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Lady Corvus
2020-10-19, 03:13 PM
Hi everyone!

I'm looking for some ideas and inspiration for quests and characters in an urban fantasy campaign. The campaign is set in a giant flying city called Sundown that floats in safety above an apocalyptic wasteland.

Anything you can think of would be great to help me brainstorm as I'm really struggling with creativity at the moment with lockdown.

Thanks a lot!

Palanan
2020-10-19, 06:23 PM
Can you tell us a little more about the setting? Exactly how giant of a flying city is Sundown? Population in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? Is it essentially a big pancake in the sky, or does it have structure to it? How does it stay aloft, and how high above the wasteland is it floating?

Also, are there other flying cities that Sundown might interact with? Does Sundown send out scavenging parties to the surface, to glean any relics, raw materials or even pick up survivors? Who rules Sundown, and how, and is their rule accepted or fought against?

Is Sundown capable of controlling its own altitude and direction, or is it at the mercy of whatever forces are keeping it aloft? That could be a plotline in itself—if the city’s rulers are aware that they’re losing control over Sundown’s altitude, they would probably keep this information to themselves as long as possible.

In that case, the PCs might either be agents of the city’s ruling class, sent to find something to help correct the situation (almost certainly without full knowledge of the developing crisis) or they might be agents of a potential insurrection, sniffing for information they could use to help erode support for the rulers and tip the balance in favor of revolution.

This could take place either within the city, perhaps searching for lost archives or delving into the “underdark” of the city’s substructure, or down below on the ruined surface—or perhaps one leading to the other. It all depends on what you had in mind for the setting.

Duff
2020-10-19, 08:32 PM
City campaigns often depend on friction between factions. That can be:

Police* v criminals - PCs can be a criminal gang, a police department, freelance bounty hunters etc
House v house - eg Romeo and Juliette's rival houses, Game of Thrones writ smaller etc
Guilds clashing - Clashes can be over what work is covered by each, pricing, positions in a guild controlled government or simple prestige. The Baker's guild vs the Chef's guild fighting over who gets to sell cakes, The lumberjacks' guild and the carpenter's guild fighting over how much the lumberjacks charge. Guild enforcers can clash with rival guilds, rogue traders, law enforcement etc
Rival criminal gangs - This could be pretty standard fair - Turf war where the turf is any and all of types of crime, parts of the city, but could also involve conflict/competition within the gang, personality clashes and competition for gang "inputs" such as access to recruitment from each orphanage or the ability to buy gear from the wizards guild.
Political factions -Perhaps the merchant's guild wants the queen to be required by law to appoint a merchant guild member as finance minister. The Money lender's guild and most of the nobles disagree with the merchants. The Revolution are trying to get worker's rights while The Alliance of soldiers guilds, some of the minor nobles and the university want to limit the queen's power.

Your campaign could be about a specific conflict, in which case the PCs are probably in one faction and might hope to (by the end at least) shape their faction's policy, strategy and success. Other conflicts can still be included in the setting, giving possible shifting alliances as each group tries to achieve their own varied goals. This could suit a more sandbox type game as the party can have opportunities come past them, some that must be seized right away or be lost, others which can be picked up later, and lots of room for players to take the initiative.

Or, in a setting with multiple different conflicts going on, the PCs could be freelance "problem solvers", finding this runaway heir, defending that merchant from assassins and deducing who cursed the king's 2nd favorite horse. With optional assassination missions if you want a darker flavour and brokering negotiations if you want some purely social challenges

* - Whatever law enforcement the city might use

Saintheart
2020-10-19, 09:44 PM
Can you tell us a little more about the setting? Exactly how giant of a flying city is Sundown? Population in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? Is it essentially a big pancake in the sky, or does it have structure to it? How does it stay aloft, and how high above the wasteland is it floating?

Instant plot hook, via a couple of questions to be answered about the setting:

First question: what is the consumable and ideally finite resource that allows the city to stay aloft? Unobtainium? Spice? Dragon gizzards? The Turtle to Bear Beam holding up the Dark Tower? The psychic energy of magic-capable children fed horribly into a magitech device?

Second question: is that supply stable? Increasing? Dwindling? Why?

Third question: who has control of that resource (or control of access to that resource) and therefore is responsible for the city's continued survival?

Fourth question: who wants, or is trying to gain control of that resource?

Fifth question: do the PCs work for the person who controls the resource, or the person who wants control of it?

Sixth question: What is the person controlling, or the person wanting control's, plan for eliminating the opposition?

Seventh question: Does that plan involve the PCs?

Eighth question: If not, why not?

sktarq
2020-10-20, 01:54 PM
Well in addition to all your normal urban stuff a flying city over wastelands poses additional potentially interesting questions.

What to people eat? No seriously. In the real world ever city needs many many times its actual area in terms of support regions. Higher technology means those support regions can be farther away but that food (to start) needs to come from somewhere. The basic question then becomes does the city get its food internally, externally, or some mixture of both? Internally may lead to there being giant vats of algae, yeast, etc that are growing in various levels under the city pushing most of the normal living to the upper surface...or externally it overflies large area of farmland worked by vassal towns who are under the cities both domination and protection. Some mix is that it mostly uses the vats mentioned above but has to add biomass on a regular basis. And so the city has to have some way of collecting said biomass. Which could be interesting cover for all sorts of things. So why care about this stuff? because threats to the food supply, even indirect ones, make good adventuring hooks. Why do you city folk care what happens to this vassal town? because we tax food from it and protecting it serves as an example to other towns to keep giving us food as well securing this food supply. Why is BBEG politically untouchable? because he has the support of the Vat Stirrers Union and everyone knows that if the vats stop working everyone is out of food in a month...or need a replacement valve/sensor/etc and there are none on city? send adventurers to scrounge one up from some facility somewhere.

Where to they get water? Water is heavy, bulky, and vital for food, bathing, and lots of industry. Your city will need lots of it. More than you'd get from being rained on. Can it desalinate from the ocean? did the apocalypse taint water sources leading them to need to clean the water somehow? So finding good water, possibly recycling water, storing it (and just what that does to the weight of the city as a whole-can it be emergency dumped?) Does it gate the water in from the Elemental Plane? Every technical or magical solutions to these issues can have their own problems (maintenance, monsters catching a ride in the gate). And those problems make good adventure seeds. And again whoever controls the water, has major influence...without water the people of the city die or leave (potentially being just a slower death)...and powerful forces in your city can be powerful sources of adventure and intrigue...do the water managers have their own security group to safeguard the magitech that keep the gate open? does the controlling guild use the use their hold on the water supply as political cover to do other things?

What happens to the waste? both biological and physical? just get dumped out the bottom? murdered bodies often end up in the sewers and these kind of unpleasant places are a classic place for monsters and undesirables to tuck themselves away. Plus it a classic place to start looking for lost items of great import.

How does the city get things like building materials, specialist materials etc? Building materials for things like buildings, roads, etc are usually heavy. Either the city has to magically make them, never change (which will have its own effects and feeling of slow loss as some damage will be irreparable), or collect them. Does the city send out scouts to find good sources and then go set down? These scouts could make good adventuring groups or bring stuff from the wastes back into the city to kick off adventures. Similarly fabric, material for things like furniture, personal tools etc also need to be provided. And while some stuff is obvious high tech and magi tech can and do rely on small amounts of weird things. Columbia failed because of a bad O ring...simple bit of rubber...which needed plantations, transport, purification, vulcanization, etc etc etc...great now your city needs a new one. How do you get it? Or needs some special crystal to focus the floating charge for backup keep-the-disk-flat magic item or whatever...either way stuff that that is vital but inefficient to bring the full city to bear on, and can be carried by adventurers. . . or who can be monopolized by someone to act as a threat (perhaps preventing some political or law enforcement action for example)

Energy. Be it magical fire, wood, or heavy hydrogen for fusion reactors. Who controls it? What other influence does that grant them? where to they source the energy? And what can go wrong? how is the energy distributed? does that have social effects (do some people only have cooking fire some of the day or in communal areas? You see the pattern from above I'm sure.

Float, Location, and Structure. What keeps the city up, presumably moving about, and structurally sound? More sources of influence (politically, socially, and potentially religiously) and more sources of things going wrong/avenues of threat to act as adventure seeds.

Lady Corvus
2020-10-20, 04:50 PM
Thanks a lot for all your suggestions so far!

To answer some questions: Sundown is about 1,500 km² in all, separated into districts. About 3 million people live there. The city itself is flat but beneath it there is an inverted pyramid shape which contains the floatation device itself (the nature of which is secret to most, not 100% sure what it is yet, but maybe something dangerous or fiendish, a pact made to save the city perhaps?). The pyramid also holds the long winding sewers filled with monsters that somehow reach there from the surface (maybe ancient teleporting circles that are still active from before the apocalypse).

It floats about 800 ft above the ground from the tip of the pyramid. High level adventurers are sometimes hired to go down to the surface to find survivors, relics and such by wealthy collectors, nobles and such. At the moment, the general public believe Sundown is the only city and there are no other survivors. Unsure if the rulers know about survivors. Maybe they hide that knowledge to keep everyone scared of the surface and in their city?

Sundown floats in a seemingly random direction, likely somewhat directed by the core or what made the core. I do like the food idea! I feel that most people live in cramped conditions, eating algae and drinking recycled urine. Of course the rich have either special food production or magic users to make it for them. Rich people get water from gates that are also dangerous.

aglondier
2020-10-21, 04:09 AM
All those winding sewers, tunnels, dungeons, etc under the city? Not populated by monsters somehow teleporting up from the surface...no, those twisted abominations are the unfortunates and descendants of those who were once city dwellers, but were lost or banished to the tunnels, twisted and warped by the very eldritch engines that keep the city aloft.

Sundown is just one of a constellation of floating cities, but like repels like, and the cities coast along the world's leyline network, forever pushing each other away...but sometimes leaving evidence for subsequent travellers.

Knowing the likely future path of the city, scouts and rangers are sent ahead to find resources. Ores, herbs, forests, arable land, clean water... and once found, teams are sent ahead to exploit them, so that by the time the city catches up, the ores are mined, the crops are harvested, the timber cut and ready... uncaring of the mess left behind, it might be decades before the city passes by here again...

InvisibleBison
2020-10-21, 08:35 AM
Sundown is about 1,500 km² in all, separated into districts. About 3 million people live there. [...] I feel that most people live in cramped conditions

I'm not sure that these two things are compatible. 2000 people per square kilometer is not a particularly high population density, by either modern or medieval standards. I'd recommend reducing the size of the city to 300 km2, either by just having it be smaller or by having a large amount of the area be uninhabitable.

aglondier
2020-10-21, 09:28 AM
I'm not sure that these two things are compatible. 2000 people per square kilometer is not a particularly high population density, by either modern or medieval standards. I'd recommend reducing the size of the city to 300 km2, either by just having it be smaller or by having a large amount of the area be uninhabitable.

Farming land?

InvisibleBison
2020-10-21, 12:52 PM
Farming land?

Yeah, maybe, or maybe areas that have been overrun by monsters, or maybe both.

sktarq
2020-10-21, 03:54 PM
Well first recommendation I'd give is to go get a large paper road map of Oahu.

Why Oahu? Because Oahu is 1583 km2 and so is basically the same size as your city....

Does that feel right?

so I'd assume most of the area is pretty flat with the pyramid sticking out below...because if the pyramid is too tall that drives up the upper living surface above a comfortable altitude for people to breathe.

if the city floats under 1000ft over the landscape you may even have the city bump steep enough mountains...
which could be fun.

Could also mean if the main plane is say a km thick you'd have plenty of space for vats and sewers/dungeons internally and boosted with tightly packed vegetable gardens on much of the surface. So that's the food sorted at least.

Duff
2020-10-21, 05:24 PM
Farming land?
A lot of medieval cities had faming activity going on inside the walls. Vegetable gardens, pigs and chooks being kept. A few cows and goats for milk.
Maybe huge mushroom farms underground?

Kurgan
2020-10-21, 06:09 PM
For plot hooks/quests in a city game, there are a few options you can use. The first is simply have an adventurer's guild in the city. For your floating city, it could be wealthy patrons/aristocrats posting fetch quests to the surface for rare and exotic items, or the City Council requesting a sweep of subdeck 15 sections C-E after mutants set up camp there chasing maintenance workers away.

The other idea that I've run with before is make a local newspaper or two, and make front pages of them. Give the papers a slant too, so one that is owned by a corrupt mayor who dislikes party might dig up dirt on them and publish it, or make their great heroics seem less heroic, while another paper might hail them as heroes, etc.

Just be prepared to run random junk on the fly - one time in a paper filled with little plot hooks and just background fluff, the players noticed the article about "Local Elementary School Running Canned Goods Drive", which started a 2 session, 5-6 hour in real time adventure of them using it as a means of making themselves look great. It was great fun for all involved, as we had the corrupt mayor swooping in to try to outdo the party, since there was a mutual animosity, the party then trying to get back at mayor, while everyone involved was trying to put on a face about how great it is that we raised money for the kids. Throw in a saboteur who tried to use the rare public appearance of the mayor to get into the act of bomb throwing, and we had a great time overall. End result was that players made their characters look like, well, heroes, and successfully portrayed themselves as champions of the needy, and snubbed a political rival in the process.

So, make a couple front page articles, print them off and give to players - make it a mix of fluff and possible plot hooks for either right now or the distant future, and it helps make the place feel a little bit more real and gives the players a chance to engage in the city a bit more. Hell, some of my players started actually submitting articles to put in the paper for me to save me trouble, following the slant of the paper and everything.