Musings About Citycrawling

So, your players show up to the big city. They plan on spending a lot of time here — doing jobs, unraveling mysteries, acquiring gear, the works. Along the way, they’ll build up a network of friends and enemies, explore many different neighborhoods, and eventually come to know the city the way you might know the actual city you live in. If all goes well, it’ll be just as much a character in your game as the PCs themselves.

But how do you design a place as big as, say, New York City? That’s a huge commitment in prep work, all frontloaded. You could get stuck doing prep forever and never actually sit down and play.

You could do worse than starting the same way you’d start a hexcrawl or a megadungeon: one step at a time.

I’m not a huge fan of megadungeons, personally. Nothing against them, they’re just not my cup of tea. I prefer the vibe of crisscrossing a whole country visiting different environments and locales. For some reason it just feels more grounded to me. The exception is Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent, which I’m itching to run at some point. Maybe it’s because the Deep feels like an actual place that could exist in the world, and not a contrivance that would only exist in the context of a D&D game.

There’s a lot of good advice out there for designing both dungeons and hexcrawls. I think we can combine the structures of both to build an interesting, dynamic city.

What do I mean by this?

Say that each neighborhood is like a wilderness hex. It’s a small space, only a few blocks across at most. Give it a handful of NPCs, a paragraph description, a little d6 encounter table, and maybe a secret or two. What’s unique about it? You don’t have to go overboard, just one good idea is enough to make it stand out.

After that, build the second neighborhood, adjacent to the first. It’s got its own landmark, its own group of NPCs, its own set of encounters. Then build another, and another, and another. Mark how they relate to each other spatially, but don’t get hung up on mapping every street. Like the hex in wilderness travel, the neighborhood is your basic building block. You don’t need to get any more granular than that.

Once you have a few neighborhoods, you’ve got a borough or ward. Like the dungeon level, the borough is a collection of neighborhoods with a common set of themes, aesthetics, and challenges. This is where you start building factions. And I think factions are really important — like a dungeon or hexcrawl, you want players to be able to make informed decisions about where to go and how to get there. And with fewer “natural” barriers like rivers or walls, the social landscape of the city needs to do more work in creating interesting choices in exploration.

Sure, you could take the train across town — but the corporation running the train has a bounty on your head. You could walk there, but the direct route runs through a district locked down by cops after a terrorist attack. Next door there’s a confrontation between strikebreakers and union workers. The sewers below are infested with members of a mysterious and violent cult. You get the idea?

The great thing about this is that the whole thing tessellates. You could spend a dozen sessions exploring just one borough, with local conflicts contained to a handful of neighborhoods. Then, events take the players to the borough next door, and the stakes get higher. The players start running into bigger factions with loftier ambitions. Like dungeon levels, city boroughs can be self-contained locales, but they can also connect with other boroughs as the situation demands.

I don’t think any of this is really new. All I’m doing here is applying the friction of wilderness or dungeon exploration to the city. Constrain the players’ navigation options, impose costs and risks to various modes of travel, and give yourself permission to start small and build as you go.

Musings About Citycrawling

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