Running a City (in your TTRPG)

How do you run a city?

I’m not talking about advice to mayors and city councillors. This is a role-playing game blog, after all. I’m talking about making a city the centre of your campaign and adventures.

Regular readers of my blog will be aware that my current campaign is based in the city of Akorros, on the shores of Lake Amsorak in the Republic of Darokin. The more astute of you will also have picked up that this was not what I was used to, and I’ve been out of my comfort zone.

Now I have been in Akorros for four years, I feel I am starting to get the hang of running games in a city. I wouldn’t yet say I’m comfortable – it has been a pleasant break having the party head out for a few days on the road with real wandering monsters and lairs – but I now feel I know a bit better what I’m doing. However, I’m definitely feeling there’s something wrong with my approach, because I never have the information I need to hand.

I thought I’d share my learning, and my struggles, in the hopes it will help you with your cities.

How we arrived in Akorros

I ended up running a city campaign after a changeover of players. For various reasons, several players had moved on, and the replacement players needed characters. The campaign at the time was deep in the alternate dimension of X2 Castle Amber (translated into 5e), so I gave the players various options of where in Mystara their characters came from. Without exception, they went for Akorros, which I had described as follows:

This is a lively port town where the trade across Lake Amsorak from Akesoli comes into Darokin. It is controlled by the “families” to whom laws are guidelines to beat other people with but can be broken if you can get away with it. Since they control Akorros, they and their henchmen and women generally can get away with it – anyone who objects too loudly is likely to be found in pieces on the lake shore (if at all).

We finished Castle Amber, and since by now most of the characters came from Akorros, I had them returned there (to a basement where a summoning was about to take place).

Naturally, they were interested in the city, and wanted to get to know the place “they came from”, and so the campaign became a city campaign.

That campaign eventually fizzled out, possibly partly because I didn’t know how to run a city, but I had the seeds of a story in the rift incursion and wanted to explore it further.

By then I had also done a fair amount of world-building in and around Akorros, and I wanted to make use of it. So my new campaign was definitely based in Akorros as a starting point. I had the plot, I had the background; how hard could it be?

How are cities campaigns different?

Definition time: I’m talking here about a campaign where the action is primarily based in the city (as opposed to a town or city which the adventurers use as a home base before heading out on their next mission).

When I was preparing the new campaign, I realised I had two distinct challenges to address if I was going to run it in a city: combat opponents and making the city feel real.

Combat opponents

The first problem I realised was the availability of monsters, or rather lack of it.

I don’t fancy a murder-hobo campaign, and I don’t allow evil characters, but players like combat, so I want to make the opponents meaningful, and give the players opponents who they can fight with only minor moral qualms.

People live in a city (for whatever definition of “people” you want – human, dwarf, elf, Tabaxi, Aaracocra, Gearforged…), and want their places safe, so it is much less likely that there will be monster lairs in the city. If the monsters caused problems, they would have been cleaned out long ago.

Putting the two together significantly reduces the options of opponents when planning encounters, and makes it harder to provide appropriate combat.

To address this in my pre-campaign planning, I based the campaign around rifts opening, allowing demons through into the city. This allows me to bring in blood-thirsty demons at the drop of a hat which clearly need dealing with.

To vary things after a few months, I also decided the castle rock had fissures and caverns underneath it (inspired by one of Heroic Maps’ beautiful battlemaps), which also allowed cavern creatures like a darkmantle and spiders.

Of course, there are also the individuals and gangs involved in the rifts (or maybe not…) who may come in opposition to the PCs.

This seems to have worked okay, although I am starting to feel it might be getting a bit repetitive. A couple of trips outside the city recently have provided some much-needed variety.

Making the city feel real

The second challenge I realised I would need to address was making the city feel like an interesting place.

The city itself is a sort of character. Somehow I’ve got to make it feel to the players that it’s a real place, and communicate to them how different locations are connected, and give the different areas different feels.

I thought I had this nailed with all the world-building I had done of Akorros and the surrounding areas – starting here and tagged in my Developing Akorros series of blogs. I had thought about size and rough layout, and I had developed a basic map of the city, and mentally pictured a much more detailed one.

I had listed assorted groups, factions and guilds. I had described different areas, including the docks, the Toney plaza, a residential area, some religions, the tanneries and their residents, the lake and people on it. I had written several pieces on festivals and gang adventures, the love festival and the local cherry brandy guindamettla, and other background. And during the tail end of my previous campaign I had developed various characters.

This has been an area that was a lot harder than I expected, and I wasn’t as prepared as I thought. The world-building has proved a lot less useful at the table.

I had developed a lot of background, but it wasn’t directly relevant to the storyline. The pages of text don’t lend themselves to descriptions in passing.

More on this later.

Repeated locations and characters

What I wasn’t prepared for was how much more repetition there is, and how the stories often aren’t based around a single location. This makes it a lot harder to prepare.

In a traditional wilderness campaign, if the party is investigating a lair, the lair will likely only feature during that session, the party will do what they need in it, and then move on. Even if the party heads out into the wilderness to take on an orc band, the band may be roving, but they’re a single entity and can be prepared as a single location.

In a city, however, the party dots around all over the place: visiting the temple, going to the library, meeting with a noble, investigating in the docks, chatting up the guards, casing the market. And all of these are options the players could decide to choose in the middle of the session, meaning either there is a lot more to prep (in order to be ready), or a lot more improvisation.

Also, the locations and people are much more likely to recur from session to session, and the players expect them to be consistent. So if I introduce a character, the players will expect that character to be there next time they visit. If I create a location, the players will expect to go back to that location, and for all the features to still be there (or a good reason why things might have changed). And if I do make up something on the spot, they will expect that to be there next time they come by.

After four years (three years in this campaign) I’ve built up a lot of detail that they expect me to remember…

Making a city work

Over the years, I have developed some strategies to address these in my campaign.

Monsters and combat

The approach with demonic incursions and under-city caverns seems to have worked okay, although I am starting to feel it might be getting a bit repetitive. A couple of trips outside the city recently (one incorporating “Reach for the Stars” from Keys from the Golden Vault, and the other to rescue a relative caught in an ambush, with a side order of Ice Troll and skeletal remains in a forgotten shrine) have provided some much-needed variety.

There are also plenty of people, some opponents, some mentors, some ambiguous, and lots just living their lives and intertwining with the PCs from time to time. The gang organising the incursions has provided opponents – although they morphed between rivals and allies and back again on the quest for the Tome of the Stars, which made for an interesting combat session.

I think I’m reasonably on top of this one.

The city as background

As well as the combat which the rifts bring, the campaign has the intrigue of trying to find out who is creating them, how, and why. Which takes the party around the city. I really want them to feel like they’re in a city, not just a sheet of paper with labels.

As I said above, I did a lot of world-building, both before starting the campaign and since (mostly as part of WorldAnvil’s Summer Camp). But I have found this useful only as background to draw on when preparing or improvising, if I can remember it. It has all been both too much and not enough – wading through walls of text, which are stored variously on my computer and in WorldAnvil, doesn’t lend itself to quick reference while playing.

What has been most useful was working out a rough map of the city – see this blog post – so I have an idea of the rough shape, with the castle in the centre on the top of a hill with a sloping road down to the posh harbour forming the rich area, and the rich area stretching over the water to the island on which the Temple of Khoronus is based. The working docks are round the corner of the coast in the southern part of the city, and the less affluent areas are to the south of Toney Hill.

Over the years this map has developed, so when the party are moving around the city, I have a mental picture of where they are and where they are going which I can base my descriptions on. I still need to create a proper map which I can show the players, and which I can update when I create landmarks, but doing this would need me to choose a tool, and actually invest enough time to learn how to use it and get a base map laid down. Any year now…

City description

I am still trying to find the right amount of detail to make the city feel real without overwhelming the players with loads of narrative. I opened the campaign with several paragraphs describing the market, trying to bring in the feel of the city – that’s the basis of my post on Redcliffe Market – and the players seemed to accept that introduction as a campaign introduction.

But more recently I tried to describe the group’s entrance to the city as the preparations for the harvest festival were ongoing, and I definitely got the feeling the players were thinking “yeah, yeah, but we just want to return the horses and get back to our digs.” Oops.

Other times, I have forgotten the descriptions altogether, so they might as well be teleporting between locations.

The time I did feel I got it right, I created a two-sentence summary of a square and a few snippets of things which might happen that would give colour:

Singing Snappers Square

Busy street, people filling urns from the fountain in the square. Fountain of many carved fish with water spilling out, into a bowl below. Kids chase about.

• One kid tries to pick one of the characters’ pockets: Sleight of Hand +3 against Perception. Will burst into tears if caught and say he’s just hungry, and other kids will gather round with palms out.
• Guy in sailor’s clothing staggers across the square, nearly bumping into a character – DEX save or knocked over
• A figure in a green cloak runs up to a character and says “here, hold this for me – I’ll find you later”, pushing a copper rod with verdigrised runes into their hands, then dashes off. While the character is still looking at it, a woman in red robes runs up and says “has anyone seen a cloaked figure with a copper rod? He was running this way.”
• A guy in a nondescript brown cloak, with greying hair which was obviously once bright red falls in step with Gareth and says “worried about magic? When I was training, I’d have been whipped for being so obvious.” He noticed Gareth’s Detect Magic in the pub, and is trying to find out more. Alvar Delos (mage).

I also had a map and various establishments around the square (mostly just annotated on the map), and a secret lair that evolved as the characters were exploring it. That gave me enough to improvise details that made it feel like they were interacting with a real place.

Repeated locations

I’m still working on this one. It hadn’t occurred to me that being in a city would mean going between common locations repeatedly, and so I’ve been learning on the fly.

My session notes currently are generally a few pages of A4, written in Word and printed out so I can refer to them at the table. These include setting descriptions I think relevant, characters I think will feature, stat blocks, some detailed descriptions of locations and treasure.

This is fine for the first time they hit that location, but if they go back, I either copy some of the description (if I’m expecting it), or I find myself flicking backward and forward through my folder of notes trying to find the one which mentions that area. Or I have to fire up the laptop and search through my assorted notes there to try to find the relevant information.

And if I’ve improvised some details, it’s even worse, because if I have notes, they are usually scribbled in the margin of one of my session trackers, and I need to try to remember which one. Or I’ve forgotten to note it down at all, so I’m trying to remember what I said.

Fortunately I have a very visual imagination, so I do have a picture of quite a few of the locations they have visited, but there are plenty of times when I’ve finished the session, and then thought on my way home “oh, I forgot to mention XXX.” And, of course, the times I forget I made up a crucial detail and make it up again will be the time the players have remembered it and correct me, or suspect something fishy because it has changed…

At least I now save every session’s document so I can refer back. When I started, I used to update the working version, stripping out the stuff the party had already done and adding the new, so I have been caught out quite a few times searching for information I deleted. I’ve learned from that mistake now.

But I still need a better way of handling this information so I can put my hands on a location quickly and easily.

Character management

In the same way that locations have recurred, over the last three years the party have met quite a lot of characters, so there is quite a cast in Akorros, all stored in a selection of Word documents. We have:

• The PCs themselves. Along with various notes about basic stats, background, mentors, what rumours each one has been given, and extra information that has developed over play which might be relevant.
• The mentors. In this campaign, training takes half a day per level being gained, with a mentor, so they need mentors to train them. These mentors are also useful sources of information, and have their own interests and biases, so the document gives basic stat blocks and a description as well, along with where they can be found and what they can train the characters in.
• Various adversaries, thugs, neighbours, bartenders, city guards and so on who the characters meet and interact with, each with their own description and some idea of stats. Of course, these need regularly replenishing as different adversaries get defeated/driven off/killed…
• Other notables who come up, some of whom I developed thinking they might be useful and have never been used, but they might be useful if I need a character on the fly.
• A page of potential names, which I sometimes remember to refer to when the characters meet someone new (but usually I forget and just sit there with a blank look while I try to conjure up a name on the fly).

These are spread across multiple Word documents, and generally not printed out, so if I’m to refer to them at the table I need to have expected them and added them to the session notes, or I need to fire up the laptop.

I have an index card for each player character with their stats and the skills they are proficient in (but not the ones they aren’t proficient in, which sometimes I find myself wanting to know…), and I put these out on the table behind my screen for quick reference.

But the other characters, the NPCs,  are not close enough to hand, so I find myself having to rely on my memory if I haven’t explicitly prepared them for this session.

Again, I need a better system.

Inspiration from Justin Alexander

Cue Justin Alexander (of The Alexandrian) and his new book “So You Want to be a Game Master”.

Once it gets going, the book is great, and I strongly recommend you invest (and if you use the link above I will get a small cut from Amazon). I’m not going to review the book in detail here – I’ll leave that for other posts. The reason I bring it up now is to highlight a couple of sections which I have found really useful and applicable to my problem of running a city.

Urban Adventures

The first section is, appropriately enough, Urban Adventures. Where was this when I needed it four years ago?

A fair amount of this I have worked out myself by trial and error, as you will see above, but it has been useful seeing it written down and collected in one place.

Justin recommends having:

• A city map, including different districts with different characters and the connecting routes between them
• A city gazetteer, containing notes on different sections and locations, landmarks, services characters, history
• Collections of scenic encounters which give the flavour of the city or district and make it a living, breathing, active place

Then when the party are heading to a location, name the district they are heading to, drop in a landmark (a statue, a major street they head down, a building, a business), check for a city encounter while passing, and finally describe the location they arrive at.

I’ve been sort of drifting towards this, as you’ll see above. I created a map, with some districts, although I haven’t written down a huge amount of detail, and my map is still mostly in my head. I have come up with encounters … sometimes … and have tried to give some landmarks as they pass and repeat them when they take the route again.

Where I’ve fallen down is the gazetteer. Arguably I do have a gazetteer of sorts, but it is spread across semi-connected blog posts and world-building, a document full of characters which covers some of the characters I actually use, and a morass of different session plans which include locations and characters.

NPC management

The other section of Justin’s book which has inspired me relating to this is some advice he gives in the Social Events section, and the Extra Credit section The Universal NPC Roleplaying Template.

I’ll quote the first paragraph of the NPC section, because it perfectly describes my problem with both my characters and my city:

The more important an NPC is, the more detailed they become. But the more detailed they are, the more their description becomes an unwieldy mass that’s almost impossible to parse during the pressure of actual play. And so, ironically, the more important an NPC is, the more difficult it becomes to run them smoothly and effectively at the table.

What’s Justin’s solution to this?

In the Social Events section, he recommends:

… prep notes for each of [your] important NPCs. I recommend one NPC per sheet and keeping them loose-leaf. This will let you quickly pull out sheets for each NPC participating in a particular conversation for easy use.

…

[T]he Universal NPC Roleplaying Template … is specifically designed to make it easy for you to quickly pick up each NPC and seamlessly slip into their role.

That was a flash of illumination!

That half page told me what I need to do to manage not only my NPCs, but also my locations. And it is similar to the solution I came up with to make my religions easier to run at the table.

But before I get into my solution, let’s see what the Universal Roleplaying Template contains. Back to Justin:

The template is designed so that it doesn’t take any extra effort to prep compared to the traditional “wall of text” presentations, but it structures the NPC’s description into utilitarian categories that will (a) focus your prep and (b) make it incredibly easy to use during actual play.

It contains the following headings:

• Name
• Appearance – 1-2 sentences, max three
• Roleplaying – the essential elements which “unlock” the character – a mannerism (he uses an actual physical mannerism which he uses at the table to get into character), plus a handful of personality traits and attitude. He suggests (like I did in my new Religion template) “You may find that a properly crafted quote can be a very effective way of capturing the NPC’s unique voice.”
• Some more discursive background, with key information called out in bold
• Key Info which the NPC may provide – rumours, information. It can be useful to subdivide this if there are different categories of information
• Possibly stat blocks, if necessary, but these are generally lower priority

And that’s about it. Short and to the point, just like I moved to with my religion.

Running a city – the solution

So with that, here is my guidance for running a city, combining my experience with Justin Alexander’s recommendations.

• Develop a map, with distinct districts and landmarks
• Develop a gazetteer, as a set of loose-leaf pages which can be organised and updated easily
• Have each location, district, group and character on its own page with a standard succinct format which allows me to pick out the relevant information at a glance
• Prepare some random encounters which give a flavour of city life
• When preparing, find and review the appropriate location and character pages, adding new hints that move the plot on as appropriate
• As the PCs move about the city, briefly describe the districts, route and landmarks they pass through and arrive in – using the map and single-page descriptions as reference
• Throw in random city encounters as appropriate
• When they reach a location, pull out or flip to the page with the description, which helps with describing and portraying it
• Any important hints should be called out on the page, making sure they don’t get missed
• Annotate any changes back on the page for future reference

Plan of campaign

With that in mind, how do I get from where I am now to where I want to be?

My biggest problem at the moment is organisation and finding the relevant information when I need it at the table.

Currently, to my sessions I take

• a large A4 ring binder with the working documents for the session (and all the old ones, too, because who knows…)
• a smaller ring binder mostly containing A5 poly-pockets, which is supposed to be reference stuff but which I haven’t got round to populating
• a bunch of small boxes of 4.5cm square character tents for initiative tracking

And, of course, my dice, and GM screen with useful tables (some of which are custom to my campaign), mapping, a bunch of GoGos Crazy Bones to represent the characters and beasties because it’s simpler than buying lots of custom miniatures, and my PHB, DMG and MM … but those are irrelevant here.

I think what I need to do is make that A5 ring binder become the printed version of my campaign gazetteer. I can write and print out an A5 page per character – both PC and NPC – and put it into one of the poly-pockets. I can do the same for locations. And districts. And religions. Maybe gangs need one page for the gang covering the insignias and all the members.

Then when I need a particular character or location in a session, I can easily flip to the appropriate page, maybe pop it out and put it handy. If anything changes during the session I can slide out the piece of paper, annotate it, and slip it back in. And then at the end I can file it away again and it will be ready for next time. I can even slip the character’s initiative tent into the same poly-pocket so it’s easy to locate if I need it.

Every so often, I can pull up the annotations and update the master document on my PC, and print out a clean version.

As I develop a session plan, I no longer need to include all the details of all the characters and locations involved. Instead the session plan becomes a summary, and any new characters get their own sheet. Then I collect together the relevant sheets ready for the session, and I’m ready to go. If the players head somewhere else, I have the pages already in the folder easy to pull out.

Alongside this, I do need to develop a city map as well. Once I do that I could include extracts on the locations to show where they are.

To get all this done feels like quite a large task. But even a small part of it will be useful – I just need to do enough for the next sessions. And then over time I can add more and more, and suddenly I’ll find I’m doing less adding and more just picking up the stuff already done.

So I’ll start with the characters and locations I expect to use in the next couple of sessions, and build from there.

Formatting will need to evolve over time as I see what information I need and find useful. My information is currently all in Word, so I will start there and see how far it takes me, reformatting it to one page per character/location.

Summary

This has been a long post with a lot of detail of my thinking. So here’s an overview.

Running a city is different to other styles of campaign because of

• restrictions on the type of monster available
• making the city feel real to the players – like a character in its own right
• much higher frequency of recurring locations and characters

To make the city feel real, and to stay on top of the recurring locations and characters:

• develop a map, including different districts and their characters
• build up a gazetteer, loose-leaf, with individual pages for each location and character
• drop in descriptions as the PCs move around the city

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a session to plan. Time to split out some locations and characters onto single sheets…

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