The City Accelerated

Years ago I wrote a series of blog posts around the “City Accelerator”, a tool for creating and growing TTRPG cities (using partial inspiration from CRPGs).

I updated and collected the ideas in this document. It’s about 15 pages long and under 4000 words, too long for a single blog post, so this is a summary.

Goals

The aims were:

  1. Focus on the details that matter
  2. Player-facing; everything on the table
  3. Involve the PCs in the city
  4. Involve the players in the world-building

Method

This is how the tool is supposed to work. It has three sub-systems.

The first system considers a topological approach of Districts connected with Entry Points and populated by Spaces. Spaces are where scenes actually happen. Districts and Spaces can be tagged with descriptions such as “open”, “close”, “high”, “dirty”, “noble”, “crime” &c. Spaces inherit the tags from their District but also have their own individual tags.

The second system considers the people in the city, in three tiers. Pawns and Knights occupy the lowest tier as Free Agents, Bishops and Rooks hold the middle tier as the feudal lords of the city, and the King and Queen occupy the highest tier. Each kind of character has a certain property, e.g. Knights have Ambition, Bishops have Territory, the King has Divinity. Crucially moving between tiers strips a character of the property of their old role when then enter the new one (e.g. a Knight becoming a Bishop loses Ambition and gains Territory).

The third system is just a brainstorm around a set of questions around the sights that a visitor to the city might see, from seeing the city in the distance all the way to walking through the city to its Heart.

I’m going to develop three examples based on current and old RPGs I’ve run. One is a sort of traditional fantasy pre-apocalyptic game called Glory that I ran in the early 2000s (inspired by Viriconium as well as Grant Morrison), one is a modern OSR-ish game called Black Mantle that I’ve blogged about, and the third is Lag which is definitely at the Indie/Storygame end of the scale, and which I’m just getting into with the first few playtest games.

Comments welcome.

Addendum: later finds

These are resources I discovered after writing the original blog posts, but which complement the tool really well:

  • In Corpathium is a brilliant dice-on-the-table method for randomising city districts (I like dice on the table). The author is a Viriconium fan, too. The method proposed is totally compatible with mapping out Districts.
  • Sine Nomine games use location tags for fantasy, sf and modern horror RPGs; potential inspiration for all kinds of city tags.