Urban adventure ideas?

[PaigeXenon]

I am currently running a campaign based in an island nation and my players are about to reach the large port capital. My problem is that I have never run a urban adventure of any kind so i have no idea what to really have my players do in the city.

The idea for my city is that it has a twisted version on the plane of shadow. the 2 versions of the city overlap and shifting conduits of shadow(any sort of true seeing effect could reveal them) connect the streets. The 2 cities are aware of each other on some level mostly the scholar and the government but the common people of either city have no idea the other is there unless they have stumbled in to a conduit of shadow. I am unsure what to do with this idea or if it is even a good one.

I would like to come up with some thing to make use of all my PCs abilities the party consists of

- a narcissistic goblin rogue
- a gnomish bard with ADD
- a human cleric
- a half orc druid who mainly a melee fighter and forgets he even has spells

[sdream]

It sounds like you've never done a city campaign, and your idea would involve basically two cities plus politics.

Seems like learning to swim in a wave pool to me.

If you have never done an urban campaign, download and read a couple urban modules other people have put together, and look for opportunities to get your people involved in any of the events from both.

I would look for a city map just so you can say, It's over at J23 and you are at Q75, but I would caution against trying to flesh it out too much to start.

The PCs will probably find a way to burn it down or get expelled in a couple sessions, and then all that creativity will be wasted.

[Gotterdammerung]

City campaigns really can't be put into a box. They vary depending on how much work you are willing to put into defining the locales, creating the political structure, peppering it with a population of interesting citizens, and flavoring it with a history. If you do none of these things, a city campaign consists of a rough description of the theme of the city + some staple buildings (bar, church, outhouse, whorehouse) + relevant NPCs with everything outside of that being an undefined grid.

So you can see how it can vary. It can be as intrigue infused as the game of thrones world. It can be focused on exploration like Indiana Jones (the "i'm in egypt, eating your dates" part), with a majestic city full of strange wonders. Or if the GM didn't put any work into it, it can be linear and boring. It can be about as sturdy as a soap bubble, popping the moment players put any pressure on the inadequately fleshed out chassis.



If you want tips on how to put the work in, I suggest:

- read some examples -
Forgotten Realms is probably the best place to get ideas about creating cities. It has the most content available for fully fleshed out cities complete with secret organizations, governments, key players, histories, agendas, maps, population info, specific places of interest, and various other useful bits of data.

You can use these examples to get a feel for the way to flesh out a city. But don't just copy the city. You will have a much better result if you just assimilate the info and then let the miasma of data steep until it culminates into an arrow of inspiration. Ride the coat tails of this knowledge volcano and you will succeed in creating your very own original city.

-Follow the logic-

It is easy to get overwhelmed when creating something ambitious from scratch. The best advice I can give is to just start writing ideas down. Once you have somewhere to start from, you can ask yourself questions and then follow the logic to find the answer.

For example, your idea is 2 cities slightly aware of each other but linked by coterminous planes.
So we can extrapolate several basic questions from this idea. And then by finding the logical answers to those questions, we begin to more finely define this city of yours.

Is there a thieves guild?

If so what is a thieves guild like when it has 2 whole cities to choose from?

How easy is it to travel from one city to the other?

If it is hard to travel, why? Is it for political reasons? Or is it just the nature of the magical rifts?

Is the city more Lawfully aligned or more chaotic? More good or more evil? Do both sides of the city share alignment, or are they juxtaposed?

Whatever the answer, why does it lean towards that alignment? Is it answered in the cities history?

You can literally probe this dual city for hours just asking yourself questions and then answering those questions. Sometimes the answers to those questions will lead to more questions. Just keep answering questions.

Write down the answers you come up with and very soon you will not only become more intimately familiar with your creation, but you will also start to conjure up these realities at an increasingly rapid rate.




Hope that helped.

[Gotterdammerung]

and then all that creativity will be wasted.

Creativity is never wasted. That is a big fat myth.

When my players burn down a city I spent hours creating, it doesn't bother me one little bit.

I just change a few notes and salvage most all of the work for another day.

With an "all parts of the buffalo" mentality it becomes very easy to find a way to salvage, save, and recycle your hard work.

[Deth Muncher]

Read Cityscape? It's literally a book about cities in D&D. There's also a DMG2 web enhancement on How To Build A City, so that's probably worth looking at as well.

For the actual campaign, though? I like the fact that you're going for the overlapping cities thing. It's cool. It works. For a similar subject, I recommend you go read China Mieville's The City and The City. I think you might be able to yank something nice out of it for your campaign.

To try and add to Gotterdamerung's very helpful laundry list, I would say that perhaps your first session in the city should be short. You do a little planning on every conceivable front - down to the inventory and customers of every shop, bar, and inn they might find themselves in, any NPCs they could interact with, what have you. But don't go too deep. Tell your PCs you're fleshing out how they're going to react in the city. Effectively, this means that you can tell what routes they're going to go down, and thus beef up your plot/descriptions of those things accordingly. That way, you haven't wasted time on things the PCs are literally never going to see.

I will warn you, though - political campaigns are not for everyone. Your PCs don't seem to be the heaviest on social types, but I could be wrong. My point is, if you start introducing all this intercity political intrigue, and all your players care about is "Okay, so when's the next big guy we have to kill?" you're gonna have to (probably tearfully, as you'd have spent so much time on it) bid adieu to your original plan and adapt it to something assassination-style to keep your group's interest. That is, of course, making many assumptions on your group, but it's better to be prepared on all fronts just in case.

[Gotterdammerung]

I will warn you, though - political campaigns are not for everyone. Your PCs don't seem to be the heaviest on social types, but I could be wrong. My point is, if you start introducing all this intercity political intrigue, and all your players care about is "Okay, so when's the next big guy we have to kill?" you're gonna have to (probably tearfully, as you'd have spent so much time on it) bid adieu to your original plan and adapt it to something assassination-style to keep your group's interest. That is, of course, making many assumptions on your group, but it's better to be prepared on all fronts just in case.

If political intrigue is done right it doesn't matter if the players interact with it or not. Take the twisted rune of Calimshan for instance. They are a secret group of long lived undead casters who have banded together to become the true power behind the wealthy city of Calimshan. However they are skilled artisans of politics and intrigue. So they have hidden themselves behind layers and layers of secrecy. You could ask a scholar, "who runs Calimshan?" and all but the most perfectly astute scholar would answer incorrectly.

Why is this important? Because these wicked creatures often use adventurers like pawns in their schemes. They have no qualms about hiring a good party through a shell business and sending them off to do something seemingly innocent yet functionally equivalent to a cog in a big evil machine.

When introduced to an evil party, a politically minded overlord will likely seek an alliance. If the alliance is tenuous or the party outright refuses, there will be a reaction. It doesn't matter if the party doesn't exhibit talents for intrigue. The overlord will still take steps to either remove the party of his life or, more ambitiously, from the world. An oblivious group that cares nothing for politics would likely never even know the source of the peril.

Example: many times in D&D a party comes across some info that leads them into a dangerous area. There is always a reason that tempts them into these life threatening environments. But what if we peel a layer back and find that Shangalar the Black orchestrated the lead and paid a source to give it to you. He might even have bolstered the deadly perils of the road ahead.
Well why would he do that? you might ask. Shangalar and characters like him see the world as a board game. If you find yourself strong enough to influence his board game and he finds that he can't manipulate you, then you will be targeted for destruction.


So even if your group is all "wheres the next bad guy!". It doesn't stop a DM, who enjoys subterfuge, from having behind the scenes reasons for why there was even a BBEG in the first place. (as in "hello, nice to meet you. I'm the final bosses boss, Carl.")

And in my experience, having deep layers of story that the players might never even scratch adds an indescribably wholesome feeling to a campaign. The world feels more alive, more real.

[Deth Muncher]

If political intrigue is done right it doesn't matter if the players interact with it or not. Take the twisted rune of Calimshan for instance. They are a secret group of long lived undead casters who have banded together to become the true power behind the wealthy city of Calimshan. However they are skilled artisans of politics and intrigue. So they have hidden themselves behind layers and layers of secrecy. You could ask a scholar, "who runs Calimshan?" and all but the most perfectly astute scholar would answer incorrectly.

Why is this important? Because these wicked creatures often use adventurers like pawns in their schemes. They have no qualms about hiring a good party through a shell business and sending them off to do something seemingly innocent yet functionally equivalent to a cog in a big evil machine.

When introduced to an evil party, a politically minded overlord will likely seek an alliance. If the alliance is tenuous or the party outright refuses, there will be a reaction. It doesn't matter if the party doesn't exhibit talents for intrigue. The overlord will still take steps to either remove the party of his life or, more ambitiously, from the world. An oblivious group that cares nothing for politics would likely never even know the source of the peril.

Example: many times in D&D a party comes across some info that leads them into a dangerous area. There is always a reason that tempts them into these life threatening environments. But what if we peel a layer back and find that Shangalar the Black orchestrated the lead and paid a source to give it to you. He might even have bolstered the deadly perils of the road ahead.
Well why would he do that? you might ask. Shangalar and characters like him see the world as a board game. If you find yourself strong enough to influence his board game and he finds that he can't manipulate you, then you will be targeted for destruction.


So even if your group is all "wheres the next bad guy!". It doesn't stop a DM, who enjoys subterfuge, from having behind the scenes reasons for why there was even a BBEG in the first place. (as in "hello, nice to meet you. I'm the final bosses boss, Carl.")

And in my experience, having deep layers of story that the players might never even scratch adds an indescribably wholesome feeling to a campaign. The world feels more alive, more real.

I concede to your point. And, actually, if you DO layer it out this much, then on the off chance your players evolve beyond just wanting to murderize things wantonly, then you've got all this story already prepared!

[Randomguy]

Just bring in an NPC warforged artificer and you can steal some of the overall plot of Teen Titans. :smallbiggrin: The half-orc druid is already beast boy.

Being in a city as opposed to in a dungeon means that there are a lot of changes. For example, randomly killing bad guys without proof of what they were doing is probably frowned upon by the city authorities.

Remember to keep magic in mind. No point in adding any murder mystery stuff if the party has access to raise dead (unless the body is very well disposed of).

And as already mentioned, going through cityscape and some modules that take place in the city would be a good idea. Look up and read the Tales of Wyre as well, if you have time. It's not exactly cityscape, but it isn't a dungeon crawl, and it does have a lot of intrigue and trans-planar intrigue. It's mostly at higher levels, though (and a good read anyway).

[Peelee]

Remember to keep magic in mind. No point in adding any murder mystery stuff if the party has access to raise dead (unless the body is very well disposed of).

Unless the deceased doesn't wish to come back. Maybe he was killed because of his outstanding gambling debts, and coming back would only lead to being killed again, or having several limbs broken? Or dozens to hundreds of other reasons? Access to resurrection spells does not guarantee the efficacy of resurrection spells.