Fictional city tourism guide

[NichG]

There are so many fictional cities across games, books, tabletop settings, etc. A lot of them blend together for me, but maybe not all... A lot of the time its just 'this story needs a location, that location would be a place, so here we go have some details' - maybe focused on realism of what would a city in this sort of place be like, maybe focused on supporting the story premise by having various kinds of conflict and tension creating structures, etc.

But I feel like when it comes down to it there aren't that many where I would say: I would want to take a vacation to this place and check it out. Excepting broad fantastical elements shared by the universe of that fiction as a whole like the existence of magic, etc.

What cities in fiction stand out to you as '(even if I already lived somewhere else in the setting) this would actually be a place I'd like to visit'?

What makes a city stand out like that?

How could we go about designing cities in our fictional settings to actually have this sort of character, and be a place that characters and their players could fall in love with independently of being told 'this is home, you probably should care about it'?

[Telok]

I have taken to writing up setting stuff as in-universe travelogues & travel wikis (depending on setting tech level). It seems like writing this stuff from the point of view of a person who has been there and thinks "this is what others should know" is more engaging to players than the usual dry setting workbook style.

I also feel free to take RL sources and find/replace words.

From Wikipedia 'list of travel books'

Ma Huan (ca. 1380 - 1460) and Fei Xin (ca. 1385 - after 1436), each of whom wrote a book about the lands visited with Zheng He's fleet.

Niccolò de' Conti (1395–1469), an Italian merchant who explored India, China and Indonesia from 1419 to 1444.
His travel account was written by request of Pope Eugene IV and is included in Book IV of "De varietate fortunae" by Poggio Bracciolini

[Quertus]

To visit? A place needs only have a gimmick, some simple draw to make it worth visiting. Cities that sing in the winds, landscapes of floating rocks, crystalline waterfalls, metal trees, cabbage migrations, magical bathhouses, inverted temporal flow, alternate reality media, unique confections, Illithid-level shared sensation, museums, local dishes. There's also "being a big name", like The Two Towers, Shadar Logoth, Hogwarts, or Atlantis, that make a spot have tourism potential.

That's to visit as a tourist. There are also reasons to visit on business (some of which overlap), like a great sage, local healer, magical university, or even (respawning) dungeon.

However, that's a little different from a city worth caring about in-character, or a city one would want to live in.

Most settings are designed with their ability to provide conflict in mind, and so aren't exactly what one is usually looking for when looking for a home. Which is why threads of "what would you do if sent to X setting" get responses of "leave!", and threads of "where would you like to live" usually result in crickets chirping in the silence.

Like, as a sufficiently powerful individual, I might enjoy going to Hogwarts to learn their local magic system, but it'd be a horrible place for the intended (pre)teen apprentices to learn magic.

In fact, most places in fiction, I'd only really want to go there if I knew I had the power to change things, drastically - either the setting / location itself, or the details of its history (often, but not always, the portion of the history covered in the fiction).

How to make PCs care? That can vary greatly. For me, 1) give me something like "floating rocks" that I can do whatever I want with; 2) make it more than one thing, so that I can find at least one such thing that I want to interact with; 3) let me invest the time and energy doing something with that unique resource; 4) provide me with NPCs worth interacting with. Of course, I said that in the wrong order. Let me try again. Give me NPCs worth interacting with. And a setting that doesn't feel "complete", that feels like more can be added. Let me in character add to it, invest in it, make my mark. But make me want to make my mark here because there's NPCs here that are worth interacting with.

So, for instance, let's look at Rivendale. It's beautiful to look at. It's got Elrond to interact with... if you're an important person, like Gandalf. But it really doesn't feel like there's much that the average PC would contribute to the place, y'know?

Contrast that with Koriko, or Leadale, or even Zootopia. Not as beautiful or magical as Rivendale, perhaps, but it really feels like the creator is ready to detail meaningful interactions with characters of all strips, not just those at the upper echelons, and like most any character could find a place there, a reason to call that place home.

So, to call a place home, to care about a place, I find it optimal to create a place where most any PC can find / carve out a niche, and can find NPCs worth interacting with. But that's not the same as the one-note draws of a tourist attraction.

[NichG]

Hm, so if I think about fictional locations, for me...

No list:
Ankh-Morpork? No, awful
Night City? No, awful
Waterdeep? Neverwinter? Only things I can think of about these places is stuff that went wrong with them, so no...
Tyr in Athas? No, awful
Vivec? "Outlander..." No thanks. Out of all the Elder Scrolls cities that have shown up in games, hm... there's really not that much in the way of cultural events and locations in the Elder Scrolls cities I guess? No theaters or performance halls that I can recall. So I guess maybe Solitude, which at least has a Bard's College...
Gotham? Metropolis? No, awful, its like Bad Chicago and Bad New York... While we're going down the Wikipedia list, Kamar-Taj? Is a city, really? Well, the bookstore is pretty good, and I like mountains and the cold - put that down as a maybe?
Brockton Bay? ... seriously no.
Midgar (FF7). No, awful. Wutai was sort of nice and distinctive though. Anything from the other FFs? Nothing coming to mind... maybe the 'land of summoned monsters' in 4? Maybe there was something in 8 or 10? Not familiar with things after that...

Yes/Maybes:
Novigrad (Witcher 3)? Well actually put this down as a maybe, it seems like there'd be things to participate in - races, shows, bath houses, etc. Local culture and circumstances aren't great though. Skellige sounds like it could be an interesting vacation I suppose.
Ulthar (Lovecraft)? Well I do like cats.
Aveh, Shevat (Xenogears). Actually, maybe! Aveh was pretty dynamic when you first enter it in the middle of a festival. Shevat, for what you get to see of it, seemed like a relatively well-adjusted and not-dystopian place given the rest of the setting.
The locations in SaGa Frontier were all pretty distinctive, so aside from the fact that many were filled with innately hostile things, this might be a good source.
Sigil is ironically both a horrible place, and one that seems innately interesting to visit for me. Probably the only easy pick on this list.
Does the Labyrinth from Labyrinth count? Could be a yes.
Maybe some of the player bases from the Suikoden series actually, they tend to have all sorts of stuff going on if you recruit everyone - plays, restaurants, races, baths, shopping, farms, fishing tours, teleportation services to everywhere else for day trips...
Futurama New New York? Certainly has a lot of things going on...

Anything stand out from MMOs? I'd think they'd do a lot towards making a place feel like players want to use it as a home base...

I feel like there should be locations in the Breath of Fire or Wild Arms series that give a good impression, but since they're blurring together for me I guess not so much?

[Quertus]

Gotham? Metropolis? No, awful, its like Bad Chicago and Bad New York...

This brings up an important point. If you were the one and only Supreme Being in the area (Superman), or simultaneously the wealthiest business owner / local genius and an alter-ego that fixes society’s ills (Bruce Wayne / Batman), or otherwise the most important figure (Elrond, for example), the idea of making a home in a lot of these places become a lot more palatable.

I wouldn’t mind visiting Rivendale as someone important enough to have Elrond’s ear. Hand me the power of Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, and I might visit metropolis, or Hogwarts.

But a normal person? Forget living there, even visiting? Out of D&D world settings, FR, Athas, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Ravenloft? Nope, no reason to even visit that setting in particular comes to mind, and I doubt you could pay people enough to visit some of those places. Eberon seems the only official option with any tourist potential, but I’ve never run a PC there to have the “boots on the ground” experience.

Other worlds in fiction? If the power to travel there became common enough to discuss, I could see bragging rights for traveling to Endor, or Arrakis, or some other big name. But my own personal desire, for a trip purely for pleasure, not business? Hmmm… there’s a few spots in Tolkien’s works worth visiting / sight seeing. A singing city in Star Wars EU. A mystery spot in Shangarta. About half the places in the “what if you were made a (magical) shopkeeper?” thread (whatever its title actually was). And, outside generic fantasy “dragons” or “magic”, that’s about all that comes to mind, from a purely “for pleasure tourism” PoV. Everywhere else I can think of (not that it’s a long list) is too elitist, or too dangerous, to consider: other places by Tolkien, Sky Garden of Babylon, even the Forest of Illusion are too elitist to allow tourists.

[King of Nowhere]

the major cities in the wheel of time world, or in sanderson's cosmere, all have decent tourism potential. art, monuments, ethnic culture, that kind of stuff.

I'd also visit any science museum in a sci-fi setting.

by the way, the fact that past cultures were a lot more elitist than we are is exactly the reason they produced the fine art that we now admire. Most of the population was worked to the bone, for the benefit of a small elite that could afford to commission masterwork paintings, sculptures, palaces that we now consider very important. we are now better off because of it. A fine paradox.
then again, if all that money had been spent on mass education, we'd probably be even better off.

[Quertus]

by the way, the fact that past cultures were a lot more elitist than we are is exactly the reason they produced the fine art that we now admire. Most of the population was worked to the bone, for the benefit of a small elite that could afford to commission masterwork paintings, sculptures, palaces that we now consider very important. we are now better off because of it. A fine paradox.

Ah, I was loose with my words. When I said “elitist”, I meant close to xenophobic - there is some barrier to entry making it such that only an elite few could enter the realm. “Tourism” is decidedly discouraged, often to death, by living, physical, and/or magical barriers / security measures. “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”

[NichG]

I guess if I were to theory-craft what would make a city that I'd want to visit, based on this:

Layer 1: Attractions

There should be several things that are just sort of spectacular or engaging, independent of the local culture or what its actually like to live there. Real-world examples I can think of from various places are:

- Street food vendors, walk-thru marketplaces. Show off strange things and the promise that you can experience them or take them home with you. These are the bite-sized experiences that make it attractive to 'just be there'. Street performances are a plus here too.
- More scheduled things to do that bring you into a kind of frame in which you feel like you belong, if only for a few hours - restaurants with famous chefs innovating on new kinds of cuisine, theatres, museums, VR arcades, clubs, nature tours, etc. Pretend like you're an adventurer, pretend like you're a sailor, learn how to windsurf, learn how to juggle, join an improv skit, go skiing, climb a wall...
- 'Serious' shopping. In JRPGs one of the things that makes getting to the next town exciting is often there will be gear upgrades, spells you can purchase, etc.

Layer 2: People and Culture

- Even for an outsider, have certain universal venues that invite you to become more integrated with the locals. Meet-up places where people will chat each-other up and tell stories, little events in each section of the city where people will show off their talents or re-enact historical events or do a little ritual or whatever. Firework shows, marching a portable shrine through the city, drinking while looking at tree blossoms, etc.
- Have more interest-specific points of contact that, again, are open to outsiders. Gaming meetups, tinkering meetups, adventuring guilds, etc. Something where if you're a traveller you might drop in for a session, but if you become a local it can become a weekly ritual.
- The city should support diverse stories, ways of being, subcultures, etc so that when you meet different people in the city, they actually feel different and not like 'generic City X denizen'. So you can meet someone who works in a mercenary company and performs music as a hobby, the secretary for a megacorp middle manager who does historical archery, the person studying to be an architect who is also an activist, etc.
- On top of that diversity, there should be some kind of distinct weirdness or character which thematically integrates those ways of life, like something that everyone in the city can agree on characterizes life in that city (even if its not overpoweringly 'the thing we all fixate on'). Like the idea of Osaka being a bit of a casual party town, or Kyoto being immersed in historical culture and arts, or Portland's 'keep Portland weird' ethos and tendency to try pickling everything including stuff that maybe should not be pickled. This is part of the 'why go to this city, and not any of the others?' hook.

Layer 3: Coming Home

This is subtle, but its the idea that if you make the city your home there should be a kind of feeling of relaxation or removal of stresses or problems when you return to the city (or to your place in the city) versus when you're elsewhere. In computer games, for me this is often simply and effectively 'I can finally unload all my loot and clean up my inventory'. That feeling of having a location where you can let go, relax, and simplify would be an important part of feeling like its worth protecting.

Layer 4: Ability to build a stake

In the very long term, if the city is some place which can be in some way altered by your own actions over a long period of time, then that I think gives rise to that strong urge to protect it. Maybe not something like 'I set policy for the city', but if you started your own club or meetup group and it keeps going even as the members join and leave, or if you planted an orchard and you've been seeing it develop, or you were part of a company or institute from the date of its founding and you're interwoven in its history and why it is the way it is now. From the point of view of what needs to be true about the city, it can't be too static and it can't be too self-contained - there should be at least some degree to which it's fertile ground for new things to come into being which are not just 'resolve this problem facing the city' but are more self-directed. This is the feeling of like if I were going to start a business, 'I could see starting it in City X'.