Into the Cess & Citadel Review - Third Party 5E

[Sparky McDibben]

Those of you familiar with DriveThruRPG are no doubt already familiar with Into the Wyrd & Wild, a sourcebook for wilderness adventures by Wet Ink Games, written by Charles Ferguson-Avery.

But you may not have heard that the same chap also released Into the Cess & Citadel, a sourcebook for city adventures. It's an interesting but occasionally frustrating book that aims for the heavens and lands somewhere in the stratosphere ... over Cleveland.

I wanted to kind of talk through my thoughts on the book and synthesize some of the things I found compelling, interesting, useful, and where the book occasionally slips on a banana peel. So I thought...what better way to do that THAN TO SHOUT IT INTO THE VOID OF THE INTERNET!!!!!

Look, I'm working through some stuff right now, y'all. Bear with me.

One final point - I'm putting this review into the 5E section, despite the fact that this book is system neutral, because I will be reviewing it with 5E use-cases and mechanics in mind. I'll be diving into how to convert from the sort of "generic system" the book uses to 5E mechanics, too. Especially the monster conversions. Oof, the monsters.

Thusly, this is my review of Into the Cess & Citadel, which I picked up in digital PDF format from DriveThruRPG for $15.96 (Halloween sale, normal price is $19.95). It clocks in at about 288 pages, which comes to about 6 cents a page at the price I got it at, or 7 cents a page at normal price.

My current plan is to review the book roughly by chapter:

I. Introduction
II. Rules of the Street
III. Cobblestone Beasts
IV. To Build A City
V. The Undercity
VI. The Spires
VII. The Districts (Cultivist, Foundry, and Archivist Districts)
VIII. Backmatter (100 Locations, Artifacts & Spells, and Running A City)
IX. Monster Conversions (to 5E)*
X. Ravnica, Dallas, and Other Hellscapes (Using This Book in Existing Settings)
XI. Final Recommendation
Appendix: How I'd Do It - Recommendations to Fix My Gripes

My goal is to publish one of these sections every two to three days, though be advised we have some medical stuff coming up next week so it may be a little slow off the mark.

To start, I'd like to break down the book's definition of System Neutrality, and how it was written:

"This means that a majority of the book has been written to be immediately usable by most RPG systems, but some additions or tweaks may be desired by GMs and players."

Listed systems for use include: DCC, Troika!, Pathfinder, Mork Borg, and DnD 5E.

Those of you familiar with all these systems may wonder how on earth this book managed to get something that works for all of them. Well....they did and they didn't. To continue quoting the designers: "The most important parts of the book are the ideas and concepts for GMs and players alike."

That last phrase really sits at the heart of this book's value. It is most useful as a prep and inspiration book. Do NOT try to use this at the table. Copy the procedures and tables onto a few index cards, clip them to your screen, and go. If you have monsters you want to use (and there are definitely monsters in here you'll want to use), convert them to 5E ahead of time. Learn from ol' Sparky's mistakes, young Padawan!

There is also a useful glossary of terms included, however, including defining turns (not exploration turns, just turns in general), rounds, advantage, disadvantage, and breaking out the various saves. This is actually really useful from a 5E perspective - it tells you upfront that they'll be using some language you're unfamiliar with (like "Save vs. Poison") but that there's a key in the front of the book that tells you what that means in 5E terms (a Constitution save, in case you hadn't already guessed, clever clogs).

It then breaks down the various DCs in a familiar chart, listing out Easy to Impossible DCs per the 5E DMG (p 238). And this is one of the places where the book kind of trips over its own shoelaces. They broke down the DCs, but never actually included any of them into the game effects. For example, the Dire Pigeon (I love this thing, trust me, we'll get to it!) has a stench aura, but it only says "Anyone within arm’s length, save v. Poison" and then lists the effects. Is that a Hard save? An Easy one? I know that in BX games, you don't have the DC in the monster stat block, but boy it would have been helpful here. This will be a theme throughout the book, where it's desire to remain system neutral actually makes using it harder than it would have been if it just picked a system and stuck with it.

Alright, y'all, it's time for Sparky's nap and then I've been invited to a wedding in Westeros. Any thoughts on what I should bring as a gift?

I'll catch y'all later!

*Edit: Future Sparky, this is Past Sparky. Two things: One, when you go over the mechanical conversions, don't forget to include the hazards, diseases, poisons, disasters and catastrophes. Two, the doc's alive! He's alive!

[BeholderEyeDr]

As always, excited to read your reviews! You're doing a vital service for the community, and it's very much appreciated.

[animorte]

Any thoughts on what I should bring as a gift?

I would go with your classic:
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Or just a cloak. I hear those are useful.

I also very much look forward to this as I gained respect for your words shortly after joining the wonderful playground. Keep it coming!

[Sparky McDibben]

As always, excited to read your reviews! You're doing a vital service for the community, and it's very much appreciated.

I would go with your classic:
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Or just a cloak. I hear those are useful.

I also very much look forward to this as I gained respect for your words shortly after joining the wonderful playground. Keep it coming!

Thanks, y'all!

I'm going to roll the Introduction and the Rules of the Street together into one section, because the Introduction is only a couple pages long.

The Intro section gives us a quick overview of the city. In short, it's a nightmare dystopia ruled by Nobles, god-like aristocrats "demigods of flesh made gold, whose tyrannical whims ebb and flow like bloody tides across the city." A few folks are resisting, but most are just trying to survive. Under all of it lies the Wurm, a (possibly literal) creature whose will can drive people nuts, whose thrashing can roil the streets, and who does not care about anyone but itself.

It's a very "fantasypunk" version of a medieval city. The setting focuses on cultivating partial victories and incremental gains under a horrible system. Personally, I get enough of that in my daily life, but you do you. The stated goal of Into the Cess & Citadel is to "turn the traditional city into a more immersive dungeon-like adventure setting." It does this by developing random generators to create an urban landscape, both physical and political, that the players can navigate with choices and consequences. It also gives us structures to help apply meaning to those choices by invoking specific, thematic consequences.

So that's the goal of Into the Cess & Citadel. Now let's see how well they do, eh?

Moving on, we get into the Rules of the Street. This section is 29 pages long, and packed with options for DMs to add. Specifically, these options are modular, so you don't have to use all of them for some of them to be lifted out and dropped into your game.

The options break down as follows:

• Traveling the City
• Traffic & Crowds
• Roughing It
• Dumpster Diving
• Reputation
• Hazards & Disasters
• City Mutations
• City Adaptations
• Diseases

Let's take a look!

Traveling the City gives you tools to break down the old, "fast and dangerous or slow but expensive" dichotomy. Normal travel through the city is at a rate of 2 miles per hour (18 miles per day); congested travel through the city is at a rate of 1 mile per hour (9 miles per day). But you can take a shortcut!

Shortcuts double your travel time (although its not clear if it doubles the entire day's travel time, or just the one hour), and there are three of them: roof-hopping, sewer tunnels, and pushing through the crowds. Each has two abilities that could be used (roof-hopping, for example, can use either Dex or Int, while crowd-pushing uses either Str or Cha), so each member of the party can choose a mode of travel they're comfortable with. Each method has a d6 table of fun and interesting complications that can occur, from face-planting to fighting a sewer gator.

Traffic & Crowds
But how would you know if there's congestion? Why, the map-thingamadoodle on your phone, of course! (Editor's note - Sparky doesn't actually know how apps work) But when running the city, you randomly determine which hexes have traffic, and the traffic applies certain modifier determined by the kind of event. There are three tables that interlink with each other that determine a) what causes the disruption, b) how big the disruption is, and c) the atmosphere. These tables interlink, so if the cause of the traffic is "A Noble Visits," the size of the disruption is always Grand ("[The crowd s]tretches beyond sight. No paid travel available, use a shortcut or lose 5d6 hours") and the atmosphere is always Dangerous ("Folks shout and push as a palpable tension rides through the air. Blood runs hot in the veins of folks here. Roll for an encounter.") Traffic (like Hazards & Disasters) can move around from hex to hex over time.

This section is also where they put the encounters common to the streets. The monster section starts off with some short statblocks about guard, aristocrat, etc., all of which are easy enough to just replace with the NPCs in Appendix B of the 5E Monster Manual. Next up there's a d100 table using these stat blocks to build these encounters, including entries for what the group encountered wants, and how they approach the PCs. These are awesome - much better than a simple block of monsters and die numbers. Love it!

Next up, the Roughing It section! This is a full page on how to camp out in the city. It is explicitly not something you want to do, as it is neither easy nor safe. There is a callout that misery tourism is Not Cool, man. They then give you a d20 list of what shelter you find and how safe it is. You can mix this up by rolling 2d20 and using one for the shelter and one for the risk. Risk varies from a 1-in-6 chance of an encounter that night to a 5-in-6 chance. Notably, there is no option for a risk-free campout. Well done and flavorful!

Speaking of flavorful, Dumpster Diving! When you can't find anything to eat (or don't have the money), you can always find a trash pile This is also a large d20 table to determine both what you find and how safe it is. There is a new Disease, the Droops. These diseases are friggin weird, y'all. The Droops causes 1d3 damage each day to a random ability score unless you make a Con save (once again with no guidance on the DC). The Droops is only cured by three consecutive saves...or an enema of heated holy water. Look, I like weird, but this seems like it's humiliating the player for having to go through a dumpster. I get that that should have some risk...but shouldn't the punishment part be dumpster diving itself?

Next up we have a price list. This is two full pages, covering the cost of goods and services, all broken up by Common, Middling, Wealthy, or Opulent prices. These follow a pattern of Base / Base x2 / Base x 10 / Base x 100, and the kind of stuff you're buying is determined by the wealth of the hex you're in (as determined by the city generation rules, which we'll get to later). Notably, pricier stuff is not better stuff. However, there's also waaaay too much stuff on this price list, and only about a third of it is really anything the PCs are going to care about. Eel Peddler? Potter? Urine Salesman?? Clothing broken down item? So there are separate listings for "Sandals," "Shoes," and "Slippers" if you can believe it. There's a ton of this you won't use. However, this is where you'll find the costs for paid transport and lodging, which will be useful to know as the PCs try to get around. Paid transport doubles your movement speed with no risk, it's just expensive and not always available.

Next up we have Reputation. This is a pretty basic mechanic; a sliding scale from 6 (Allies) to -5 (Enemies) with ideas for what people will do for you at each level. It is also lists out how much Reputation the PCs can gain or lose for various acts. Not bad, just a little basic.

And now we come to Hazards & Disasters. These are determined when you generate the city map, and they can move around from district to district. Hazards are the little brothers to Disasters, and mostly localized effects. Some of these are really kind of awesome, like arson mites (they take special shampoo to remove and will set your clothes on fire in 1d6 minutes), or spell residues that will let you walk into a weakened zone of truth. Disasters are the real big bad boys. Each one has multiple sub-effects. So if a block is on fire, you have to contend with the smoke (which can blind you for a few minutes), the panicked stampede of people fleeing, and you also have to contend with the actual fire. These are well written, too - the city feels more like an animal than an environment. Finally, we have Catastrophes. These are like the legendary monsters of city hazards - a full-blown wildfire, a plague outbreak, a tower collapse, etc. These are nasty.

Alright, so this place eats people. Great. It also poops them back out! (Editor's note - we're working with Sparky on cleaning up the language) City Mutations is where we learn what you look like when you come out the other end. So whenever you suffer a certain set of triggers, from being robbed, to spending a month without shelter, to losing all your money, you can acquire a mutation. These are ... interesting? They range from a penny allergy, to losing the capacity for all emotion, to stuff eating holes in your clothes. Nothing that's crippling, but not much that has mechanical bite, either. Depending on the table, you may want to introduce mechanical consequences for these. These feel like a good penalty to apply for someone dropping to zero hit points, although I'd probably allow a save of some kind.

However, you can also gain City Adaptations! These occur when you pull one over on the powers of the city, like robbing an aristocrat. These actually are pretty awesome, but limited in their scope. So you might learn how to talk to vermin or cats, be able to detect any gold in 50 feet of you, or grow a third arm. Zoinks, Scoob! These are good boons to add for anyone who needs an "Attaboy!" or even for a magic item quirk.

Finally, we have Diseases. There are twenty of them, and they are gloriously insane. So one of them is Arcane Emissions, which forces you to make a save every hour, or randomly cast a spell you know. Given the nature of most spells in 5E, this could really up the bloodshed factor. Also, talk about a great way to deplete your caster's resources! The only cure is a weeklong magical cleanse, where you don't have any contact with the forces of magic. Another are worms that chew their way into your teeth. Pardon me while I step away and start screaming.

OK, I'm back. All of these are great, clearly unnatural, and have some nasty freaking consequences. But most importantly, there are cures. And the cures are what I'm interested in, because they all take time and money. Like one requires either two consecutive successful saves, or three sessions of joint acupuncture and a soak in medicinal baths. Of course, the remove disease spell, Lay on Hands, etc., all can nerf these in a heartbeat, so I'd either affect someone other than the characters, or I'd just characterize these as magical diseases / curses. Perhaps a remove disease spell reduces the number of saves you have to make, but it won't get rid of the disease.

So, all put together, this is a lot of danger for a party to handle. Ironically, 5E parties are the best equipped to handle most of these, but the playstyle focuses on handwaving most of them. Play it right, though, and you don't need much combat to have some very tense Tier 1 sessions. Moreover, this gives me meaningful consequences for the players to make, though I think I'd probably change some of the abstractions. For example, the game creates these semi-random hazards that migrate around the map, which creates player-unknown problems that they can't really solve. There's no real way for the PCs to plan around a randomly migrating wildfire, for example (this is getting into the stuff in City Generation, but for now just trust me). Instead, I'd probably use a Hazard die per district entered. So if you go from one district to another, you'd roll twice on the Hazard Die. And it would probably look something like this:

1. Encounter (just use the provided encounter table)
2. Hazard (roll 1d8 - 1 - 5 is a Hazard, 6 - 7 is a Disaster, 8 is a Catastrophe)
3. Depletion - Pay a bridge toll, deal with the tax imp, etc.
4. Local Effect - Tick down any local timers, or show off the color of the district (I'd probably prep a d12 table per district for these)
5. Discovery - You see something weird, or worth investigating for later (points to one of the adventures you'd prepped for the district)
6. Free Turn (nothing happens)

This way I can simulate a constantly moving and alive city without having to monitor what hex has what in it. That's just me though.

In terms of design, these are so modular it's awesome. They exist in rough pairs - you don't really need Shortcuts without Traffic, for example. But each of those pairs is super easy to splice out and splice into your own game. Forget hacking, these are easier to digest than pre-chewed peaches.

As far as layout goes, each ruleset is targeted to a two-page spread, making it dead easy to grok. Large, easy-to-read font and callout boxes also help in that regard. Not much art, but the stuff that's there is highly evocative. I dig it! This is probably the strongest chapter of the book, and probably one of the most directly useful.

Alright, y'all, next time we're going to go over the Cobblestone Beasts chapter! It's 15 pages of sweet, sweet, Dire-Pigeon-having, PC-slaughtering, monster-filled goodness!

[Sparky McDibben]

Hey, you know what's fun? Anxiety! And there's nothing better for murdering fun (anxiety!) than doing a way-too-in-depth analysis of fantasy monsters!

(By the way, the Westerosi wedding was fine. Just FINE. There was definitely not an NDA involved).

So without further ado, let's get into the next chapter of this weighty tome - Cobblestone Beasts!

So this book has kind of an odd structure to it. You see, each of the location-based chapters (Spires, Cultivist District, Foundry District, etc.) all have their own unique monsters inside. Cobblestone Beasts is a separate section...well, I'm not actually sure why, come to think of it. Feels like they could have just made a "street-level" section that was meant to be the "All Other" of the city that included this chapter in it. Anyway, it's fine. They lead off with a quick section about "How to Read the Statblocks." That is such a massive issue for me I've literally reserved a whole section of the review for it, so I'm going to skip it for now.

The rest of the chapter contains the following monsters:

• Brick Tick
• Cobblestone Crab
• Court Spider
• Demons
• Dire Pigeon (YES!)
• Fists of the City
• Kruksgrippen
• Garbage Shambler
• Master of Procession
• Sutfilk

So let's go over the concepts of these fellows, shall we?

The Brick Tick is an animated brick. It hurls itself at people's heads. Kind of like a ranged mimic, in that if it stays still, it's basically invisible. If it stays in a given wall for too long, it can convert other bricks into brick ticks, too. This feels like a fantastic way to make an area a bit more dynamic - like you're engaged in some swashbuckling shenanigans and then POW! Brick to the head! Followed by an entire wall of bricks! They can also set up some fun environmental effects - "Hey, those guys who are tailing me, can I lead them to that alley with the brick ticks and try to lose them there?"

Cobblestone Crabs are literal stone crabs who will try to eat anything. ANYTHING. They are also basically invisible if they stay still, and consummate ambush predators. If their claws don't kill you, they can just drag you down and smother you over the course of 1d6 minutes. That's about 35 rounds, though, so you'll have plenty of opportunities to stab it. Except it can also just smash your weapons. No save, it just breaks 'em. However, the crabs are apparently quite delicious - so delicious that it costs at minimum 4 gp per pound of crab meat, and each one yields 6d6 pounds. That's a material amount of XP for a group!

Court Spiders are basically your standard ninjas. They get trained by nobles, cut out their own tongues, that sort of thing. What does make them interesting is that their weapons are poisoned, and there is a 2-in-6 chance (on hit) that you don't even realize you've been hit. That is freaking cool! There's also a little d6 table listing off some inventive little poisons for the PCs to find as treasure. Or, y'know, just reskin an assassin with that cool 2-in-6 chance a target doesn't realize it's been hit.

Demons are the only monster to get a two-page spread in the book, because these demons follow the Build-A-Bear Workshop school of design! They have four small templates (HD ranging from 1 to 10), and a grab-bag of abilities, descriptions, quirks, and mannerisms. Per the book: “'Demons' is a catch-all term for the eclectic and colorful denizens of the city who sprang from magical means, distant realms, or bizarre coincidence." Need a monster in a hurry? Reskin a demon! Unfortunately, as we'll see when we get to the monster conversions, this implementation doesn't really work for 5E.

And finally - FINALLY! - we come it. The best monster in the book. The greatest of all time! The Dire. Freaking. Pigeon. Unfortunately, I can't just upload a picture of the art, and I can't find any URLs to link to, so y'all will just have to imagine the derpiest godd@mn pigeon staring at you from the page. It's awesome! But they're also a 6HD monster that can gouge your eyes out. And their smell is apparently so nauseating it requires a saving throw. But...enterprising players can try to tame one of them and use it as a mount (stats included), so there's some serious business potential there.

Fists of the City are monstrous armored knights that patrol the city, wrapped in chains. They don't kill their victims, but drag them off into the depths of the Nobles' dungeons. Methinks I detect a hint of inspiration?

The Kruksgrippen is a friggin' nightmare. It's a spirit, like a monstrous centipede-worm thing with hands for legs. The art looks like what you'd get if you locked the Studio Ghibli animation team in a closet for 4 days straight. If it tries to grab you, you have to make a Dex save, and even on a success, there's still a 1-in-6 chance of losing an item! It can perfectly mimic any voices, and knows what your loved ones sound like. Oh, and because it's a spirit, it can go ethereal, phasing through walls, ceilings, and floors. Only lodestone powder (or Noble blood) can stop this ability. It's shag-NASTY.

We also have the Garbage Shambler, which is like a cross between an otyugh and a shambling mound. It also has a stench, and if it hits you can give you all kinds of unpleasant diseases (like the one that requires a holy water enema, remember?). However, the Shambler also has a ton of treasure (d12 items, ranging from "random tools" to "magic item") that you can acquire. Personally, it's easy enough to reskin as either an otyugh or a shambling mound but with garbage. I would definitely take the disease ability and the treasure and staple those on the 5E statblocks, though.

Penultimately, we have the Master of Procession. These guys go before the Nobles and whip up the crowds into violent frenzies so their bosses can lay the smack down. Canonically, they are just 1d6 + 1 imps stacked on top of each other in a nice robe. This is equal parts creepy and delightful; I love it! If you didn't feel like converting this, though, just use one of the Rakdos statblocks from Ravnica. Way easier.

Finally, we have sutfilk, which are Danish for "I dunno, it sounds vaguely Danish." I'm pretty sure that's spot-on, but feel free to check my translation. These guys are basically smog wraiths, and run around trying to smother people. They avoid anyone carrying silver, though, so yay? Sutfilk either appear solo, or in crowds of 1d20. They look like ordinary people from behind, but horrible smog-monsters from the front, so they always walk backwards in creepy, silent unison. Well, that's terrifying, but you could also just use shadows from 5E with the sutfilk's suffocation instead of Strength drain.

This chapter is a little hit or miss for me. Honestly, so many of these are freaking awesome reskins of existing 5E monsters...but I don't really need the new mechanics. I can just reskin the existing 5E monsters with new abilities. So for me, it has medium value - really it's just showing me a slightly different view of something I've already seen.

That being said, the art - while mostly very stylized and heavily line-drawing - is on point. Highly evocative and immediate imagination fuel.

Alright, folks, next up, we need to update those Spotify playlist for ROCK as we build this city...on ROCK 'N' ROLL!!!!!

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright folks, here's Sparky yet again. Man, how good is Starship, right? I know I made this joke last time, but this song objectively slaps, so I feel no shame in doing so again.



Moving on, the part in the city supplement where we actually build a city! Man, maybe WotC's Spelljammer supplement really lowered my bar, but it's so nice when a product does what you think it ought to do!

The city-building chapter is honestly a small book on it's own - about 46 pages long and jam-packed with random tables for everything from generating a street on the fly to shops, to NPCs, buildings-as-dungeon-map generators to help spark you out of a map-rut. Like, I love Dyson Logos as much as the next guy, but sometimes you want something new, y'know?

But first, get ready to do some...READING!!! There's a quick 5-page essay in the front of the chapter about city adventuring. This is not about city campaigns, but rather city adventures, so it's still useful even if you aren't doing a full-blown urban campaign (though you should; they're fun!).

The first question they're answering is "Why a City?" and it lays out some high-level differences between city and wilderness adventures (avoiding the obvious along the way). They focus on the unique dangers of city adventures (like a higher incidence of disease, militarized security, wealth disparity, and a few others), and say, "Why not highlight these?" The authors stress that everybody, from the lowest guard to the greatest Noble, has social ties that can be leveraged against them (see Tanarii's recent Social Pillar thread for another discussion of this kind of game). This makes factions vital, moreso than they normally are. The authors next highlight that wealth is both safety and illusion - as long as you've got it, someone else doesn't, and that puts a target on your back.

And, as long as we're here, yes, this book has a very particular political / economic viewpoint. No, we're not going to discuss it. If you don't like it, I believe there's a whole other site called Read It for those conversations. Oh wait. I may have spelled that wrong. Ah, screw it. Look, don't bring the mods into this, y'all. Mark Hall scares me.

Also, the authors really want to highlight that city dangers should feel reactive, not random. That is, the city (almost as an NPC) should be reacting to the players' choices. Put a pin in this idea, we'll come back to it.

Finally, we have a brief checklist summing up the urban adventure:

• STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT! (They don't go full scream-caps like Gary G. did, but it's the same basic idea)
• Let Your Players Buy Stuff (that is, don't cut off their access to services and supplies)
• Stuff's Expensive (nickel-and-diming your players keeps them hungry for the next adventure)

The next section's all about Faction Relationships! There's an interesting die-drop generator for the various factions, divided by social class, function, etc. I really like these, but the actual faction templates are... well, they're mostly repeats at different scale.

For example, the book divides factions into those who rule (which includes the Grand Guild and the Occult Circle), those who serve (which includes the High Guild and the Cult), and those who struggle (which includes the Lesser Guild and the Local Business). And if you're thinking, "Gee, Sparky, that sounds like they replicated some of the same groups at different levels of power," then get out of my head, Dan!

I would have preferred a less-classist and more function-based system, much like Ravnica (or most White Wolf products from the 90's, but shh! The Technocracy's watching!). Anyway, there are a bunch of tables for these, but they feel differentiated more by scale than anything else. Not great, but you can always substitute your own factions and go to town! Although, if you already have your own factions, you probably already know how they're interacting, which makes this chapter less useful. Ah well, always good inspiration fuel if nothing else!

But now we're into building the actual city! The first step is dropping a bunch of dice on a hex map, and we're already at my first problem. I happen to think a hex grid is a terrible way to key content to your city. Hexes are good on overland adventures to key content to specific "chunks" of the map. "Aha! They've found the ogre's hut!" But in a city, content is so densely packed that a hex map makes next-to-no sense.

In this instance, the hexes are at a 6-mile range (which is ducking massive - see how much fits into a six-mile hex?), and generally keyed to a specific cost bracket (the Common, Middling, Wealthy, and Opulent from Chapter 1). So now we have a heat map of where the rich people are at. Great! But then the game tells us to drop the dice again, having noted which neighborhoods are which. The second drop is for Danger! Whatever hexes these dice land on, something is going on there, whether it's an encounter, traffic, etc. (which is where you use those tools from Rules of the Street). Pretty standard so far.

But! These dice stay on the map, and each in-game day, you roll 1d6 to move the danger around (so if you roll a 1, the danger moves up a hex, etc.). That's pretty cool! Except, you remember how I told you to put a pin in the idea that city dangers were reactive, not random? That thing that was like, really important for urban adventures, according to the authors? Yeah. So these dangers are...random. They move in a random, Brownian motion that cannot be predicted by the PCs.

Breaking one of your core adventuring tenets only 17 pages later? That'll cost you, IC&C. That'll cost you. I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box, but I am the kid who will eat all the crayons! I mean I'll figure stuff out eventually. That came out badly. (Editor's note: I'm not real and have no editorial discretion; all the other voices in Sparky's head were just "busy" with "stuff.")

Next, the book tells us to break the map into one-mile hexes, and key one feature and one issue per one-mile sub-hex. There are some genuinely interesting tables that help differentiate the hexes based on the cost bracket! However, when we get to hexcrawls within hexcrawls, you've lost me. Like, the purpose of this is to simplify the city so I can hold it all in my head. And I can't focus too good right now anyway, 'cuz I just ate all those crayons. Anyway, all that to say that this seems a little overcomplicated and brings with it crunch that doesn't match the designers' intent.

Now, the features and issues I can absolutely work with. Micronations forming? A necropolis? Good stuff here; this is super useful!

The good news is that the Generating a City content was the biggest problem I had with this chapter, so now onto the really good stuff! The next section tells you how to take 3 to 6 six-sided dice and use them to generate a quick floorplan of a given household. I really like these; they feel random enough to be organic, but not so random that it feels completely disconnected from reality. Very useful if you've got like 10 minutes and need a quick building plan.

There are also building atmospheres, which range from Haunted to Infested to Heap. There's only one entry that says "Well-Kept" and it comes with a "cleanliness-obsessed" NPC. At least they didn't outright say "OCD," which is encouraging. Hurray for mental health awareness! Building Generation also has a neat little system for giving your PCs a hideout, including a slowly-ratcheting tension-o-meter called "Suspicion." Ah, the greatest of threats! Nosy neighbors! I'm making fun of that part, but consequences can include a full-blown invasion, so it's a meaningful threat. There's a bunch of different ways to upgrade your hideout, too, including escape hatches, gambling dens (ooh! Skeeball!), etc.

Next up is the Street Generator! It includes a d50 table, a d20 table (mislabeled as a d50 table) and a d66 table. Ooh! Nice! Basically it's a street name and a single detail. Enough to improv off of, and evocative enough to really set a scene. Good work!

Then we have the NPC Generator. We have a name, profession, appearance, manners, and quirk. Apparently the motivation, personality, and needs come from you. Still, it's enough to get you going in the middle of a session, and they only had two pages to work with, so I can't be too hard on them. (Just kidding. I can.)

We've got the Shop Generator up next, and this one builds in a LOT of good stuff. Each shop has what they offer, what they're called (including some awesome ideas like "From the Ashes" (formerly called the Spot)), what the atmosphere's like, their reputation and a quirk. That might not sound like much, but it's pretty evocative. For example, you might get a grocer called the South Bend Market. The inside is coated in thick dust, but they appear oddly ill-stocked. The dice tell me that there's a panic room under the shop...a front for the mob, maybe?

See? A handful of dice, and a lifetime of inspirations! Good job, team. You get (some) points back.

Next up we have my favorite table in the book, "I Search the Body." It's a d50 of random weird stuff, and I friggin love it. This kind of crap is why I love reading Mothership supplements. Finally, there's a short d50 table of "Cobblestone Treasures" that list a treasure item and then separately give you a spread of value. So that parasol you grabbed might be worth 1d6 x 10 gp, or it might be worth 1d6 x 100 gp. YES! Don't let your coins just be coins!

So, for those of you who've stuck around through my godd@mn ranting this long (still here, Dan? There will be a test!), my verdict on this chapter is ... complicated. There was only one part of the chapter that was a problem for me. Still, it was a major problem, and it lies at the heart of the chapter's utility. City-building is this book's raison d'etre. I applaud it for trying, but it feels like it missed the mark on a crucial point. To paraphrase the Onion Knight, I'd say this chapter's parts are mixed, some good and some bad.

Let me know if you care about how I would go about generating a city, but I don't want y'all to suffer through that if you don't care. See? I do care about your time, Dan!

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright, y'all, I'm back with the next chapter in our delightful exploration of Into the Cess & Citadel. This chapter's all about creating an undercity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this part has a lot in common with creating a city, except without the cognitive dissonance.

The chapter opens with a brief conversation about "What is an Undercity?" Well, it's a dangerous place with a few bright spots of safety (one might almost call them "points of light," no?) surrounded by the bones of dead civilizations, horrific monsters, and ... OK, yeah, this is a starting D&D setting. I think this probably works better in an ecumenopolis like Ravnica, but the theory seems to be that as you level up, you move up in the strata of the city. So of course you'd start out in the Undercity. The Undercity denizens also resist Noble interference with "calculated and coordinated violence," but live in a dog-eat-dog world, so you could explore some tension between freedom vs oppression there.

Next in "The Under-crawl," the game sets up how you can bring miles of lightless depths to life without running the local Wal-Mart out of graph paper. The answer, of course, is a point-crawl. The Undercrawl is organized for the DM as a series of nodes and connectors, giving the PCs meaningful exploration options without murdering the DM. See Slumbering Ursine Dunes for a good example of this being used for an adventure. The nodes can be safe (ish) or more dangerous, depending on how the dice fall when you create it. Furthermore, the Undercrawl is defined by scarcity, so really this part bears more in common with a traditional dungeoncrawl than the city adventure principles outlined in the previous chapter.

Next up is a new faction - the Alley-Whelps! This mirrors the book's tendency to put location-specific content in the location, and not having a "Factions" chapter. Thank God for indices. The Alley-Whelps are basically the Lost Boys from Hook meets the kids from Lord of the Flies, tempered with a healthy dose of Oliver Twist. You're supposed to like them, but not take their help for granted.

After that, the book lays out the procedure for travel and encounter checks in the Undercity. You check for encounters once per mile traveled, per day, and per Landmark encountered. They move at a speed of one mile per hour, a speed that assumes the PCs are moving carefully, but they can double their speed at the risk of more dangerous encounters. All this means that you will be encountering things regularly, so the Undercrawl will get quite lethal, but never boring. And, as we'll see in the Encounter section, the designers have varied the results to keep it from getting stale.

Next up is Generating the Undercity. I hope this isn't going to shock anyone: it's a die-drop system! On a hex grid! Except that the first time you drop the dice, the results of the dice determine a tunnel type. So you quickly develop a mesh-like grid of tunnels, and you turn half the intersections into nodes. To prevent it from getting too predictable, you also add a few more nodes off the main tunnels, and then populate these nodes with Landmarks.

Landmarks are nodes, and the game gives a d20 table of examples, ranging from The Great Trash Pile to the Chandelier Tunnels. Several of these have their own sub-features in case you roll doubles, so one Trash Pile can be different from another. There's also a "General Features" table that can help further differentiate these. These are good - very weird, very idiosyncratic, and give you good ideas for generating your own.

Next up is the Undercity Encounters table. The higher the number, the worse the monster, so when you're loud, or have recently been in a fight, or are moving quickly, you add an extra d6 to the roll on the Encounters table. The table includes d6 sub-entries under each monster type, listing how it's mood (really it's demeanour and general tactics). So if you get a roll of 1d3 Trophy Hunters, for example, those Trophy Hunters might be friendly and willing to chat for a bit, or they might demand ransom and attack you. Even better, the sub-entries are organized such that a lower roll on that d6 table is better for the players, and a higher roll is worse. So if the players make smart choices, you can weight the reaction of your NPCs, still getting surprised by your world and honoring your players' choices. That's good design and I love seeing that.

Next up - monsters! These are weird, flavorful, and generally pretty cool. You have Waking Walls, which will try to eat you, but can also be bargained with for fell secrets. Skinner Moths, which are 8 foot-tall evil moths that injects you with acid to eat you from the inside out (and can also cast hypnotic pattern with its wings). There is a sewer walrus, sewer gator, a grimebender (basically a sewer-dwelling angler fish), and numenwicht (a shattered holy statue who wants adoration again, and will absolutely murder the crap out of you to get it).

There are a bunch of other monsters that are basically a couple Hit Dice and a special ability (the nachtwik, for instance, reflects any arcane magic back at the caster, and can't be harmed except by lodestone weapons). You probably want to prep these first, but if played right, they could be awesome at the table.

Undercity Goods and Services gives us some interesting price fluctuation mechanics, along with Undercity-specific gear like the walrus gun. Yes, they have walrus guns here, along with the price for powder and shot. They've also listed out some typical Undercity food, which should really help bring the place to life as you describe the PCs drinking alleyshine and eating walrus jerky.

Undercity Trinkets is a quick d50 table of non-magical items that PCs can use to their benefit, like a poisonous frog sealed inside a glass jar, or a crowbar. These are really good for inspiring equipment-based play, but I suspect a lot of players will just write them down on their character sheet and ask you five sessions later if the frog's still alive. Undercity Treasures is a d20 table of just odd little treasures you can seed into your game. These don't have values or stats, but they're good inspiration fodder.

This chapter has a couple of interesting innovations, and is very interesting if you don't know what a pointcrawl is. It's thematically different enough from the previous chapter that it merits a different style of play, and it definitely fills those shoes. An NPC generator (or shop generator) tailored to the Undercity would have been useful, but wasn't essential. All in all, this chapter is pretty well done!

[animorte]

Spoiler: To keep your review thread pretty

Show

However, there's also waaaay too much stuff on this price list, and only about a third of it is really anything the PCs are going to care about. Eel Peddler? Potter? Urine Salesman?? Clothing broken down item? So there are separate listings for "Sandals," "Shoes," and "Slippers" if you can believe it. There's a ton of this you won't use.

Imagine working in some ridiculous Monkey Island shenanigans where you have to collect some outrageous specific item to appease a particular obstacle/person.

(By the way, the Westerosi wedding was fine. Just FINE. There was definitely not an NDA involved).

Glad to hear about it!

The Kruksgrippen is a friggin' nightmare. It's a spirit, like a monstrous centipede-worm thing with hands for legs. The art looks like what you'd get if you locked the Studio Ghibli animation team in a closet for 4 days straight. If it tries to grab you, you have to make a Dex save, and even on a success, there's still a 1-in-6 chance of losing an item! It can perfectly mimic any voices, and knows what your loved ones sound like. Oh, and because it's a spirit, it can go ethereal, phasing through walls, ceilings, and floors. Only lodestone powder (or Noble blood) can stop this ability. It's shag-NASTY.

Love Studio Ghibli! Also got some heavy Koh, the Face Stealer vibes.

Let me know if you care about how I would go about generating a city, but I don't want y'all to suffer through that if you don't care. See? I do care about your time, Dan!

Bring it on! I feel sorry for Dan though.

[Spriteless]

I love reading when people are excited about D&D, and grognards read Hasbro's stuff out of obligation, not because it's exciting. Please keep writing about what excites you, is what I'm saying.

And don't be too hard on Dan he seems important to you.

[Sparky McDibben]

Imagine working in some ridiculous Monkey Island shenanigans where you have to collect some outrageous specific item to appease a particular obstacle/person.

That would be awesome...but these don't seem like the best fits for those shenanigans. If I was going to do that, I'd have the PCs go collect truly impossible things: the promise a politician kept, the breath of a dead man, etc. Cool idea!

Bring it on! I feel sorry for Dan though.

OK, I'll add it to the list! Thanks!

And don't feel sorry for Dan. Dan knows what he did.

I love reading when people are excited about D&D, and grognards read Hasbro's stuff out of obligation, not because it's exciting. Please keep writing about what excites you, is what I'm saying.

And don't be too hard on Dan he seems important to you.

Thanks!

First off, I want to apologize for the delay - I've had some family stuff, some medical stuff, and some work stuff that blended into a mélange of terrible that Peter Thiel look like a Pomeranian. Thanks for the patience, and I'm back up and running now.

Alright, y'all, moving on!

The next chapter in our tour of Into the Cess & Citadel is the Spires! This chapter is about 20 pages long and details the impossible, M.C. Escher-like towers that the nobles and aristocrats live in. These things can appear in any neighborhood, and the book spends an entire page telling us how horrible these people are:

"Devoid of sympathy for the “lesser folk,” the spires are host to all manner of savage and sadistic revelry."

"Lording over all, both splendor and perversion, are the divine Nobles."

"They stalk the halls of the Spires, sowing fear in all who cross their path."

And how do you become a Noble? Glad you asked! "...they were mortals, once. Rich beyond any scope of the imagination, they reveled in lifetimes of hedonism, cruelty, and despotism."

...Y'all, I bet the authors have some fantastic horrible bosses stories. Anyway! The next page sets up the Spirecrawl, with some notes on how to run this environment. Specifically, the authors want you to know that while most environments exist to be explored in an urban campaign, the Spires exist to be fought. This is the endgame, where all the big bad bosses live, and going toe-to-toe with them is gonna be rough on your character's mortality. The Spires also have all the best loot in the city (everything up here is worth 10x what it would be down on the streets), and is actively patrolled and responsive. Some Spires have a magical entrance or two, known to only a trusted few (and gaining access to those sounds like an adventure all to itself!), but for most you just have to climb for a mile.

Honestly, "just climb for a mile" is a great answer from a system-neutral perspective, but I would love for some guidance on how to make that interesting in 5E (or the other systems, for that matter). Should I treat the climb like it's part of the dungeon with its own Complications table and Hazard Die? Except, of course, even at a movement speed of 90 feet per 10 minutes, it would still take a party about 59 turns (9 hours, 45 minutes) to climb that far, which pretty much guarantees they'll be wiped out. Worse yet, it's mostly a railroad - there's no real choices to make on your way up.

Hmm...this bears thinking on.

Alright, next up we get to answer the age-old question that's been plaguing America since the 80's: Who's the Boss? (Look, Google it; don't make me feel older than I am, OK?)

The Nobles are the bosses! We get a quick primer on them and what they can offer. Nobles can apparently offer any mortal desire, so long as they are bowed down to and worshiped. Some interesting narrative tension and a d8 table of quests the Nobles can give out. Weirdly, though, they split up the sections on the Nobles as a faction and the actual Noble statblock by like 14 pages, so expect to do some flipping during your prep.

Then the book transitions into the Exploration structure for the Spires. Basically, the Spires have an escalating response algorithm that's been hard-coded into the random encounter tables and the dungeon-crawling structure. See, the PCs' actions generate Alarm among the inhabitants. The more they explore and loot, the more Alarm builds up, triggering worse and worse encounters.

You roll a random encounter (not a random encounter check, a random encounter) every hour. The roll is 1d20 + Alarm, and the random encounter chart tops out at 30 (a Noble shows up). Moving from room to room takes 10 minutes, and looting a room takes 30 minutes. You can double your speed, but you double the Alarm you gain from exploration and looting. You can also gain Alarm from every guard and aristocrat you kill (unless properly disposed of), and every time you are spotted (unless wearing an appropriate disguise). This basically assures the party that at some point they will get in over their heads.

This is super-interesting, and pretty good design. I have some beef with it I'll address later, but otherwise it's a good way to simulate a dangerous environment where you have limited time to pull some heisty shenanigans. Also, if you carry food onto the bridges between towers, you have a 3-in-6 chance of being attacked by a Dire Pigeon! Heck yeah!

Next, the book goes in to how to create the Spires themselves. Basically, you roll a d6 to determine the number of towers, and then you roll that number of d6's and that's how many rooms are in each Spire. Then you can link the towers with bridges. These rooms are generated by rolling 1d20 per room, and consulting a table. The rooms are interesting Edwardian-era nonsense (Tea Room, etc). There are some funny ones. For example, this is the description of the Sitting Room: "(Not to be confused with a Parlor Room) A quiet, private room with reclining couches and ample seating." And this is the description of the Parlor Room: "(Not to be confused with a Sitting Room) A quiet, private room with reclining couches and ample seating." The room contents are actually different, but it's a good way to make the statement that the Nobles have too much money and not enough to do with it.

Throne Rooms, Wine Cellars (with wine listings!), and an Atrium (teleport door) are all good, flavorful ways to differentiate "Room with a bunch of stuff in it."

I'll give this book this: They get a lot of mileage out of using die-drop generators in interesting and creative ways.

Following Spire Generation is Spire Encounters. This is where the random encounter table comes into play, and they keep their same methodology of keying the encounter's mood and desires right into the table, though the range of wants gets noticeably flatter as Alarm escalates. For example, entry 12 is a Lone Aristocrat who only has a 1-in-3 chance of immediately calling for help. But by the time you get to entry 29 (False Scion and 1d10 Aristocrat Thralls), their only Mood is "Kill."

The NPC statblocks in this chapter are pretty weak, most of them are only 1 - 3 HD, and their Morale has a pretty good chance of running away. However, there are three new monsters: the False Scion, the Noble, and the Vulpesphinx. The False Scion is an elemental lieutenant of a Noble, scheming to replace the Noble itself (and it can make use of the PCs in its plots). It's also 10HD and has a 1-in-3 chance of blinding people permanently on death. Not bad!

The Noble is 20 HD, and has a grab-bag of really nifty powers that would be a pain in the ass to run. For example, there's a 1% base chance it can charm you under its control. This goes up by every 100 coins of wealth or treasure the PC is carrying. So, in order to proc this, you'd need to ask your players to total up their gold pieces, do some quick division to convert cp into gp, figure out what the total wealth they're carrying is and then figure out how likely it is to go off.

Not my cup of tea, but eh, you do you. Nobles get three great weapon attacks and cast spells as level 10 wizards, too. They're...well, we'll get to it in the monster conversions.

Finally, the Vulpesphinx, which looks like Jasmine's (from Aladdin) fursona. You're gonna have to trust me on this one. They're dangerous, predatory sphinxes that "hunt servants like mice." I mean, given all the diseases we discussed earlier, I just hope the vulpesphinxes get regular de-wormings.

Next up is the aristocrat-generating table, which takes 3d20s and generates manner, garb, and adornment. These are all flavorful and interesting, probably enough to hang a whole NPC on.

Finally, we have Treasures. Have you been wondering how you knew what treasure was in these rooms? I was! And now the book tells me - there's a 40-entry table with loot on it, and the higher you roll, the more valuable the item. You roll 1d20 + the number of rooms previously searched. You can also loot dead aristocrats, but there you roll 1d10 + current Alarm.

All in all, a pretty good read. I certainly take issue with the idea of immortal rich people lording it over the peasantry and controlling their everyday lives with but a whim...but that's because I want the fantasy to be fantastic, not my everyday experience.

My one gripe is that the mechanics of the Spire-crawl push you toward a raid-like scenario structure, but block a lot of what makes raids work. During a raid, the objective is to get in and get out, which means you need to know as much of the layout going in as you can, or rely on simple structures that can be easily understood on the way inside. But the Spire-crawl makes no provision for intelligence-gathering. How long does Alarm persist? Can the bad guys follow you out? How? A structure that exists to be fought through should be able to be known before the fight, otherwise you're depriving yourself of some interesting gameplay.

Otherwise, this is generally pretty great stuff. I really like it, and I think I'll use Alarm the next time I design a prison complex or a cult infiltration scenario.

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright, y'all, we've got ourselves a bit of a doozy today. In the book there are three chapters: The Cultivist District, the Foundry District, and the Archivist District. And we're going to do ALL THREE RIGHT NOW!!!

The reason for this is that the book lays them out in very similar formats, which means we can discuss them pretty briefly.

Quick overview: the Cultivist District is basically the city park, if it were run by morlocks. The Foundry District is what you get if you transport the Industrial Revolution into your fantasy game, and it's genuinely interesting. The Archivist District is a big-ass library.

These districts are all divided up (roughly) into these sections:

• Quick Overview
• Features & Issues
• Factions & NPCs
• Changes & Boons
• Goods & Services
• Artifacts
• Loot / Trinkets
• People & Places
• Encounters

Because the layout is so standardized, I'm going to be using each section as more of a compare-and-contrast to highlight where the book deviates from this formula, and what I find interesting in each section.

The overviews I've kind of already given you, but they're interesting little one-page reads in their own rights. Each of them highlights an exploited workforce ruled by an elite that has been changed by the district they live in. So the Archivist district is ruled by the Bibliothecaries, who can "erase" people they don't like.

Next up are features and issues, which are replacement landmarks and nodes for your "generating a city" section, with a much tighter theming. So the Cultivist District might be marked by beautiful neat hedgerows, with nothing out of place, but also water tainted with hallucinogens. These are imaginative and interesting, and my only complaint is that there aren't more of them.

After that, we get into Factions and NPCs. The factions are...meh. There are some that are exactly what you'd expect to find, like a group of strange fey aristocrats trying to control how the Cultivist District looks. And there are some that are really interesting, like a group of pyromaniac Luddites trying to burn down the Archivist District. Bit of a mixed bag. But there are also some really cool and funny NPCs, like the Chief Warden of the Beehives, whose recently landed in hot water over incendiary comments about insecticide usage. All the NPCs have portraiture, too, so you can just print those out on an index card and there you go! Really flavorful and well done, but only 4 per district.

Changes and Boons reflect how the districts change those who live there. For example, someone who lives in the Foundry District might find their days on constantly inhaling smoke give them immunity to the effects of "impure air," but also has constant coughing fits. Or an Archivist-dweller might get Twinned Scribe: "Your hands, eyes, and brain begin to operate independent of one another. You can easily write and read with each hand and eye individually; some scribes see you as a divine being." No notes; that's just awesome. The Cultivist District actually breaks formula here; instead of a series of grab-bag changes and gifts, you actually contract a curse called the Bloom that painfully turns your skin to bark. However, if you accept the patronage of a Noble, this turns to barkskin and you start down your road to Ascension, eventually turning into a magical plant-person that is basically a Noble themselves. But also hideous and covered in mushrooms and insects. Ew.

Next up are Goods & Services. These are all themed to the specific district, so the Archivist District has listings for a biographer, a bibliographer and a cartographer, for example, and the Foundry District has listings for a gear-maker, metallurgist and wire-maker. I mean, eh? My previous complaint about meaningless detail stands, but what they've introduced are a couple pages in each district that go into minor magical items. For example, the Cultivist District has wink slugs, which are like if you crossed a slug with a blink dog, and Vita-Botanis, that will make anything grow to the size of a castle tower after one day. These are fascinating, and I only wished we got some of these in the earlier chapters!

After this we have Artifacts. If you haven't had any experience with the OSR, your first question will likely be, "Who the hell thought this was balanced?" If you have had experience with the OSR, you'll know that balance is not something they care about. One example is the Curse Press: "Once per day you may print a pamphlet or paper detailing a single event, rumor, or claim. Whether it is real or not, anyone reading the article will believe it true. This lasts until all copies of the printing are destroyed, the press is broken, or a new article is printed at the press." You could bypass a whole adventure with that, and designers fully expect you to. Or the Vicious Quill, which lets you go full-on Deathnote: "Writing a name with the Vicious Quill causes it to fly off and strike the named victim with the power of a crossbow bolt. The range of this artifact affects up to 500 feet; however, signing the name in the victim’s own blood causes the Vicious Quill to have infinite range."

These are amazing and I love them, but I'd recommend putting a limited number of uses on some of the more powerful ones before giving them to your players.

Loot & Trinkets are each a d50 table of cool stuff you can find here, like 1d12 persimmons in the Cultivist District or a lunch box (with lunch!) in the Foundry District.

People and Places are great little NPC, shop, and street generators that work on 3d12 or 2d12 rolls. These are pretty fun and again, give you enough to hang a character on in the moment if you're hurting for inspiration. Personally, I'd recommend pre-rolling a handful of NPCs you can just throw in so that you don't have to pause the game.

Finally, we have new monsters. These are all really flippin' cool. There's a grimoire mummy, who is a mummified librarian into which a single book has been bound to prevent it from being lost, and so they are these hard-to-find, jealously protective, and actively hostile super-librarians. Good luck getting the book out of them. Or the furnace cat, a magma elemental in the shape of a housecat (they have collars so you don't get burned whilst snuggling). Or the Masque Heron, a 12-foot-tall giant bird that can perfectly imitate human voices, has a host of charm effects, and likes to eat people. I could go on, but d@mn, dude, these are are just so evocative it's hard to see the downside.

The only thing I didn't like about these chapters was the lack of a DIY section. A "create your own district" section would have been awesome, since there's a lot of ground left unturned here. What does the Red Light district look like? Or a fantasy necropolis? Or the Temple District? Or the docks? Some more guidance would have been really nice, but they did give us three examples, so I'll take it.

All in all, these are well-done: enough flavor to get you going, without so much that it drowns out what you want to bring to the table.

Personally, I like what I'm seeing here, but I think the real standout is the Foundry District. Exploring the tension between machines and mortals (especially when some of the changes can make you part machine) is an interesting concept that we don't often see in this space. I think this is where the book's classism theme shines through the strongest, and I wish that we had a tighter focus on these kinds of power struggles in the book. Plus, magma kitties!

[Sparky McDibben]

Well, folks, we're almost done reviewing the actual content of Into the Cess & Citadel. This actually closes out the last sections of the book; after this, I'll be focusing on how we can use the book, as well as my long-running gripe with the monsters.

The backmatter is broken up into three sections: Artifacts & Spells, 100 Locations, and Running A City.

Artifacts and Spells is a small (17 page) chapter on magic items and a handful of new spells. Continuing in the OSR vein, these are not particularly balanced - literally the first one allows you to make anyone who can see or hear you fall to their knees in catatonic fear, and once per day dominate someone permanently. Now, this is offset somewhat by the fact that there's now a horrible demon-thing whispering in your ear, but the actual mechanics of that are left purely to the DM.

The second magic item removes creative blocks of any kind. So...yeah. Kind of all over the place with the game impact.

That being said, some of these are awesome and some are hilarious. In the "awesome" category, I give you the Chimney-Scamp's fireplace. It turns any fire built in that fireplace into a portal to another lit fire, but you still take damage from walking through the fire. Personally, I'm going to require that the fire be bigger or hotter if you want to travel farther.

In the "hilarious" category is the Doctorate of Many Things, which gives someone deep experience in a strange (and strangely specific) field of knowledge, such as banisters and how to make them, or post-industrial pipe making.

There really are a ton of very good items in here, from an earwax homunculus you can use as a spy, to a brick that functions as a longbow and automatically returns to the hand of the thrower. It's very good, and if you're running an urban campaign (or even just a long urban arc), these will seriously add some value in the hands of creative players.

Next up we have Cobblestone Spells. This section is prefaced with a d20 table of "where a spell is found" and holy crap this is probably the best value-for-space in the book. These are great little secret places to look for spells, whether in the cracks of the cobblestone street, to tattooed on the back of a three-eyed rat. Just golden, and great flavor for any wizards in the party.

The actual spells themselves are pretty good, but the book's commitment to system neutrality comes up to bite it (again) here - there are no spell levels listed. Even just a range would have been a good place to start.

That being said, the spells are really fun and unique little bits of magic to hand out to your players. Braggart's Blades, for example, makes the party seem way tougher than they are, giving the party advantage on all attack and intimidation rolls for 1 minute / level (except there's no level listed), and all enemies have disadvantage to attack rolls. However, if anyone sees through the illusion, enemies gain advantage on all attack rolls for one turn.

Another one is the Chimney Cannon, which launches anything inside the chimney 1d6 miles in a direction of the caster's choosing. Being shot out of the chimney does no damage, but landing causes full falling damage. Feather fall recommended!

There's another that turns your spit into glue, and one that lets you eat cash. These really are fun; I have no idea if any of them can be balanced for 5E, but that won't stop me from trying!

After Artifacts and Spells comes 100 Locations. It's exactly what it says on the tin, and it's incredibly useful...it would be even more useful if I could have a d100 table to roll on to generate which location to use. That's a small complaint, though, because check out the first entry:

"Abbey Road: This busy street runs directly through the nave of a massive monastery complex. Dedicated to the Quartet of the Beetle God, the road is busy and constantly filled with the melodious music of the nuns and monks who live within the abbey and musically preach to all who pass through."

I wish I could say they were all this good, but hot d@mn, what an opening location. Other standouts include the Capricious Clinic, an urgent care facility a clinic where you have a 50 / 50 chance of being harmed or healed. Good luck!

There are Floating Ponds (that can flatten 1d4 city blocks), Edge-Mazes (all the leaves are razor-sharp), and the Heintower Chapel (St. Heintower has been "blessed" with being transformed into a quivering mass of warts that quietly beg for help or death, all while surrounded by acolytes attending its every need except providing help or death).

These really are fantastically helpful, and make coming up with interesting locations so much easier.

Finally, Running a City is a quick one-page essay that reiterates most of the points from the City Adventures section. I'm honestly not sure why this is here; it doesn't seem to be adding anything.

The last few pages are made up of several blank hex maps, a time-tracker sheet, a faction sheet, and the price sheet for most of the city.

Like most of the rest of the book, this has some really excellent content, and some content that's kinda blah. I recommend being careful with anything that you're going to show to players, and having a ton of fun with the rest.

Alright, folks, next up we're going over the Monster Conversions to 5E!!!! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHAAAAAAAAWWWW!!!!

[BeholderEyeDr]

Edge-Mazes (all the leaves are razor-sharp)

I am straight up stealing this. "As you walk into the edge maze---" "Wait, did you say hedge maze?" "Sure. Now, if everyone could roll a Dexterity saving throw..."

This has been really really interesting to read. Even just your review has generated an awful lot of ideas for me, like how to distinguish via mechanics and gameplay how playing at different city tiers/environments should feel (in addition to simply being distinguished narratively). It looks like a lot of the resources are generally useful too, even apart from the system neutrality (which would drive me bonkers) and ties to this specific urban setting (which I'd almost certainly never use). Limitations aside, I think your review has convinced me that if I ever do run an urban campaign, I might have to snag this book to help out. It looks really helpful, interesting, and inspiring.

[Sparky McDibben]

Limitations aside, I think your review has convinced me that if I ever do run an urban campaign, I might have to snag this book to help out. It looks really helpful, interesting, and inspiring.

Thanks, Doc! I'm glad it was helpful. PS - you should definitely run an urban campaign; they're great fun.

Alright, friends, neighbors, friendly neighbors and neighborly friends, we're here. It's all been building to this. The moment. The reckoning. The moment of TRUTH!

Monster conversions. And oh, friends, the monsters in this book give me chest pains.

To look at why, let's examine the very first monster in the book: the humble Brick Tick.

I wish I could just snip this, but I'll recreate it using the POWER OF THE FORUM!!!!

• Defense: As Chain
• Hit Dice: 1HD
• Hit Points: 4
• Move: Standard
• Damage: Slam 1d2 or 'Brick to the Head'
• Quantity: Solo, Cluster 2d4, Wall 4d6
• XP: 100
• Camouflage: When still and hidden in a wall, a Brick Tick is nearly imperceptible to the naked eye, save for some slight twitches.
• Brick to the Head: As attack, if a Brick Tick attacks from its hiding spot it will instinctively hurl itself at a victim’s head. Save v. Breath, Success: suffer 1d6 damage. Failure: suffer 2d6 damage and become stunned for 1d3 rounds.

Now, if you don't have any experience with monsters outside of 5E, you're probably having one of two reactions right now: "What the hell do I do with this?" and "Wait, you can put the number appearing in the stat block? Cool!"

For those of you who do, you're probably thinking, "Eh, I can run with this."

The first problem I have is the Defense. In general, this isn't terrible design: the monster is about as hard to hit as someone wearing chain in your system of choice. However, when I open up the 5E equipment section, we have chain shirt (13 + Dex mod, max 2), and chain mail (16). And so I'm left here wondering, "Well, f---- me. It's a brick, how hard can it be to hit? Screw it, let's go with chain mail."

And that can work - for the Brick Tick. Trying it with the Dire Pigeon (defense: as Hide, which in 5E is AC 12 + Dex mod (max 2)) is a little trickier, since they don't give you the monster's ability scores. You've basically got to make them up.

Let's move on to Hit Dice - it's got 1HD, but 4 hit points, so they seem to be using a d8 as a Hit Die. Hmm...no big problems there; a hit point's a hit point, right?

Soooo...damage. 1d2, huh? Average 1.5 hit points of damage. Y'know, now I'm getting curious what this thing would be rated on that table in the DMG for building your own monsters:

Defensive CR starts at 0, but we adjust CR upwards one rank for the AC of 16...to Defensive CR of 1/8. Ooookay, then. Well, it's fine. After all, it's an ambush predator, so it's not supposed to be very chonky.

So the Offensive CR starts at... 1/8, but we modify it by the attack bonus. Hang on a second...hmmm....mmhmm...mhmm....I don't see an attack bonus.

Well, balls. Let's say +4? That sounds about right. What's that do to the Offensive CR: nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Per the DMG, p 281, the "False Appearance" feature has no modifier on CR, so this thing's by-the-book CR is 1/8.

And at this point, we've gone through three different books, stitching mods out of multiple on-the-fly sources, to come up with a severely underpowered ambush predator. So screw it, let's finish it off.

(Editor's note: Yes, Sparky has heard of the sunk cost fallacy. Nope, that's not gonna stop him. Dan, if you're reading this, stay in Bermuda.)

The Brick to the Head feature, though, is perfect 5E design, once we check the table in the front of the book to see that "Save vs Breath" is a Dexterity save. And if this is a CR 1/8 creature, we can assign that a save DC of 13.

And all that, in real-life, took me about 20 minutes, including the extended dive into the DMG. But I hope it's illustrative of why you can't run these monsters out of the book. Once again, our old nemesis, system neutrality, emerges to dog our steps. From hell's heart, it stabs at us; for hate's sake, it spits it's last breath at us! Ah, Ahab, you old fool....

Anyway, enough classical literature! Moving on.

So! We cannot run the monster as written, and now must rely on our wits to guide us. Fortunately, my local Wal-Mart got a large shipment of Wits in, and I picked some up this afternoon.

The answer I've generally come up with is to take one of two paths:

1) Reskin a monster from the Monster Manual, adding abilities where required.

2) Design a quick monster using the Hit Dice as the intended CR (Why use Hit Die? Because flippin' nothing else works).

Let's walk through both of these:

For the Brick Tick, it's an ambusher, skittering, chasing, and with a nasty attack. I'd suggest reskinning a piercer, and letting the Brick Ticks launch themselves from higher up to take advantage of the Drop attack rider. If you wanted less nasty ones, use the animated sword entry instead. In either case, you should add the Brick to the Head ability, since you can use it basically as written.

If you want to redesign the Brick Tick, I'd suggest targeting CR 1 (the original creature's Hit Die). I'd probably bump up the hit points to somewhere in the mid 20's to get the Defensive CR to 1/4, and let the Slam attack do about 30 points of damage at an attack bonus of +5 to get the Offensive CR to about 4. If you want actual numbers, let's go with giving it a Con mod of +4, and 4d4 HD (so 10 + 16 = 26), and a Str mod of +2, and modifying Slam to read as follows:

Slam: Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft. Hit: 4 (1d4 + 2) bludgeoning damage, plus 26 (4d12) bludgeoning damage if the Brick Tick was attacking an opponent who had no awareness of its presence.

Honestly, just go the reskin route. It's a surer bet and far less stress. Hell, if you have a quick reference handy (Brick Tick = Piercer with 'Brick to the Head' ability), you might have a much easier time that I did running these at the table.

If the monster's armor says an armor type that can be adjusted by Dexterity, assume the Dex mod is +4, or the max allowable by the armor, whichever is lower. That's it.

But seriously, don't try to run these monsters out of the book unless you have familiarity with OSR rulesets, a good improv ability, and patient players. I only had two out of three, and it was rough, lemme tell you.

And that sucks, because so many of these monsters are so freaking cool! I look at these and want to run them, and that's a feeling I haven't had since I looked at Planegea! So it blows that running them takes more work, and it brings up a point that I want to discuss. I think system neutrality is actually this book's Achilles Heel. See, if they went all in on a single system, like Into the Odd or something, and just put the conversion math in the back, I think that would be way easier to master than whatever the hell cobbled-together mess they used in this book. But instead, they used a cobbled-together mess, and just like using a wood-chipper to hide a body, it doesn't work.

Finally, past Sparky asked me to remember to cover the Hazards and Disasters stuff, too. Most of these are very low - 1d6 to 1d10, tops. So there's a right answer and a wrong answer here. The right answer is to look up the Improvising Damage chart in the DMG (p 249) and finding out from there what the right number should be. So if it's about as bad as being submerged in lava, go with 18d10 fire damage, for example. But the wrong answer (and the easy / lazy one) is to just take the damage IC&C gives you and multiply by the PCs' tier. So if they're 17th level, for instance, an on-fire city block will do 4d6 fire damage.

Alright, folks, next up we're going to discuss leveraging this book into alternative cities, because why use an implied setting when you could have an explicit one!

[animorte]

But seriously, don't try to run these monsters out of the book unless you have familiarity with OSR rulesets, a good improv ability, and patient players. I only had two out of three, and it was rough, lemme tell you.

My improv experience has proven enough to not give my players the opportunity to get too impatient. What I lack is familiarity with OSR, but I’ve recently discovered multiple sources in said direction. Looking good so far!

Alright, folks, next up we're going to discuss leveraging this book into alternative cities, because why use an implied setting when you could have an explicit one!

Still here enjoying every minute of reading! Bring it on.

[Sparky McDibben]

My improv experience has proven enough to not give my players the opportunity to get too impatient. What I lack is familiarity with OSR, but I’ve recently discovered multiple sources in said direction. Looking good so far!

That was where I was, too. I think you can probably get by with winging it for a couple sessions, but you get in trouble if bonuses change and players start thinking you're fudging.

Still here enjoying every minute of reading! Bring it on.

Thanks, friend!!

Quick admin note - I'm going to be out of pocket until Thursday next week, so I wanted to try to get an update out this week. Wrapping it up might take me a bit.

So, how can we use this book in our worlds? Well, let's start with three common use-cases of cities in 5E adventures: city-as-quest-hub, city-as-adventure-location, and city-as-campaign-location.

1) The City-As-Quest-Hub models the city as basically a larger town. Cities are where you go after you've burnt the town out of adventure. It's a bigger hub from which your PCs can branch out, creating a regional HQ after you've become local heroes. This book adds a little value to that model, but not much. That's because in this model, the city isn't really meant to be adventured in. It's a safe space with some occasional whacky shenanigans when the thieves' guild gets ideas above their station. That's it.

2) The City-As-Adventure-Location views the city itself as more of a dungeon, to be explored, looted, and potentially set up as a stronghold. This is the Dragon Heist model, if we're using 5E parlance. Because the city is meant to be the adventure location, you can leverage either linear adventure design or node-based scenario design to your benefit. There are some extra interesting wrinkles to such a model, like "What about cops?" etc. In this model, I think Into the Cess & Citadel adds a lot of value. It lets you create and design a classic pointcrawl in the Undercity (notably absent from most WotC products), which is crucial in an urban adventure. I've literally never played an urban adventure that did not hit the sewers at some point. Having a map of the Undercity expands the adventure possibilities of using the sewers from "make an ability check" or "sure, you get there" to "OK, you're lost in the Undercity. Here's what happens..." This is in addition to all the value from using Reputation to track factions, or traffic, or hazards, or riots, etc.

3) The City-As-Campaign-Location model uses the city as the backdrop for an entire 1 - 20 campaign. This is the Ravnica model. In this understanding of a city, the city itself becomes almost like a character in its own right. And it's this model where IC&C really shines. The mechanics, flavor, and crunch of the book lend themselves well to creating a place that is dangerous, distinct, and friggin' interesting; alive with cool NPCs, neat adventures to go on, and fun things to do even during a downtime session.

Now let's talk about settings. Personally, the first thing I'm going to ditch is the implied setting for this book. That's a matter of taste, and I don't expect anyone to agree with me. But I want a place where the PCs can change things, not just make things a different flavor of awful. I know that's the whole point of punk, but it's a massive reason why I don't like punk or grimdark. Just...nope. If you like this implied setting, I salute you and wish you all the best in your gaming experiences.

But there's plenty of things that can fill that hole. The obvious one is Ravnica, which is the basis I use for my big urban setting. I've run like three 1 - 20 campaigns there, and I know it pretty well. Part of the reason I've been salivating over specific rules and generators in this book is because I've had the problem that these rules solve before. I don't know that you need IC&C's Reputation tracker (I'd just use the Renown system from Ravnica), but pretty much everything else is IC&C is hella useful for a heavy intrigue urban campaign or adventure.

Moving on, there's Waterdeep, especially Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage. If you haven't seen the Alexandrian's remix of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, check that out immediately. Pay especial attention to the factions in the city, and how he uses them actively. All of that could really benefit from what IC&C has to offer. Imagine if you could actually leverage different mechanics to do a moonlight chase through the rooftops! And that's when someone says, "Can I use the sewers to cut them off?" and now you have a structure to let them do that. Moreover, the Reputation tracker in IC&C lets you apply that same Reputation mechanic to all of the various factions in Waterdeep outside of the ones in Dragon Heist, like WOMP or anything you want to make up (a secretive githyanki group hoping to access the Stardock in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage, perhaps?)

Other WotC products don't benefit from this nearly as much, especially Port Nyanzaru and the Radiant Citadel, since they're primarily places designed as hubs for adventure, rather than adventures in their own right.

Moving on, there's plenty of inspiration for using this supplement even outside of standard D&D, such as a D20 Modern game. Change the "godly lords of debauchery and despair" Nobles for "secret masters of the Illuminati" and reskin a bunch, and you're good. Maybe Brick Ticks become auto-guided drones disguised as bricks, and the Dire Pigeons are an escaped experiment that the morlock geneticists hiding in the sewers want returned alive. Keep Austin weird? Nah, son. Keep everywhere weird.

There's also some historical examples. See this video for one idea (gets real D&D at about 9:25)



"The old core among the hills had become largely uninhabited..." Well, it sounds like there might be some dungeons in there!

"as the population clustered by the Campus Martius around the Pantheon, while the Papal government operated in the Lateran to the southeast, and pilgrims stayed in Leonine city up by St Peters, which was enclosed by a newly-added Leonine wall."

Interesting! Sounds like some factional play, and players with powerbases in different groups having to split the party to keep up with their contacts among the different groups!

So the book is versatile and useful, as long as you can answer the question "What is my city for?" with "Adventure!"

Y'know what, while we're here, let's go ahead and get into my final recommendation.

Into the Cess & Citadel was "designed to turn the traditional city into a more immersive dungeon-like adventure setting." I think, broadly, that it has met that goal. There are definitely gripes I have with how it meets that goal, and there are a ton of ways I think it could have met it better, but it has met its goal.

So should you buy it?

Well, I think you need to answer two questions:

1) Do I have a city in which I expect at least 25% of my adventures to take place?

Spoiler: Math

Show

Assuming 3 sessions per level, and 2.5 levels are the 25% of levels taking place in an urban context during the campaign, that's about 7.5 sessions of use you'll get out of this book - probably 22.5 hours of gameplay, assuming 3 hours per session. That comes out to about .89 cents per hour, assuming you get it at list price.

2) Do I have an extra hour a week to handle converting mechanics during those specific city-adventure sessions?

If you answered yes to both questions, then yeah, go ahead and pick it up. If you answered yes to the first one, that's a dicier proposition. I'd say yes, but that's because I really enjoyed reading it as a gaming supplement. I'd say it's 50 / 50. If you answered no, then a) Your world sounds interesting! and b) I don't recommend picking it up.

Alright kids, Ol' Sparky has to go and screw around in Dallas for a few days. If anyone has any recommendations, let me know. Otherwise, I'll see y'all in about a week to review How I'd Do It!

Thanks!

[Sparky McDibben]

Alright, y'all! Stop, collaborate and listen, 'cuz Sparky's back from a work-trip convention....

I don't really know where to go from there with that, but I feel pretty good that I'm a certified rapper now. At least insofar as Vanilla Ice ripoffs are considered rappers.

The last piece of this review is focused mostly on how I would fix my own gripes with Into the Cess & Citadel. So let's review my primary complaints!

1) Using hexes to key cities is inefficient, increasing the prep required for any given hex massively, given the content that needs to be keyed to even a 1-mile hex

2) Hexes don't really allow players to make meaningful diegetic navigational decisions around the city - "We go to hex A2" is not something anyone has ever said in urban orienteering.

3) City hazards are set up to be random, not something the characters can incorporate to their decision-making process

Suggested reading: Justin Alexander's Thinking About Urbancrawls
W.F. Smith's Hexcrawl Checklist

Fortunately, a lot of the work here has already been done - I strongly recommend checking out Mr. Alexander's dive on this before reading this section. Basically, we're going to key this city by neighborhood / district. This is already sort of the approach taken by the book itself (remember when they broke out the Cultivist / Archivist / Foundry districts?), and it works well once you strip out the hex grid nonsense. Give each district several linked layers of content, plus a basic "gazetteer" approach. Nothing fancy - you need to know what the district is, what/who you can find here, and probably a random encounter table to simulate the activities of the denizens interacting with the party.

I recommend against duplicating neighborhoods, or having neighborhoods that are too closely related thematically. For example, in my city, I have a poor neighborhood, a middle-class neighborhood, and an upper-class neighborhood. No need to make three or four "middle-class suburbs" neighborhoods, even if that is more true-to-life. You can also branch out into various themed neighborhoods, like a temple district, a necropolis, a red-light district, the docks, a university, a castle, and more!

Not much of the gazetteer stuff should change, but the layers should be keyed separately, probably in a spreadsheet so you can make edits on the fly.

I'd recommend having between 4 - 8 layers; no need to go crazy. Layers might look like this:

Cult Layer - What nefarious activities are the city's wicked cults up to in this district?
Crime Layer - Are there any big heists, cons, or scores in progress that the players can stumble across or get hired onto?
Patron Layer - Who here might be willing to hire the players to take on a job?
Faction Layer - What are the members of [insert faction here] up to in this district?

Not every district needs to have every layer keyed (especially if you have a lot of factions), but every district should have at least three layers keyed to it, and these layers should talk to each other in some limited capacity. For example, in my game, there's a singular big nasty cult that's trying to drive the city insane. All the cult activities lead to their plan to do that, and as the PCs explore the city, that will come to fruition whether the PCs encounter it or not. But if they follow up on one district's cult content, it will lead them to another, and another, and another after that until they can put the picture together and try to stop the cult's plan.

In the crime layer, for example, maybe you've only got a few districts keyed, but they all lead back to the Thieves' Guild in the area. So if the PCs disrupt the heist on Monocle Lane, that should lead them to an underboss, and start them on the path to rolling up the entire guild.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is! At least, up front, it is. Once you start play, though, you'd be amazed at how easy it is to keep those balls in the air, even if you aren't a great note-taker.

So, using those solves problems 1 and 2, but what about problem 3?

Well, for that, we're going to add a layer: the catastrophe layer!

Every month of downtime, roll 1d10 per district. Each time it comes up a one, a Hazard is present in that district. Hazards represent a potential problem that hasn't progressed yet. Could be a fire, could be a sick person, could be a small gateway to the Hells. Add rumors about this to the rumor table to put the information in front of the PCs. "Everyone knows that ol' Purgess house is a gosh-durned fire hazard! Why, who knows what kind of experiments that mad old evoker was doing?" Or maybe, "Every night, everyone in the Perfumed Quarter has had the same dream. Now we're all afraid to go to sleep. We're not afraid to sleep because we dream of Hell. We're afraid to sleep because one night maybe we won't want to wake up..."

Every month of downtime, keep rolling d10's. Unless the players intervene and nip the problem in the bud, it'll get worse and now pose an active problem to the whole district. Additional 1's rolled on a hazard move it to a Disaster. "Durnt Purgess house finally caught fire! Now we're all scrambling to contain it; goodness knows we can't put it out, the way it's raging. It seems almost...alive." Or the PCs find notices about how anyone sick should quarantine themselves immediately. Again, unless they intervene, it'll keep getting worse.

If a 1 is rolled on a Disaster, a Catastrophe ensues. Now the problem threatens the whole city. "Get everybody across the river! I've heard devils cain't swim!" This immediately interrupts downtime and dumps an existential issue into the players' laps. Once the PCs resolve the issue, reset all Catastrophe layers to empty.

Now the PCs have something they can react to, instead of just stumbling into a random crisis.

Alright, friends! That's it for ol' Sparky. Let me know if there's anything I forgot, and let me know if there's anything you'd like me to review next! I've got my gimlet eye staring down Cubicle 7's Journeys, but that's a good month off yet.

Thanks a bunch; stay safe and stay sane!

[BeholderEyeDr]

I do like your tweak to random disasters, though I think it runs the risk of making the city too PC-centric. Part of the fun of an urban setting, I'd imagine, is conveying the idea that this is a complicated, interconnected, populated environment where lots of people are doing things. Random crises are a way of abstracting that so that the DM doesn't have to keep track of what every single faction/patron/hero/person of significance is doing at all times. There should be a way for problems to escalate AND deescalate on their own, without the PC's intervention (in my opinion: maybe you do want to make it so that only the PCs are helping out!).

With that in mind, I'd probably tweak your tweak (kinky) so that if a 1 is the creation of a new problem, a 10 is the resolution of a new event. The problem subsided or was dealt with, without the party's intervention. Ideally you'd do this in a way so that it's also narratively interesting: if the problem was a civil war in the thieves' guild, now the civil war is done with one faction in control, and maybe they're unfavorable towards the PCs.

If we wanted to get really crazy, you could break this step into several rolls: one for the overall health of the district, to see if any new problems get created or not; and then one for each existing problem, to see if it worsens, maintains, or gets better. On the one hand, this would really contribute to a feeling that the city is alive and dynamic with tons of things going on for the PCs to get involved in; on the other hand, it's a good amount of book-keeping, and it might lead to the feeling of the PCs getting overwhelmed by random problems they feel they have to deal with, distracting from the main plot (if there is one).

Side note, I would *love* to follow along with your campaign as it happens, if you'd be willing to post recaps, DM commentary, etc.!

[animorte]

Thanks for the links and your in-depth analysis!

Not much of the gazetteer stuff should change, but the layers should be keyed separately, probably in a spreadsheet so you can make edits on the fly.

I ****ing love spreadsheets and will find any excuse to play with one.

Alright, friends! That's it for ol' Sparky. Let me know if there's anything I forgot, and let me know if there's anything you'd like me to review next!

What I would like you to review? Personal request: keep up with the base class and subclass contests, providing constructive criticism to entries and casting your votes!

With that in mind, I'd probably tweak your tweak (kinky) so that if a 1 is the creation of a new problem, a 10 is the resolution of a new event. The problem subsided or was dealt with, without the party's intervention.

I second this. Add in on that roll of 10: If a Catastrophe is in play, it is then reduced to a Disaster instead, likewise a Disaster is reduced to a memory. Either of which can leave relevant consequences for nearby factions and how that interacts with the PCs, etc…

Side note, I would *love* to follow along with your campaign as it happens, if you'd be willing to post recaps, DM commentary, etc.!

I would also love your campaign log. I haven’t read a good one in years. (Of course, I haven’t looked for any recently either.)

[Sparky McDibben]

There should be a way for problems to escalate AND deescalate on their own, without the PC's intervention (in my opinion: maybe you do want to make it so that only the PCs are helping out!).

That is an interesting point!

With that in mind, I'd probably tweak your tweak (kinky)

There's no tweak-shaming here, Doc.

so that if a 1 is the creation of a new problem, a 10 is the resolution of a new event. The problem subsided or was dealt with, without the party's intervention. Ideally you'd do this in a way so that it's also narratively interesting: if the problem was a civil war in the thieves' guild, now the civil war is done with one faction in control, and maybe they're unfavorable towards the PCs.

I really like this; it minimizes the Catastrophe phase and prevents the game from turning into Pandemic! & Dragons. Think I'll throw in animorte's suggestion from down below, too.

Side note, I would *love* to follow along with your campaign as it happens, if you'd be willing to post recaps, DM commentary, etc.!

I would also love your campaign log. I haven’t read a good one in years. (Of course, I haven’t looked for any recently either.)

Uh... sure? I've literally never had anyone ask me for that, so I was a little thrown. I'll post them, probably starting in the new year and continuing for as long as I can keep them up.

I ****ing love spreadsheets and will find any excuse to play with one.

That's because you, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.