Running an urban campaign

[G.Cube]

I'm going to DM a campaign that takes place in a single, massive, metropolis. I've read through Cityscape and have a lot of good ideas started, but I'd like to see if there are any DMs out there that have run a city based adventure before and give their feed back. What worked well? What didn't? How did you keep everything fresh and dynamic in a single setting? Any advice for DMing? What was the general consensus from your players? Thanks in advance for all of your feedback!

[Gotterdammerung]

In my experience, city campaigns live and die based on the personality of the DM and players. If you have bump on a log players who just want to hop from combat to combat, or if you have a DM who isn't good at clever intrigue plots, organization, and story telling, then your city campaign will likely be short lived. But with the right group and GM they can be incredibly fun to play in.

Some tips:

The players have to care. This is likely the hardest part to accomplish. You can create a web of intrigue but if the players don't bite it is wasted. So find ways to make the players care. The absolute quickest way to accomplish this task is to have the players be manipulated by the ongoings of the city. Nothing invests a player quite as quickly as realizing that their lazy approach has allowed them to be used by a malicious force.

Example: Calimport is secretly run by a high lvl group of undead casters. Very few people truly know this reality. Most players live their entire campaigns never even finding out the sinister face behind calimport. During an adventure the story brings the players dangerously close to finding out this truth. In an attempt to side-track the players, as their current course would inevitably pull back the curtain, the sinister organization uses proxies to hire the P.C.'s for an unrelated mission. They simultaneously hire villains to oppose the players on the mission. Now if the players succeed at the fake mission, they will likely be successfully distracted from their original course. And if the hired villains win then the hero's who were close to sniffing them out will be eliminated. Win win. At a clutch moment in the campaign the defeated hired villains can confess to the players that it was all a ruse and they were hired by the same employer. Now the players can go back to calimport with an agenda and lots of questions. Why did their employer hire both sides? Who is their true employer?

The general distaste left in their mouths about being played will boil down into a true desire to "get to the bottom" of things.

Esentially, you always want to drive the players to ask the questions. Having questions available will not work all by itself. You have to make the players want to ask the questions.



Tip #2

Clearly define the important character, even if the players don't know about them yet. The story will become more real if you take the time to flesh it out, outside the game.

Looking up method acting tips can help make lively characters for important roles.

Writing classes or books will help teach you which archetypes belong where and why.

[G.Cube]

That was actually fantastic help, thank you very much. Anyone else have any advice?

[LadyLexi]

Have your players write up a bit about there characters, if they have lived in this city their whole lives they may have family, friends, a few connections. Local rumors (i.e. everyone knows to stay out of beggar's alley unless you want trouble).

Find out what interests your players. I love social encounters, rumor-mongering, and social investigation. Not everyone gets into that however.

[CoffeeIncluded]

You've still got to do random encounters, but you can't have your players constantly getting into fights or robbed. Take a look at some of the urban random encounters and give a flair to them. One encounter I did that I'm kinda proud of was rolling up "Crowd of people blocking the way," and making it a street performance that people were watching. The performers then asked for volunteers for them to jump over, and afterwards one of my players told me that she got worried when she volunteered and I actually rolled the tumble check, but that she enjoyed the encounter.

[Gazebo's Bane]

I ran something like this for a while and I back up everything Gotterdammerung says.

I would invest a lot of time in knowing possibly mundane things before you ever start: how is the place governed? How stable is that government? Who wants it changed? How does the city's economy work? How relatively influential are the religions? How is the local military and law organised? Down to the names of several taverns and inns and NPC stats for merchants and members of the watch and/or other organisations. Also: decent maps.

It sounds like a lot of work. It is a lot of work. But with this sort of game being able to confidently tell the players what they see when they walk into the main plaza or letting them have the satisfaction of avoiding trouble because they recognise a merchant's guild coat of arms without you having to tell them that's what it is makes the difference between immersive fun and random encounters that just happen to be in a street.

[avr]

You need background and connections to the players. Also, to avoid having the players shed the connections ASAP you need to use the background/connections to help the players at least as much as they are harmed or dragged around by them.

[Zero grim]

I run a large amount of urban campaigns, the large metropolis is my favourite setting, I find it works best for me as thinking of the city as an entire country to itself, your players still have to travel from place to place, they have to deal with shady characters they have to go to law controlled areas and such but give it as much depth as you would any country the party would adventure in.

Gotterdammerung has put some great points for the investigation side of things, I don't think I can add much to that but ill try, the main thing I find gets people interested in a city is an odd hook, what makes this city special or even unique in the world, perhaps the sky's are patrolled by dungeonbred fire drakes or they are the first city to have a proper bank?

I've found hooks like these help get people invested genitally, then you just have to wait until the players ask "what's the local tavern like?" until you know what to add too.

also be prepared for a lot of gather information checks, a lot of them, players may ask question about the weirdest things when they have 24/7 access to commoners to chat to.

(I only knew drungeonbred cant be applied to fire drakes after my players encountered them, not that it matters so much the template works for them just fine)

[G.Cube]

Thanks a lot everyone, this is all solid feedback! On what Gazebo said about maps, this Metropolis is absolutely massive, such a thing probably doesn't exist, but is there a generic building generator that can whip up pre-made or randomized taverns, churches, inns, and other buildings like this? It would save me a lot of time and tedious tasking if I didn't have to hand make a tavern every time the players travel to a new part of the city.

[Gotterdammerung]

Thanks a lot everyone, this is all solid feedback! On what Gazebo said about maps, this Metropolis is absolutely massive, such a thing probably doesn't exist, but is there a generic building generator that can whip up pre-made or randomized taverns, churches, inns, and other buildings like this? It would save me a lot of time and tedious tasking if I didn't have to hand make a tavern every time the players travel to a new part of the city.

If your not up to making these things yourself, then your best bet will be to scavenge material. I recommend looking into past editions. Previous incarnations of D&D tended to favor Mundane over Mechanics and therefore older books will have more useful info for your purposes. Some good places to check: Forgotten Realms has tons of books and articles about specific cities. Many of them have very detailed maps that can be copy/pasta'd. Waterdeep, Calimport, pretty much every major city in FR has a sourcebook in at least one of the previous editions. Greyhawk also has some hidden gems of articles and books for famous cities.

[meto30]

Waterdeep is my the most favorite place to adventure in, and it's a mega-sized metropolis. It's great fun, as long as the players are interested in complex plots. But nothing on the matter that everyone have not already said, so here's my suggestion:

Have multiple different factions struggle amongst themselves for dominance of the city (i.e. crime guild interregnum war). This is, in my experience, one of the most fun type of stories to play in urban settings. The players get to have great influence over the city through their role as kingmaker, and gives them a lot of choices on possible actions from the onset.

[Zerter]

My group plays weekly for more than two years with all adventures taking place in the same metropolis and everything remains fresh. The way I set it up originally is a campaign that is defined from the top, defined from the bottom, but everything inbetween is left open. Let me explain what I mean:

Defined from the top means that the major factions were worked out and commonly known. The same goes for the ruling NPCs and some other famous ones as well. It also meant the boundaries of the city were known and in general where every faction was located.

Defined from the bottom meant that the original PCs were established in the city with a background and had somewhere to go and a reason to go there for quests. A way to get things started.

Everything else being left open meant that large portions of the city were not at all defined, to be used as was needed. Also that even though they might have some knowledge publicly availably about the major players, they still had to find out a lot on their own.

What I would also definitely recommend you keep in the back of your head is that in a metropolis there are two kinds of conflicts: conflicts within the city and conflicts coming from outside the city. A city needs mechanics to deal with both and as a result any internal struggles will never lead to fullscale war. It makes no sense for a metropolis to tear itself apart because it makes it much too vulnerable for outsiders to profit from that. Also it is very realistic for even archenemies to unite against threats from the outside so you need mechanics to make that possible.

[G.Cube]

Waterdeep is my the most favorite place to adventure in, and it's a mega-sized metropolis. It's great fun, as long as the players are interested in complex plots. But nothing on the matter that everyone have not already said, so here's my suggestion:

Have multiple different factions struggle amongst themselves for dominance of the city (i.e. crime guild interregnum war). This is, in my experience, one of the most fun type of stories to play in urban settings. The players get to have great influence over the city through their role as kingmaker, and gives them a lot of choices on possible actions from the onset.

Actually, it's good that you said that, cause it reaffirms the setting I have planned as a good one, I'm doing a Ravnica based campaign (apparently a fairly popular idea, judging from google searches.) So far this has been all of great help, and any more would be greatly appreciated, has anyone here maybe played or ran a Ravnica campaign setting before? Again everyone, thank you for all of the help, and I look forward to future posts!

[Toy Killer]

Cities are great for long term campaigns, less so for short term.

Their is a fair bit of work from the start up, as everything is so easily accessible and limited at the same time.

further more, Verisimilitude is king in city campaigns. If you have Old man Henderson running the drooling mule, when the characters go back to the drooling mule and spend a bit of time back and forth their, only to realize that Henderson has been replaced by some dwarf, they are likely to wonder what happened to Henderson. Poorly prepared, this is a derailment of the story, properly ad-libbed, this is a great plot hook that rewards your players for immersing themselves in the setting.

Put time into a stack of 100 NPCs, separate them by Age Category (I find that it really tries the suspension of disbelief when an elderly man is trying out for Knighthood and a teenager is the head of a black smith shop. While both can be great characters in their own rights, leave if for when you run out of appropriate age cards to further define their uniqueness rather then a random smattering across all of Ravnica.) and don't define their professions or even stats. As the PCs explore your setting, make notes of where each NPC should be commonly found at. Remember that faces in a city are constantly flashing back and forth at you, and meeting Ulric the paladin at the market is a good way to make the world feel like it is a living breathing place.

As time goes on, the game will practically play itself. You won't need to write out new people for the PCs to meet, they already know them. You don't need to make new factions and new guilds, they are already there. You just need to define how each reacts to the situations as they change. It's a challenge, but a fun one.

Good Luck!

[meto30]

Another two cents, if I may. I've found while DMing that players can (and sometimes does) differentiate between NPCs important to the plot and minor ones who're there to just fill out the cityscape by seeing if yhey have names. Ad lib is possible but the potential delay may tip players off. I see three ways out of this: one way is refraining from naming anyone, another is preparing a list of setting appropriate names to pull from, and the last one, which I use, is naming everyone. Naming hundreds of thousands of NPCs can be fun, and they provide easy reference points for when you review NPCs to add plot elements. "Remember Wenda the tavern wench who seemed to be hitting on Barcus the apprentice mage? Looks like she's seduced Barcus to gain access to his masters ingredients stock. Yeah, that's the ingredients dealer you're looking for.