Urbancrawls in the Post apocalypse: Making Radical Ink

 We're doing URBANCRAWLS today

First, some recognition:

This blog post is founded on ideas that I encountered in three places:

The Alexandrian: Thinking About Urbancrawls 

Vornheim, the Complete City Kit

The Yellow City, from Yoon-Suin: The Purple Land  (Available for purchase here)(Also, there was a recent kickstarter)

My thinking is going to references these sources. I'll try to introduce and credit the ideas, but I'm imperfect and I'll likely screw that up. Also, you guys might like to check these out for yourself, they're all incredible.

Now, on to the show

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What I'm trying to do here is simple: I want to make the minimum amount of prep, that creates the biggest city in the minds and play-experience of the players. I want it to be explorable, destroyable, feel "real", and feel vast. I want it to be conquerable, and to be reactive like a real living place would be to player actions. It needs to have tactical considerations and its own character.

Simple, right?

Since I'm the one doing this, and since I'm big on getting as much out of my work on elfgames as possible, I'm going to work through the prepload for Radical Ink, a city in the post-apocalypse hexcrawl I'm writing for my Discord game.

So, what am I going to need out of Radical Ink for my game, keeping in my mind I've got to hit all those goals?

Well first, its best to start simply and enthusiastically: With a single good idea. I've often touted the idea that "Your prep extends as far as your good ideas", and I think that's a strong maxim for making the best possible content you can. 

However, there's another important maxim I want to cleave to as well: "You need silence between the notes"

What's that mean? It means that for every good idea that you turn into a room in a dungeon, you make an empty room right next to it. It means for every hex bursting with personality and radical stuff, you have one that's just grass and hills.

"But why the fuck would you do that, you charismatic sex-god?" I hear you ask. Well prepare your brain to receive my genius, mortal, because it's coming out like a fire hydrant. You do that because the process of play demands it. Those "empty" rooms and hexes are filled with something you didn't anticipate, but critically need: the room to play the fucking game. You make "empty" content for the same reason you avoid stuffing every square inch of a room with furniture: because you need room to live. In prep, you need room for your players to play.

The practical benefit of this for prep purposes is that it inflates our prep to about twice the size of our good ideas, which is just about how much prep we need to actually run a game. There's one more component that fuses two opposing but vital elements: the need to Be Lazy (for us prep-generators, nothing is more vital) and the need to Be Consistent (which is anathema to creative types).

This last step involves a random content generator that gives consistent setting-appropriate results. The method of using it requires more "empty" areas, or minimally filled ones, used in conjunction with these generators to create procedural content which is still consistent with our established setting. This is useful for allowing our content to grow as needed to both increase its scale in a real sense and to increase the psychological impression of enormity and continuity in the players.

Okay, with the preliminaries out of the way: Radical Ink

What do we need to bring this city to life and keep it alive in our campaign?

My suspicion is that we need to start with three things:

1. What this place does

2. What protects it

3. The consequences of those two things

We need the first to give our city a sense of identity. Since I'm basing this city off of Legend of the Wulin's Magnificent Ink, why not make it a place of art and leisure? Buildings utterly soaked in spray-paint graffiti, air filled with music, bohemian lifestyles, colorful theatre troupes, all that jazz? 

Filling point 1 gives me a core to work with and it tells me something about this place and its people: they make art, and they therefore must be able to make a living from their art. Their art is a commodity, and commodities imply the right to barter with them for your needs.

Shouldn't these people become very quickly enslaved; forced to perform for the delight of warlords? Their art stolen or destroyed? Well yes, logically; this is the post-apocalypse, being able to eat every day is a luxury few can afford. How can these people not only survive in these harsh conditions, but thrive enough to warrant an entire city?

Enter point 2; there's got to be something protecting these fragile artistic types, enforcing their property rights, and facilitating their ability to barter. They've got to have a warrior caste. Not only that but this caste must have a philosophy that requires them to be protectors and encourage this artistic flourishing, rather than rapacious barbarians who will just do what rampaging foreign warlords threaten to do here.

Point 3 is where things start to get tasty. We get to exercise our creative muscles and think about the necessities and consequences of how these artists and this warrior caste interact. This is the opportunity to inject some real personality into your prep, and this is necessary because you'll get tons of content from it, both specifically prepped content and the content generators. 

Is this a divergence from "minimum viable prep"? I don't suspect so: You CAN do this, and you SHOULD in your own prep. Any time you have a good idea (or the opportunity to generate one), you should use it, even if it's "more work"; it pays off so deeply that you'd be a fool to spare yourself the additional prep time to bring a great idea into your game.

Incidentally, I actually have a fucking radical idea where I base this warrior caste off of the Five Deadly Venoms, making five competing schools that all have a mercenary arrangement with the artists. 

God this movie rules

So we've got the heart of this content, what do we need next?

Let's steal. From the Best.

Yoon-Suin's Yellow City starts us off by giving us a beautifully written section of in-character prose describing the city and it's many interesting peculiarities. If I were going to write this as a book for broader use, I would certainly want to do this, but for our purposes we can eschew the prose and keep the essentials, a bulleted list of facts about the city:

• It is Yellow (due to quartz in the clay of the buildings)
• It is ruled by a brahman-caste of slug-men (magical hermaphrodites, I love them) who are the only ones who can own property
• They love tea, opium, and being smart
• Its stinky

It then proceeds to give us a very minimalist description of setting up a game in the city (something to the effect of "put down a few districts to start then add as needed", followed by pages upon pages of content-generating charts). 

Yoon-Suin does two incredibly smart things here. First, the charts are fucking brilliant "breeder"-style charts that both minimize your work as a chart-maker and maximize their utility while providing both content and setting consistency, but even smarter than that is the second thing it does. The second thing is that it tells you, explicitly, to leave yourself room through vaguery.

There's a tendency among us content-crafters to fill up every square with specificity. The earliest urbancrawls were this, dense and detail-rich maps stuffed to the point of unusability with content. Just look at this monstrosity:

I don't have time, in the heat of running a game, to parse what I need out of this. It demands that I know about it beforehand, memorize it, develop an intuition about it, and I just do not have time for that bullshit.

The license for vagueness gifted to us by the Yellow City allows us be the ones crafting this detail into a bigger, more immediately accessible description of a given part of the city. This means that we're developing that intuition and prioritizing the information in our entire game table's collective memories through the experience of play, rather than fruitlessly front-loading our brains with trivia that will in all likelihood never get used

Because we're not filling in this detail until we need it, we're getting the best of both worlds. All because we allowed ourselves the freedom to come to the table without either writing it down or memorizing it beforehand.

So we're taking three things from the Yellow City method of urbancrawls:

1. A list of facts (turn into prose to taste)

2. Breeder charts for content

3. A license to keep things nebulous until we need detail

Let's start stealing from the next genius:

I'm actually taking surprisingly little from The Alexandrian's urbancrawls. Primarily, this is because my goals differ from Justin's; I'm not really interested in running an open table like he does, so really brilliant stuff like the Conspyramid just don't have the same utility for me. 

But his thinking on Districts (does he call them that? Fuck it, its a good name) is of incredible value to me: it matches very well with my idea of Tracts. A city's terrain is mostly artificial, and designed purposefully to reinforce a type of activity. Tracts are geographic areas created by nature (mountain, forest, etc.) that have a contiguous environment. The Venn diagram between these two concepts is almost just a circle, so we can map Justin's ideas about Districts to our rules for Tracts.

Generally I map Tracts 1-for-1 to hexes on my own maps, but this allows us an alternative where we can squeeze a bunch of Tracts into a single hex by making our own little district map.

Also, these are easy to find online

So we steal Districts and map them to Tracts, allowing us to fill them with landmarks that can serve as Fields (which you'll recall are "cool places to fight"). We'll use more breeder charts here so that we can procedurally generate these places as the game demands. Wonderfully, this maps to our intuition for what a Field in a city should be; they should be like stages from a fighting game.

Districts do something else that is very important for us: they let us "chunk" the city into bits that can be controlled, conquered, and otherwise played on a macro-scale. You can use the Districts as Nodes, leveraging them for Domain Play. You can police them with Forces, which has hooks leading into investigative playstyles as well as urban war scenarios.

This allows us to think of Districts, which are very large-scale, similarly to how we think about rooms in a dungeon. We can run them at this scale using our License for Vaguery; we can describe and generate any number of places within a given District to make it infinitely explorable.

Districts additionally create an ecosystem out of the city as a whole if we define their relationships to one another. X district produces food, sending it to Y district where most of the populace works in a bullet factory. Z district has a criminal empire that supplies vice to them both. And so on.

So what are we taking from The Alexandrian's Urbancrawls?

4. Chunk our content into Tract-sized Districts

5. Use of Terrain Breeder charts to generate details as needed

6. Use Districts like Rooms in a dungeon

7. District relationships

Our last point of theft is going to be from good ol' Vornheim. 

Vornheim has a good habit of populating its city with memorable power-players that may take an interest in you (or that you may want to fuck with). They live in interesting places for an adventure. Most importantly, they have stuff going on that you will likely get caught up in.

This works gangbusters for our purposes, because that is precisely how wuxia characters work.

A New Challenger Enters the Ring

Oh, what's this? A link to Sons of Lady 87, the premier wuxia urbancrawl supplement, available right now from Studio 2 Publishing in PDF and Print? What are YOU doing here!? Get out of here, you masterpiece of game design by Enny-award winning designer Brendan Davis! Shoo!

Sheesh, sorry about that completely unrelated interruption folks! (Steal the Grudge Charts from this game)

We can take this design ethos and make some Important NPCs (which is to say, some bosses for our players to fight) and give them some Places that they're generally hanging out (Strongholds or HQs or Dojos or Brothels That Are Actually Training Grounds For Assassins or whathaveyou) and some Plots that they're hatching. This can double as our "Conspyramid/Urbancrawl Layers" so that players have some meatier content to hook into when they come to our city.

This means we'll have some:

8. Major NPCs

9. Places they're generally found (Lairs, if you like)

10. Plots which represent the stuff they're doing

....

Putting it all together, we get the following template for our Urbancrawl:

Of course, you might want more of something, like maybe you've got a bunch of populations you want to write in, but that's a matter of tweaking this more general template rather than reinventing it

I decided to leave in a big pile of places in the master list if you wanted to stuff it with a bunch of unique NPCs, but you can also take up ranges if you want to do it demographically.

....

So, let's fill this in with Radical Ink

Name is an obvious one

Facts are gonna be:

• City of artists
• Graffiti everywhere
• Ruled by five clans of warrior/mercenaries who know five different kinds of kung-fu
• Consume Rice, Opium and Games
• Leaders wear masks and are anonymized

That should give us some memorable aspects of the city for players.

Now I only have two types of populace here, Artists and Warrior, but you could actually have as many as you like. Here, you can even use this sheet if you like:

I threw some more templates for NPCs and plots in there too

ANYWAY, we need to fill out ours. I'm loosely basing this on the way that Yoon-Suin does social groups, which is to say that what we should result in here is:

• Petty groups of people
• Who have a few standout points of contact for the players
• Are memorable "guys who do/are X"
• And they have a job for you to do

This is easy, as we can steal from our favorite media, file the serial numbers off, and wind up with some actionable content. For example, see if you recognize THIS award-winning modern classic:

NPC1: A well-established but talentless musician

NPC2: A young, brilliant but unstable musical genius/upstart

FLAVOR: Musicians supported by local hyper-wealthy fops

TASK: Poisoning a rival

Or what about this timeless tale:

NPC1: An untested but incredible new talent

NPC2: A reclusive and antisocial master of the craft

FLAVOR: Local theatre troupe who produce enormously popular new plays

TASK: Kidnap a new paramour for the leader

Yadda yadda, you get the idea. We do this for both of our groups and it allows us to mix-and-match between the results because these are breeder charts. So you might get:

NPC1: A well-established but talentless musician

NPC2: A reclusive and antisocial master of the craft

FLAVOR: Musicians supported by local hyper-wealthy fops

TASK: Kidnap a new paramour for the leader

And suddenly you have a unique result, a different group with a slightly different mix of personality, talent and drama. The more entries on your breeder chart, the more varied the results.

The five slots I've got here should map nicely to a d5, and they should be sufficient to give us lots of variance for procedurally-generated content.

The District Map I've provided here has an underlay of hexes if you just want to fill in their general spatial relationship or keep in the traditional mapping, but feel free to doodle in whatever shapes you like if you want a more map-y definition of the Tracts. I'm sticking with hexes here, since I already have a space carved out for them on my hexmap.

This space right here

The districts Only need enough to give you that entitlement to vaguery; they're describing the outside edge of a very big box, which you will fill during play as the need arises. That's a weird idea to wrap your head around, so here's a few examples:

DISTRICT: Resplendent Prism

OUTLINE: Bazar of the Bizarre

FUNCTION: Market III, a place to buy, sell and trade

POPULATION: Colorful merchants hawking their wares

There, we can make this Hex/District 8107 up there and now I've got a nice fat hex to play in. What I describe there is going to be loosely bounded by the elements in the District entry in that 

• NPCs will be either those merchants or some incidental thing related to them, like bodyguards or buyers
• Places will be things like market stalls, shops, or something related to those things, like alleys leading to illicit goods marketplaces
• The rules-function of what players can do is here defined: it's a Rating 3 Market, which is defined concretely in the core book (go buy it you cretins!)

When you need a Field on the fly, or really any time you need to make a Place in any amount of detail, you use the Field Generator. This is also made in the Yoon-Suin mold, giving you

• A Place
• That is in a State
• And has something memorable about it

Another example is called for here, so let's keep adding depth to our new District

STATE: Surrounded by clouds of opium smoke and incense

FEATURE: A free-standing tent overflowing with strange goods

SPECIAL: A rival merchant's agent is here, trying to spread rumors about the low quality of the merchandise for sale

Or maybe

STATE: Covered in brilliant graffiti-art

FEATURE: A hidden shop peddling illicit goods

SPECIAL: Bouncer at the entrance that only lets in select clientele

Since you're putting these on a breeder chart, you can mix-and-match for fresh results

STATE: Surrounded by clouds of opium smoke and incense

FEATURE: A hidden shop peddling illicit goods

SPECIAL: A rival merchant's agent is here, trying to spread rumors about the low quality of the merchandise for sale

See? There are five slots here so that we can make three categories map to a d5

Next up, the Plot Trackers

These bad boys are meant to reference the actual, written-elsewhere stats of our major NPCs, so we can have like "Poisonous Toad/(p.XX of my prep)"

Their real use is tracking what Poisonous Toad is doing, and clearly its something illicit.

PLOT: Sell them drugs, G

GOAL: To peddle his opium and make bank

METHOD: His dealers worm their way into more legitimate markets and hand out free samples, getting the clientelle addicted so he can squeeze them
PLACE: Resplendent Prism

NPCs: Low-ranking pushers (Mortal stats), potential martial-arts student muscle (Degree 1 Mortal Heroes)

RESOURCES: A small army of 40 dealers protected by 4 of his potential students to serve as muscle. Extract 5 Wealth per dealer who sells his entire supply per Arc

Now, when the players go scratching below the surface of  Resplendent Prism and uncover the drug ring, they encounter these guys and reveal Poisonous Toad's operation. They can screw with it to taste, and we can update this entry as necessary to reflect their meddling (or Toad's response to it!)

I feel like this one is self-explanatory. You just describe what a given person/place/thing does to benefit/influence/fuck with another whatever. I recommend only putting in what you KNOW when you start, because although I'm sure that like, 

THING1: The Warrior Caste

DTF: Offers protection for money to

THING 2: The Artist Caste

I maybe haven't yet decided/realized that

THING1: Poisonous Toad

DTF: Supplies opium to fuel the crippling addictions of

THING 2: The entire Centipede Clan

But that might be a fun thing to write down if it occurs to me in play

Finally, the Master Encounter List mixes all of the previous people and events in a big blender so that each visit to the city churns up something new. It's powerfully inspired by Zak's incredible encounter lists, of which I reproduce my very favorite below (with on permissions whatsoever):

I like this one because it serves to mix the disparate elements of the megadungeon he's crafted in Maze together, so the plot hooks come and find your lollygagging asses.

I also made mine a d100 chart, so you can populate it with a lot of results, or you can do it demographically (so like, if 60% of the populace are Artists, then you can just make results 1-60 an encounter with some kind of artists to represent that). I recommend filling this in with pencil, so you can amend it as good ideas pop into your head (keeping with our design philosophy of "specific ideas are better than general ones" and "don't design it until you need it" and ALSO "the city is living and changes over time") 

...

Okay I'm tired, but you get the idea. You fill out this Urbancrawl sheet with your city's stuff and during play, when players go somewhere that you haven't yet detailed, you pull from the appropriate bits and make a place for them to go. When they make trouble something from the master encounter chart shows up and acts as a doorway to get more involved in the city's stuff. When you need some NPCs, you generate them and they act as another doorway into the city's stuff. 

When they re-visit places they've already been, you just reference your notes just like other prep. Finally, you update notes and the charts as the city changes due to the passage of time and character actions.

Now, I didn't put in a floorplan generator for buildings because the perfect one of those already exists in Vornheim and it doesn't really need to. Most of the details inside buildings are pretty obvious and my game uses theatre of the mind, so its not really necessary to map each chair in an office building to run it. Also, really good and unique places should be mapped in detail beforehand, but you already know how to do that so I won't bore you by reproducing that information here.