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Almaseti
2018-12-04, 11:26 PM
I'm running an adventure that takes place in a city that has a weird magic effect where the roads don't always lead where they're supposed to go.

It used to be a mid-sized city-state well situated for trade, with a world-class college of arts and science. It was known for setting fashion trends and generally wealthy and powerful, and used to have an impressive military. The population is now severely depleted due to people leaving (which usually takes multiple attempts), violence or deaths due to food scarcity. It's lately been edging into outright famine after yet another bad harvest in the surrounding areas and the parts of the city proper that have been converted to farmland.

The magic is the result of a war that took place about ~30 years ago. Too much arcane magic being used in one place tends to leave a sort of pollution which causes all sorts of weird things to happen. Divine magic does not have the same problem.

The famine is actually partly unnatural, since there's a cult of a evil cannibal god using this to coerce people into joining the cult. The setting works on a Gods Need Worship setup, where the gods kinda compete against each other for worshippers (which means more power for them) Discworld-style.



There is a university where a lot of magic research happened during the war, it's now infested with fey, constructs and even some devils. The university itself has also achieved a sort of sentience.

Eristoran Zerzuket, elderly gnome NPC is a cleric of a god that may or may not be dead. (The clerics are still getting spells, but there haven't been any new clerics of that god in a while and any attempt to talk to the deity is just met with a sort of... static) He casts "Create Food and Drink" with all his high level spell slots every evening to feed as many people as he can. He also thinks spiders are lucky and won't let anyone hurt them in his vicinity.

The "roads not going where they should" thing is sometimes called "Thaenosa's Spite" after the leader of the elven nation that tried to take over the continent during the war.

Lots of abandoned buildings re purposed to grow food or keep livestock (usually rabbits or chickens). Jelaously guarded, often fought over. Neighborhoods tend to band together into gangs/clans and can be very suspicious of outsiders.

The druidic lifestyle has become very popular in the city and there's a a group of low level druids and druid-wannabes who are trying to return the city back to nature, one city block at a time, believing that if they can do that then the city will be freed from the "curse."

In other areas there's a lot of crime, and likely desperate people robbing others for money to buy the scarce food. Anyone who does have food to sell is going to need a lot of security to protect it, and even still sometimes hungry people just flat out mob them and take the food. This is dealt with harshly by the local authorities, because it discourages merchants and farmers from bringing food into the city.

There used to be a hereditary monarchy, but they were executed by an angry mob during something very much like the French Revolution. Now the area that used to be the palace and opulent palace gardens have been converted to farmland, and the produce is distributed to the needy during holidays. The government is more or less a dictatorship, changing hands as different factions gain enough power to overthrow whoever is currently in charge. Some areas of the city consider themselves separate and not beholden to the central authority, which obviously

Currently in charge is Knorri Tigerseye is an Oread woman who worships Etrimai, the LN overdeity of the setting, and is making serious attempts to crack down on the chaos in the city and restore order through any means necessary. (Stealing food in particular is harshly punished under her rule.) This attitude however is making her unpopular with certain elements of society who feel she is a tyrant. There have been a few assassination attempts and demagogues trying to claim power for themselves.



I'm basically trying to think up some low level encounters and flavor to add to the game before we get into the meat of the plot, which is combating the cult, possibly getting kidnapped and the cult trying to sacrifice them to their evil god to fuel the cult leader's transformation into a lich.

Coventry
2018-12-08, 12:51 PM
The rodent cycle

1. Destroy the rodents

Any city will have rodents. One where the food supply is limited will treat rats as major problem, so every neighborhood will have groups assigned to deal with the rodents.

2. Cut me own throat Dibbler

Stolen directly from Discworld - where there are teams hunting rodents, there are vendors looking for rodent meat that can be cooked and sold on a stick.

This has several variations - selling raw materials to him, buying from him, protecting him from a hungry mob, asking him for information about other areas of the city, et cetera.

3. Hey, why is *this* dead rat so fat?

Most of the fights against the rodents will be against lean/nearly-starving ones. Simply put - if the people have no food, then the rodents don't have food, either. Running into a group of overweight rats would imply that those rats were being well fed ... where did they get all of that food? Are they raiding our precious stores? Are the raiding someone else's precious stores (and can we raid the same thing)? Have they found something no one else is aware of?


The "We need supplies" cycle

4. Trade missions to other neighborhoods or zones.

Delivering or retrieving goods requires an appropriate amount of guards based on the value. This is an escort mission through potentially hostile territory ... but not everyone is hostile, and attacking everyone along the way is an easy way to ruin possible alliances.

5. What happened to the courier?

A courier has gone missing. Did he die in a freak accident? Mugged and killed by bandits? Was he eaten by cannibals? Did he simply steal the item he was carrying? Was he caught by the fey and is being used as a plaything?

6. Protect the foreign dignitary

Someone important from another area is here in the neighborhood, and needs to be protected.

7. I'm a commoner without my spell components

Wizards without bat guano are not casting fireballs. It's amazing how many material components can be classified as "edible" as people get hungrier. Bat guano may not be directly so, but it is fertilizer, so the people with farms will place it in high demand.

Gathering or trade mission: get the components needed for important spells


Miscellaneous

8. The older lady who keeps everyone in the neighborhood healed but otherwise keeps to herself is experimenting on people - but she is careful to leave her neighbors alone ... only people from other areas who would not be missed. Say, for example, couriers.

9. The players come upon a scene where a mob has broken into a noble's fortress, and is ransacking the place. What do they do?

10. The Pied Piper - someone shows up bearing the gifts of food, for the low, low price of obeying him.

11. The army returns home

Just as things even out, an army that was stranded outside because of the situation with the roads manages to return ... and immediately overstress the meagre resources.

12. Prison break!

Someone really bad has broken out of prison. A reward has been promised for whoever captures and returns that person.

13. A cart breaks down in the street. Do the PCs investigate? Help? Rob the hapless cart owner?

14. The new tower

Some time overnight, a tall tower has simply appeared a few blocks over in what had been a field that was being farmed. The druids are beside themselves with fury over the lost crops. Everyone else is wondering how and why the tower appeared.

15. Bandits in the night.

Someone has decided to raid the neighborhood's stockpile of supplies. Defeat them!

16. Saboteurs in the night

Rather than steal supplies, someone has decided to infect or poison the food stockpile. Defeat them! And then decide what to do about the ruined grain. (burning it will demoralize the people expecting to eat it)

Geddy2112
2018-12-10, 11:15 AM
If you want a good source for city based everything, look up Magic The Gathering's Ravnica, the city of guilds. It is an entire plane that is one giant city, run by ten guilds. Since the city is technically infinite it is isolated as in everything in that plane of existence is Ravnica.

You can add in a complexity where all the parts of the city are needed in some way to function, perhaps in an interdependent pact.

If arcane magic causes pollution, then unnatural weather phenomena are good arcs and world events. Look at what happens in our real world when hurricanes, blizzards etc. hit major cities. Now make it a magical hailstorm, weeks of darkness, that kind of thing. Since high level divine magic is needed to control the weather and arcane pollution could cause this, it is a good hook. Is somebody trying to destroy the city by just spamming arcane magic? Maybe a high level ritual is going down(planar binding, gates etc) and the weather is a side effect. Perhaps the druids and other weather folk are being hunted, or trying to save the city. The magic weather and world itself are the big bad, and the party has to find ways to stop it, or survive long enough to magically quell it.