Sir Poley's Blog, page 4

On Towns in RPGs, Part 2: Towns are Not Dungeons

In the previous
article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined quest to figure out
what, if anything, a town map is actually for
in tabletop play. If you just stumbled on this post, I encourage you to go
back and read part 1. Go on; I’ll wait.

In almost any discussion of urban adventures,
someone—whether it be a blogger online, or a writer at Wizards—will helpfully say
something like ‘a city is just another kind of dungeon.’ In particular, this crops
up in official Dungeon Master’s Guides:

The
“cobblestone jungle” of a metropolis can be as dangerous as any
dungeon.

[…]

At
first glance, a city is much like a dungeon, made up of walls, doors, rooms and
corridors. Adventures that take place in a city have two salient differences
from their dungeon counterparts, however. Characters have greater access to
resources, and must contend with local law enforcement.

[…]

Walls,
doors, poor lighting, and uneven footing: in many ways, a city is much like a
dungeon.

Dungeon Master’s Guide 3.5th
edition, 2003. p.
98

Although
they hold the promise of safety, cities and towns can be just as dangerous as
the darkest dungeon. Evil hides in plain sight or in dark corners. Sewers,
shadowy alleys, slums, smoke-filled taverns, dilapidated tenements, and crowded
marketplaces can quickly turn into battlegrounds.

Dungeon Master’s Guide 5th
Edition, 2014. p.
114

On the surface of it, this seems like a
very useful comparison, as dungeons are comfortable environments for players
and GMs alike, while adventures in cities and towns are a new, confusing
prospect. By drawing comparisons between the unfamiliar (an urban adventure)
and the familiar (a dungeon adventure), the Wizards RPG team can turn the
unfamiliar familiar and thus ease a GM’s fraying nerves.

Of course, it’s absolutely garbage. A city
is nothing like a dungeon.

Now, this is not to say that a city can’t
be twisted into a dungeon (for
example, the city is in ruins, the city is underground, the city is under siege
and full of barricades, everyone in the city has turned into zombies, etc.) in
much the same way that a temple, cave network, castle, or any feature can be
twisted into a dungeon. This might even be a fun adventure, but it isn’t a city—at least, not a typical
one. A normal city, even a pseudo-medieval one, without exceptional or
fantastical elements, is nothing like a dungeon. And here’s why.

Restricted Movement

Dungeon movement is all about restrictions,
while city movement is precisely the opposite. Dungeons are designed from the
ground up (or, more often, the ground-down) to make traversing them as difficult
as possible, while cities, to a greater or lesser degree, are built to
facilitate the movement of people, goods, and money. Rivers are bridged, slopes
are terraced, rust monsters are driven out.

You only have to look at a map of a dungeon
and a city to see the difference.

In this example from the classic Caverns of Thracia by Paul Jaquays, you
can see how constrained movement is—you can’t simply go from I to A; you must
first go through G, F, E and C—each with their own features and hazards the
party must overcome.

Now compare this historical map the
internet assures me is of 14th-century Paris:

Source

Technically, in the map above you can’t
move directly from A to B without taking several twists and turns (much like
you I to A in the Caverns of Thracia),
but at the same time—who cares? Nine times out of ten, the GM will simply say
“you get there,” and for the remaining one time out of ten, she’ll just
roll on a table to see if something happens to you along the way—something quite
unrelated to specific location.

Getting from point A to point C is a
different matter, as you have to cross a series of bridges and an island to get
there, which can be important from both a narrative and mechanical standpoint
(perhaps there’s a toll, or the bridges close after dark, or only those allowed
by the Marquis can cross the bridge, or whatever). Note that you don’t need to
know anything about the layout of
roads and buildings to see that these bridges must be crossed.

In the map above, with the exception of the
bridges, which are a rare example of a natural urban chokepoint, there are
countless routes from any one point to any other point. While the degree
depends on the setting, cities have been planned with exactly that idea in
mind—they are designed using every practical means to facilitate travel from any
location to any other location. Facilitating travel means facilitating
commerce, which directly translates to the wealth and power of the lords and
ladies running any large settlement.

In short: movement in a dungeon is virtually always highly restricted,
while movement in a city is virtually
always highly unrestricted.

Sequestered Space

In the dungeon map above—also from Caverns of Thracia—a baker’s dozen
sorcerers could light up area 1 with Fireballs
and the default assumption of both players and the GM is that the lizardmen in
area 7 would be none the wiser. This stands to a cursory amount of logical
sense—rooms are separated by thick walls of stone and heavy doors—but mostly,
it’s due to real-world logistical reasons. When the party is in area 1, the GM
has her dungeon key open to area 1 and area 1 alone. To check what’s going on
in nearby rooms, the GM would have to flip through several pages—often at
opposite ends of the book, especially in cases of multi-storey dungeons—and it
would almost never matter. The rare exceptions to this rule are written
directly into the dungeon key:

6) Spear Trap: As the location of the “6” is passed
on the map, there is a 1-4 chance on a D6 that 2 spears will come flying out of
the south wall, headed north and hit as if cast by a 7th level
fighter. There is a 25% chance that the Gnoll guard, AC: 5, HD: 2, HP 13,
Weapon: Morning Star, will be dozing at point “g.” If he hears approaching adventurers, he will slip into Room 7
and the Gnolls in there will have an ambush ready.

Paul
Jaquays, The Caverns of Thracia,
1979. p. 23 (emphasis mine)

In the above example, Jaquays specifically
calls out a rare inter-room interaction—that the dozing gnoll sentry will go
and alert his comrades. This prevents the previously-mentioned page-flipping
headache, as the GM knows exactly where to look, and can safely ignore all
other rooms

Except in specific cases mentioned, a
common abstraction is that a full symphony orchestra could play in one room,
and have little to no effect even in adjacent rooms.

In a town, the same thing is not true
whatsoever. If the party opens fire on Alchemy Street, people are going to care—kind
of a lot—and are likely to do something about it. Even in a building, the
presence windows and thinner urban walls means that people outside might come
and investigate a commotion. Civilians might run and hide, the militia might
get called in, and the party will be dragged before a magistrate.

In a dungeon, unless specifically mentioned,
everything and everyone is isolated from each other. In a city, the opposite is
true—everyone and everything are in constant communication. Great efforts have
to be gone through to achieve real isolation in an urban environment.

In a Dungeon, Everything
is Life or Death

Another major distinction between a dungeon
and a city is the density of threat. I maintain that, short of an active warzone,
even the most crime-ridden, poverty-stricken slums are safer than even the safest
of dungeons. If some PCs get drunk and wander, unarmed, through the worst neighbourhood imaginable, there’s
still a pretty good chance they’ll get through unmolested. Failing that, they
might be mugged. Actual murder or assault is possible, but pretty unlikely. These
things happen, and maybe even every day, but not to every person every day. Someone, after all, has to actually live in
this part of town. Often quite a lot of someones. In a dungeon, those same PCs
will be eaten alive with no
possibility of survival. In a dungeon, it’s not a question of if the floors will collapse to reveal a
30-foot drop to poisoned spikes, but when.

This level of threat is why every hallway,
door, and intersection matters. A
dead-end isn’t merely a delay, it’s another roll on a Wandering Monster table.
A locked door doesn’t just mean “go back to the intersection of Oak and
Fitzgerald and hang a left and we’ll go around,” it means pick the lock or
face the possibility that you’ll never see
what’s on the other side of it. This might mean missing a powerful magic sword
that would be the difference between life and death when, two hours later,
you’re face-to-face-to-face-to-face-to-face with a hydra.

If you try to run a city with a similar
density of threat (that is to say, rate of wandering monsters, traps, and so
on), it’ll take five sessions just to get from the gate to the inn, and Pelor
help you when you’re just leaving and realize you forgot to get another fifty
trail rations each.

A Town is Not a Dungeon

As mentioned previously, I appreciate the
rationale in trying to compare a dungeon to a town in order to make the
unfamiliar familiar, but I think the products of such a comparison lie
somewhere between unhelpful and harmful. In a way, that makes the Dungeon Master’s Guide 3.5th
Edition correct: “Walls, doors, poor lighting, and uneven footing: in
many ways, a city is much like a dungeon.” This statement is absolutely
correct, but, I contend, the listed features are the only ways a city is like a dungeon.

Now that I’ve found what a dungeon is not, in my next post, I’ll take a stab
at determining what a city is.

On Towns in RPGs, Part 1: Are Town Maps Useless?

A recent 
series 
of 
articles  by 
Alexis Smolensk
at the brilliant and eclectic Tao
of D&D asked a bold question: the question of whether, in the context
of D&D, town maps are useless in actual play. As I read, I found myself nodding
in agreement, but part of me—a big part—simply struggled with the concept. How
could town maps be useless when I—and many GMs—simply adore town maps?

What follows isn’t exactly response to Alexis’s
posts, which you should definitely go read, but rather, my own train of thought
on the same question.

So What’s Wrong With Town Maps?

Source

Here’s a map of Sutulak, posted as part of
Wizards of the Coast now-defunct Map-A-Week
program after the 3.5-era Cityscape supplement
in 2006. For the time being, you can still get these maps in a hidden corner of
their website, if you know where to look. I chose this map not because it was
particularly good or bad, but because it was relatively typical of the sort of
RPG town map you can find if you google “D&D town map.” The map
accompanied this blurb:

Sutulak resembles a military community in general layout. The
streets are wide, albeit less well kept, to allow for horses and carts to carry
slaves to and from the markets. While the main avenues are straight and easily
navigated, the majority of the city’s smaller streets are winding and
confusing, making it difficult for newly captured slaves to find their way out
if they should escape their restraints.

Source

The map isn’t just a piece of art, it’s a
game prop, created to efficiently convey information to the GM and players. Through
that lens, what does this map actually tell us?

The precise layout of the streets and buildingsThe size and scale of the town, including exact
distances between buildingsThe precise location of various keyed locations
(marked by numbers 1 through 14)The general look and feel of the town

Let’s break down each of these points in
detail to see how they’d come up in play.

The
precise layout of the streets and buildings

Neither as GM nor player have I ever cared
one whit about whether the Green Dragon Inn was a left turn or right turn from Ye
Olde Gnomish Alchemy Shoppe. Typically, the party navigates a city by simply
saying “we go to the Green Dragon Inn,” and the GM either whisks them
over there immediately, or stops and describes something they find along the
way (often with help from a random encounter table of some description).
Possibly, a skill check—knowledge (local) or gather information—is required to find
the route. On the whole, this category of information is completely unhelpful
to any game I’ve run.

The
size and scale of the town, including exact distances between buildings

This is slightly
more useful than the point above—I can conceive of wanting to know how many
minutes it takes an Animal Messenger
to go from the castle to the temple—but it’s also something the GM can
reasonably make up on the fly without blinking an eye. When walking on foot,
exact distance between buildings is hardly helpful, as movement speed in a city
rarely has much to do with distance as opposed to road maintenance, traffic,
the time of day, and other factors not shown on a map.

The
precise location of various keyed locations (marked by numbers 1 through 14)

While sprinkling a city with memorable
keyed locations is critical to any kind of urban adventure, I’m not convinced
that I actually care that much about where they are in relation to each other.
It matters, for instance, that the Green Dragon Inn is deep in the slums while
the Ye Olde Gnomish Alchemy Shoppe is across the river, but I don’t need their exact
lat-long coordinates.

The general
look and feel of the town

The map is more than just a schematic or a
character sheet, it’s a piece of art, and it conveys information that would
take paragraphs of text. Unlike the past points, this is legitimately useful to
me—but is it the best way to convey
such information?

Here’s a medieval
painting of Nuremburg. It’s not a map—it’s likely not particularly accurate—alongside
a tourist map
approximating the same area. To me, the painting is highly evocative, showing
the lords on their hill gazing down at a city tightly packed inside their wall.
The tourist map on the right, while not specifically an RPG map, conveys similar information, describing
certain keyed locations. It may not be as pretty as the map of Sutulak, above,
but in some ways is more useful, as it reduces the information overload by
leaving out unimportant structures. Still, judged solely by the the final point—the
look and feel of the town—I give the win to the painting on the left, not the tourist map on the right.

On the whole, this isn’t looking good for
town maps, as the one thing I find actually useful about them–capturing the feel of the town they portray–can be done better with other forms of art.

But I Love Town Maps!

And yet,
I, like many GMs, simply adore town
maps. I love making them, I love searching for them online, I love staring at
historical maps of London and Paris and Berlin and thinking about running campaigns
in them. So there must be some use to them, or why would I—like so many other
GMs—be so drawn to them? If we can isolate why
we love town maps, we can determine why
they’re useful, and thus can work towards creating a better map that is more
geared towards actual play. We can strip away superfluous information and focus
on what a GM actually needs.

This is going to be a bit of an adventure we’re
undertaking together, and I don’t yet know where—if anywhere—this will go, but
with any luck, we’ll figure something out and finally crack the mystery of the
urban campaign. To do that, we must first figure out what a town is to an RPG. Is a town just a fantasy Walmart-slash-Motel
6, where you crash for the night, buy a shovel and 50 feet of rope for
best-not-to-ask-why, then leave to be on your way to more interesting places?
Is it just a dungeon on a grander scale, with roads for hallways and houses for
rooms?

If you have any insights on this—or recommendations
to blogs or splatbooks on a similar subject—feel free to chime in. Until then,
watch this space, as I’ll be back later this week with part 2.

Harry Potter and the Natural 20 Chapter 72: SD 19: The Grim and the Grave, a Harry Potter + Dungeons and Dragons Crossover fanfic | FanFiction

Harry Potter and the Natural 20 Chapter 72: SD 19: The Grim and the Grave, a Harry Potter + Dungeons and Dragons Crossover fanfic | FanFiction:

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but I’ve officially returned to Natural 20. While I’m getting back into the swing of things, I can’t guarantee a regular update schedule like in the old days, but you’ll likely be happy to know that Chapter 20 of Save-or-Die is well under way.

Happy December!

"Divinations,” Milo said, looking at his timetable. He reached onto his shoulder and patted his..."

““Divinations,” Milo said, looking at his timetable. He reached onto his shoulder and patted his rat on the head. “Do you see that, Mordy? We have *Divinations* next. I am going to be *so good at this*.””

- Harry Potter and the Save-or-Die, Chapter 19 (first words, tentative)

The City of Eternal Rain - Sir Poley | DriveThruRPG.com

The City of Eternal Rain - Sir Poley | DriveThruRPG.com:

Brought to you by the author of Harry Potter and the Natural 20 and Into the Living Library,
this urban adventure for “The World’s Most Popular Role-Playing Game”
sets the players in a flooded, cursed city that hasn’t seen the sun in a
hundred years. The rich and powerful have long since fled to a walled,
affluent precinct at the top of the hill, pumping rainwater down onto
the already-flooded tenements below. But even their patrolled,
sequestered district provides only a false sense of security: lords and
ladies have been murdered, one by one, in their own homes. Outside their
dry haven, the powerful Ironworkers’ Guild has filled the power vacuum,
but even they have proved incapable at catching the feared and
mysterious “Ironworkers’ Demon,” a beast that prowls the streets at
night, a plague of rats swarming in its wake. Many of the impoverished
and emaciated poor, frozen or starved in back alleys and on street
corners, have risen again as voracious ghouls and mysterious shadows,
only visible through their reflections in the city’s constant raindrops.

Are the heroes capable of cleaning up this city of rust?
Can they catch the killer, slay the monster, all the while beating back
cannibalistic undead and evading enormous, man-eating fungi?

Part murder-mystery, part gothic-style monster hunt,
this 18-page atmospheric urban adventure comes complete with a
fully-keyed, colourful city map (including a non-colourful
printer-friendly version), a cast of varied NPCs and unique locations to
visit, from the fortified house of the mighty Lady-Mayor’s Watch to the
creepy but optimistic House of True Death and the slowly-sinking ruins
of the Grand Strauss luxury inn. The City of Eternal Rain comes
with enough sidequests and mapped adventure areas to keep your players
entertained and occupied for weeks, as well as dozens of hooks for
further adventures, should you choose to use Lantzberg further for your
campaign. Whether it’s a campaign setting, an urban pit stop, a map to
‘borrow’ for your own city, or a one-off adventure, the City of Eternal Rain has what you need.

THE CITY OF ETERNAL RAIN (Preview)I’ve just sent my second...

THE CITY OF ETERNAL RAIN (Preview)

I’ve just sent my second adventure: The City of Eternal Rain to drivethrurpg.com to publish. At this point, it’s out of my hands how long it will take before it’s available for you to get your hands on, but the website estimates 1-5 business days.

In the meantime, I’ve included a ½-scale preview of the map I drew of the city so you know what to look forward to. There are murderers to catch, monsters to slay, informants to meet, codewords to exchange, giant man-eating fungi to fight, and loads more. I’ll let you know with a post here when it’s available for download.

In the meantime (cue shameless plug), please check out
Into the Living Library

for something you can get right now for the low low price of absolutely free (or whatever you’re able to pay).

Happy Halloween!

Let Me Know How it Goes!

Hey all! Making this adventure was a ton of fun, and I’m pretty proud of it, but I’m also always looking to improve in any way I can. When you get around to having a chance to play it (or if you’ve already done so) let me know how it goes for you! The place most useful to me to give feedback is in the form of a review on DrivethruRPG’s website
here, followed by contacting me on tumblr.

The next adventure, tentatively titled “Lantzberg, City of Raindrops,” will place the PCs in a semi-flooded hilltop city hexed with eternal rain. The rich cower on the peak of their hilltop city surrounded by walls and patrols, while those less fortunate comb the drains and rivers of rain for trash or valuables discarded from above. Those who can band together into powerful gangs and guilds for protection, hiding indoors at night as things prowl in the dark…

“Lantzberg, City of Raindrops” serves both as an adventure and as a setting for your campaign world. It can be slotted into virtually any typical D&D world, and every DM needs a city sooner or later. It is packed with NPCs, colourful locations, and sidequests, but they’re not so grand as to get in the way of whatever you’ve got planned.

So glad to see you're still about! The adventure looks AWESOME.

Thanks! There will be more where it came from!

A Huge Thank You!I just want to take a moment and thank each and...

A Huge Thank You!

I just want to take a moment and thank each and every one of you. You’ve stuck with me through thick and thin, through good editing and bad, through regular updates and unexplained gaps, and you still turned out in droves for me when I have something new for you.

I took this screenshot yesterday from drivethrurpg.com.That’s me at #4. That’s flipping insane, and it’s all thanks to you.

On the Next Adventure

The Living Library was kind of a hit, based on downloads on the first day, so I’m working on another adventure. This one will be a city, complete with a map, sidequests, NPCs, and keyed locations that a GM can slot into any campaign. I just re-watched Bladerunner, so expect lots of rain. If all goes according to plan, I’ll post it within 2 weeks.