend 20+ sessions in. Jaquaysing techniques, lots of competing factions, restocking the dungeon, dynamic ecosystems, etc. All of these are worth it if the players keep coming back to the dungeon again and again and again. Noooooot so much if they only spend 1-2 sessions there.
Blades in the Dark
Credit: John Harper
Blades in the Dark takes place entirely within the gothic steampunk city of Doskvol. There's a map of it. I think it's really cool. Earlier I said you don't need this level of detail, but, well, if you're going to have the entire game set in the same city for every single campaign, it definitely doesn't hurt to have this much detail.
Obviously, the book covers the basic city info you'd want to know. A little bit of history, some notes on culture and language, a bunch of neighborhoods with some basic descriptions, etc. But you know what really brings the city to life? Organized crime and the law. There are numerous gangs throughout Doskvol, each competing for turf, influence, wealth, and more. The players run a gang of their own, and are thus intractably entangled in the ever-shifting web of relationships that drives criminal activity in the city. At the same time, all gangs must contend with the police, carefully managing the amount of heat you attract from your illicit activities.
These are both great gameplay elements to include because they ensure that the players are constantly weighing risk-vs-reward, and their interactions always give the GM fuel for future challenges, dynamically generating an emergent story. They also give the players a more meaningful way to engage with the map. They think about the geography of the city in political terms.
Of course, these ideas depend on, y'know, your players being members of a gang that's trying to carve out turf in a city of crime. Bit of a specific premise.
Magical Industrial Revolution
Magical Industrial Revolution takes place entirely within the high magic Victoriana city of Endon. It's the place to be if you're a wizard with big ambitions. And if you're a party of D&D adventurers? Well the nice thing about high-level wizards is that they cause lots of trouble, collect lots of magic items, and have lots of rivals, so there's no shortage of adventure opportunities in Endon.
Again, just like Blades, it includes all the basic stuff you'd want to know about the city (plus a lot of advanced stuff!). But what juicy, unique stuff does it add on top? My favorite addition is a mechanic it calls Innovations: a list of 8 breakthroughs in magical research that lead to bold and unpredictable new spells being created. Pocket dimensions, scrying tech, illusions, and so on. Each innovation progresses from its initial discovery to its widespread adoption to its inevitable apocalyptic consequences. They advance in parallel, but very gradually and at an uneven rate.
And as they advance, so too does the city itself. Throughout the book, there are numerous rules, resources, encounters, that actually change depending on how much progress the 8 innovations have made so far. For example, all the major locations keyed on the map include not one, but three separate descriptions for the GM to refer to: low magic, medium magic, high magic (see image above).
These are a great element to include because they serve as natural "plot threads" that shape the campaign, escalating the "difficulty level" without railroading the players through a specific plotline they have to complete. It enhances the experience of urban gameplay because every aspect of living in this city gets tied to the priorities and stakes of the player characters' adventures. It also makes the city feel like a living space, rather than a static description the GM jotted down on their scrap paper 6 months ago when the campaign began.
Oh, hey, and you know what else Magical Industrial Revolution includes to spice up the urban setting a little more?
- Newspapers fully implemented as a system for both delivering regular setting updates to the players and giving the players a way to disseminate info of their own. This normally wouldn't be appropriate in a D&D game because of 1) (relatively) modern advances in technology, and 2) industrial population levels. But the former can be handwaved if you're down for some anachronism (or, y'know, magic), so all you need to satisfy the latter condition is to be running a megacity.
- A detailed magic and spellcasting economy, because it's a city of wizards in a world of high magic. This one may actually be a great thing to steal for your D&D campaign, if you likewise have a high magic setting. But most of my readers are OSR fans and they're probably offended at the very suggestion.
- Many different modes of transportation, which—actually, wait, this is a good segue into the next example.
Electric Bastionland
Electric Bastionland takes place in and around the weird and chaotic science fantasy city of Bastion. Unlike these other examples, there is no canonical Bastion. No map or key exists. Instead, the book provides tools to create your own Bastion. As long as the city you generate is in accordance with the book's themes and tropes, then you're playing in a version of Bastion!
The meat and potatoes of adventure in Bastion itself relies on the borough system. The book provides guidelines for the GM to create a single borough of the city, and then you use a simple pointcrawl procedure to navigate it at the table.
Specifically, the pointcrawl is defined by its "primary transit routes," e.g. trains, metros, canals, ziplines, etc. You start by coming up with some themes, pick a few novel methods of transit ("I think this borough has a huge conveyor belt running through it!") and then brainstorm content based on that. A single borough is pretty disposable. It only has enough juice for about one session's worth of adventure, but it also only takes about an hour to create.
A lot of this sounds counter to what I've been arguing in this series so far. But again, this post is about megacities, which create a lot of exceptions. Previously I said that it doesn't make much sense to run a city like it's a dungeon, because it isn't subject to the same conditions that make dungeons dungeon-y and crawl-worthy.
But not Bastion. It's not anything like a normal city. It really is closer to being a dungeon. I'll quote Chris's description from the text:
Bastion is an adventure site. It is not a hub. Not a main menu. Not an online shop. People die in Bastion! They get tricked and take wrong turns. They fall victim to industrial accidents. When characters haul the treasure out of the expedition site, and slog their way back through Deep Country or the Underground, they don't get to switch off just because they're in the city. Run it like a dungeon. Draw a map, fill it with odd stuff, punish mistakes. When they go off-grid, roll on tables and make stuff up. People are unhelpful. Places are difficult to get to. Things run bumpily. Finding medical treatment is an adventure. Going shopping is an adventure. Getting the train to the library is an adventure. No fast travel without complications. No downtime without decisions. No switching off. Everything is the game. The game is always on.
In a way, we might consider Bastion to be like a "mythic city," in the same way that the original dungeons were a "mythic underworld."
For one thing, the city is ridiculously big, implied to be so large and complicated and zany that the players can discover a new borough every week and still have endlessly more left to find. In fact, they likely won't even return to those previous ones, either. The city is ever-changing!
Because it's huge and industrialized, we can justify having novel transit methods (unlike in a medieval city, where the size of the settlement will never be large enough to warrant anything other than basic roads). And because it shares similar pressures to a dungeon or the wilderness, we can justify actually crawling it and implementing random encounters as a way to create danger.
Maybe most importantly of all, it's a city worth forcing the players to "discover" every destination one at a time because the destinations are always bananas. There are no generic locations. There's nothing you can just "assume" will be in this place. It's 100% weird hidden gems.
Conclusion
This series so far has mostly been me naysaying other people's ideas. But my point this whole time has been to emphasize the importance of context. I hope this post has shown you that, yes, those cool ideas I dismissed earlier actually are valid... under the right circumstances.
You may have entered into this series wondering "how can I improve the town bits of my dungeoncrawling campaign?" But if any of this other stuff sounds cool enough to you, then you should consider running a megacity game!
If you really want to focus on urban exploration, where the PCs are functionally just tourists aimlessly wandering around until they stumble onto something neat, then the one context in which it makes the most sense is a megacity.
Likewise, if you really want a fancy, detailed map showing every nook and cranny of the city, then a megacity campaign is the best way to justify it.
And of course, if you really, really like random encounters, imposing a time-based pressure and generating emergent conflicts, where just getting from Point A to Point B is dangerous, then it fits a megacity a lot more than just a regular settlement.
In short, megacities aren't always the answer... but for you, they might be.
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