Worldbuilding | City Campaigns

welcome to macro the rpg art show my name is kyle and today we are continuing our world building series by talking about cities this video is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of world anvil and we'll talk about them a little bit later you know in terms of world building cities can be even more overwhelming to design than a whole continent and as a gm they can be very intimidating to prep for design and just run a game in this is on my mind because i am planning an urban campaign using 5e that is inspired by blades in the dark now my natural inclination as a designer in gm is to say well let's just run blades in the dark but my players have made it clear that they are very interested in the character progression system and spells and whatnot in fifth edition so these are the design constraints of the campaign that i'm working on and i find it actually a really interesting challenge that i can't wait to dig into now the gaming resources that i find most useful for designing a fantasy city are as follows first and foremost even if it wasn't mentioned by my players i would have brought in blades in the dark it is second to none in terms of coming up with a compelling gameable space that is designed around dark fantasy stealing from people and stabbing people in the back secondly i love yoon soon the purple city for coming up with weird shops npcs and boutiques and of course there is the magical industrial revolution which is all about a city that is being changed by the forces of industry on magical items and how different classes in a city come into conflict with each other i am also looking at genial jack by jonathan newell because i adore jonathan's work he is one of my biggest heroes and inspirations in terms of cartography and adventure design the book genial jack is about a city that spans both the exterior and interior of this giant whale and jonathan's blog bearded devil is also a wonderful place where he documents all of his amazing illustration and home brewing efforts i will have links to all of these projects and their authors in the description below so be sure to check it out and hopefully i will get the spelling a little bit more correct down there than i did on screen just because i refuse to let my reading disability stop me from making art and videos doesn't mean i can't be embarrassed by it from time to time in terms of non-gaming models for helping us think about how to build a city uh there are also some really wonderful resources that i'll link below as well including dale king's mill's own video on this very subject where she deploys a rather unfortunate acronym that you will just have to watch her video to find out about for my own purposes i find abel wolman's 1965 article the metabolism of cities to be the most useful piece of non-fiction that i read on the subject in this article wollman conceptualizes a city as a kind of living super organism and the metabolism of it is the flow of water and energy resources through it and the byproducts thereof like every living organism on our planet from the humble amoeba to the mighty moose cities too need to drink water and pass waste cities also need reliable access to food and they pass this food out as sewage cities also need clean air and they pass this clean air out as exhaust from all of the fires or factories in the city so let's keep this metabolism model in mind as we outline our major design constraints first i want this city campaign to have all of the adventure happen in the city and secondly we need things to steal from people if we're going to be planning all these heists for our first item i am going to solve this by saying that there are monsters that are just all over the outside of the city similar to how blades in the dark has you know all these horrible monsters and ghosts and the sun doesn't exist and they have a giant electric fence to keep all the ghosts out the reason that is so brilliant in blades of the dark is because it lets the pcs entangle themselves in the lives of these others factions they can't just run into the wilderness for the heat to go down or go to the next city they have to sleep in the bed that they made and this gives us our first big world building challenge where does this city get all of its food if there are monsters all over the farmland we can have a bunch of farmland kind of within these giant city walls but it still seems like that's not going to be enough to support a whole city so i am proposing this kind of new class of farmers the aggramancers these kind of necromancers who are in charge of running these giant farms with enchanted plants to support the nutritional needs of the city they will use these legions of conscripted zombies to labor the farms without need of food or rest and meat will be very scarce in this setting because there aren't enough crops to support both livestock and the people within it so maybe all the meat comes either from outside of the walls or within this royal forest preserve where only the nobility is allowed to hunt and maybe even then once every two years or something and thinking our way out of these kinds of challenges is the real fun and joy that we can find in world building how if something is a little bit different would it affect the rest of the world if we live in a strong capital city besieged on all sides by monsters how could they survive and so once we have our city's basic needs figured out we can start thinking about what we want to add into our game instead of solving these problems at a a sort of dry city planner level by thinking about this city as having a metabolism we can start enumerating the things that we want our city to have and then think about the natural byproduct of bringing those things into a closed system once we have identified our products and byproducts we can think about all the factions that interact with them who brings the meat into the city who reuses the junk where does the waste go and as a gm i would only focus on answering these questions if they create interesting results if this is a game about planning heists in a city then of course we also need to hit our second item cool stuff to steal from cool places now this is a 5v game and in order to honor that i want to make sure that we have magic items to steal because a big part of the premise the promise that 5e makes to its players is that it will be a world of epic fantasy there need to be wizards and elves and dwarves and orcs and talking spiders and all this cool stuff so we need to make sure that we design our premises together our premise of epic fantasy setting and our premise of urban heist setting we also want to make sure that there are just valuable items to steal but we don't want it just to be regular sacks of gold no one's gonna write a fantasy novel called the caper for the sack of gold but indeed many novels and short stories have been written about maps to secret vaults underground or magical jewels that have been passed down from priestess to priestess all that good stuff if this is epic fantasy then it needs to be epic loot once we have a short list of cool things to steal we need to come up with the cool people to steal them from this part of the video is really going to look a lot like our previous video on fixing your affections except we're not really going to talk about what these factions want we're just going to talk about what they have for now although as much as we are making a list of people to steal from we are also kind of making a list of clients that would want you to steal stuff for them so it would also be a great use of your time to briefly think about the things that these factions want to do in the city as well as all the cool stuff they don't want you to take from them and if you're looking at this and you're thinking kyle there's got to be a better way to keep track of all these notes than post-it notes tape to printer paper while you're in luck because today's sponsor is world anvil the place to go for gms and writers to keep track of all of their amazing idiosyncratic world building pass off a link to your page to your players and they can look up all the cool people to steal from and all the cool things to steal that you have enumerated for them keep track of their entanglements with npcs and other factions so that their actions have consequences show an interactive map of your city with all of the districts and faction headquarters hyperlinked to their appropriate articles check the description below for the link head on over to world anvil and use code crow for 40 off all new recurring memberships you know i think my favorite faction that i created for this was the dinner cult the cult of people that are devoted to eating uh monster meat and maybe if you eat enough you get like you know horns and hooves and tails and stuff um just kind of like an evil epicureal club seems like they would be great people to work for notice also that many of our factions are based around our products and byproducts our dead people are going into temples and tombs our agrimancers are bringing in the food and our workshops are using building supplies so our factions are answering questions about the world where does this stuff come from who uses it and what happens to the byproducts and of course if we have a game about robbers we gotta talk about the cops all of the people that are put into place specifically to make your life difficult should you choose a life of crime i think it might be interesting if our town guard was primarily goblins and orcs and that kind of thing and then our sort of magical crime squad would be the witch finders that work for the church regulate the use of magic and miracles and relics and all that kind of stuff and when the honor of thieves runs thin we will of course have our underworld full of colorful crime boxes like samuel the shagath who has so many eyes around the city both literally and figuratively his friends call him sammy and his enemies go screaming mad into the night and since we have been stealing so liberally from blades in the dark all along i see no reason to stop now and let's have some death crows a group of birds with skulls for heads that congregate around dead bodies so the the cops always know when there's a murder because where there's a murder there can also be ghosts and vampires and zombies and all that kind of fantasy nonsense too so they act as a kind of early warning system for the city but it also complicates the lives of the players who can't just go around murdering all their problems john harper what a genius but blades in the dark came out like five years ago as of this recording and it is still full of amazing surprises and game design wisdom as much as i would love to get into all of these wonderful little fun details i'm making for the city campaign i think this video has gone on for just about long enough that will i think do it for now as far as our short little sprint in our world building series uh but there is still plenty of things i want to come back and talk about with world building so stay tuned for that coming up next i'm thinking about revisiting our building better monsters series because there's been a lot of interest in me returning to that so if you have suggestions for monsters you would like me to look at or world building topics you'd like me to examine later please add them to the comments below and thanks again to world anvil for sponsoring these last four videos on world building ah this is my first time doing one of these sponsorships and one of the big reasons i'm interested in it is because i would really love to upgrade my equipment both my camera and my lighting are just not quite i think worthy of your attention and my poor little surface pro 4 it just really is not meant for video editing so i want to take some of that money and reinvest it into the quality of the channel but that's enough for me this video has gone on for far too long sorry for the long run time uh until next time my friends farewell

Channel: Map Crow

Views: 111,819

Keywords: drawing, art, tutorial, ttrpg, rpg, dnd, game design, worldbuilding, world building, city campaign, urban campaign, urbancrawl, citycrawl, factions

Id: f8HMbeQmN9k

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022