RPG City Settings

 “A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.”

— Walt Whitman

My interest in fantasy roleplaying game city settings came soon after I discovered Dungeons & Dragons. After receiving the basic set for Easter in 1982, I saved my allowance and, when summer break started that year, went to Branchville Hobby down the road and bought the Expert D&D boxed set. The clerk slipped a copy of Adventure Gaming magazine in the bag, a nice treat for a neophyte like me who hadn’t yet discovered Dragon magazine or other periodicals fueling my enthusiasm for a new hobby. Among the wonders inside (including an adventure by Gary Gygax!) was a review of Chaosium’s new boxed set based on the popular Thieves’ World short story anthologies...focusing on the shared setting City of Sanctuary and its inhabitants. This one article opened my eyes to a new environment for fantasy roleplaying which occasionally reached out to tempt me throughout the years.

The Basic D&D set, with the seemingly ubiquitous B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, dropped newcomers into the adventuring paradigm of dungeon delving: finding some caves, exploring them, and dealing with traps and monsters to grab treasures. No doubt this represented a focused introduction to the wider and more varied field of fantasy roleplaying game action. Other early entries in the Basic D&D catalog like B1 Into the Unknown and B3 Palace of the Silver Princess reinforced these tropes. They influenced my earliest attempts at creating my own dungeons, notably my own extremely amateur efforts developing the “Caves of the Unknown” as encouraged in B2.

The premise of the Expert D&D set in general — beyond expanding character advancement beyond third level — demonstrated the concept of wilderness adventuring and the idea of scenarios taking place outside the dungeon environment (though it did include a sample dungeon of an underground gnome settlement). Yet even in X1 The Isle of Dread, the module released with that set, the eponymous island essentially functioned as one big wilderness dungeon crawl; explorers wandered across the hex-gridded isle seeking wandering monsters and finding various lairs, with the ultimate challenge coming from...exploring ruins in a dungeon crawl.

X1 broadened my horizons in two ways, one quite obviously and one a bit more subtlely. In the spirit of promoting wilderness adventures, it included a map of the known world — what would later become known as Mystara — with, of course, the Isle of Dread in the extreme south, but an entire continent of kingdoms and islands in the north. It offered some sense of the scope of where characters could go and the kinds of peoples and cultures they might explore (thanks to some brief descriptions of each region).

It also introduced the concept of cities, notably Specularum, the home base in the Grand Duchy of Karmeikos from which adventurers sortied to explore the Isle of Dread or visit far-off ports elsewhere. I regret it didn’t include even a general map of the city; the adventure (and the subsequent solo module XS Lathan’s Gold) focused on the harbor area where one naturally would find a ship, crew, and supplies for the journey. I’m sure the flood of subsequent gazetteer supplements offered some resources for misadventures in Mystara’s cities, but by that time my high school afternoons of exploring D&D and other roleplaying games had given way to more studious concerns in college.

But the Thieves’ World boxed set really engaged my urge to explore urban settings. I bought it shortly after that D&D summer of 1982, saving up allowance money, and finally finding it in Branchville Hobby. The review in Adventure Gaming introduced me not only to the city of Sanctuary and its gaming potential, but to the short fiction as well. The boxed set immersed me in the setting: three sourcebooks, several small maps, and, of course, the giant poster map of the city (which inevitably spread across the game table so everyone could chart their course among the city streets). One book provided context for how various institutions in the city worked, as well as a history; the second outlined neighborhoods, some sample locations, and included the infamous random encounter tables; and the third detailed city denizens with stats for several of the more popular fantasy roleplaying game systems of the time. Each location, every character, offered some means of embroiling characters in some kind of adventure within the city.

I’ve run games set in Sanctuary at various points in my gaming life, using different game systems and different adventure styles. (I’ve discussed my love for the setting before.) In my earliest days it served as a solid sandbox, with characters exploring the city, uncovering rumors, making contacts (and enemies), pursuing their own ambitions (inevitably centered on thievery), and navigating the random encounters of which I was so fond at the time. In my later gaming days I designed more narrative-style adventures in Sanctuary, grounded in the setting and its inhabitants but more along the episodic scenarios I’d played so often in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. In both cases, the Thieves’ World setting encouraged gamemaster and players to explore, use, and affect the various elements that brought Thieves’ World to life.

Alas, I missed out on a host of city settings released in the early days of gaming of the late 1980s, when I set aside my hobby activities to focus on my college studies. I’d never paid much attention to the Forgotten Realms setting, so I passed on any Waterdeep products I heard about. Even though I was more interested in Greyhawk (in a casual sense), I only managed to acquire The City of Greyhawk boxed set in TSR’s waning days at a good discount; while it had a wealth of information and inspirational resources packed into the box, I still occasionally contemplate trading it in for store credit somewhere to clear off some space on my shelves. I was never a fan of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, so I only had a passing interest in Lankhmar — City of Adventure when it released.

Over the years I’ve explored other city settings for roleplaying games depending on my interests and releases at the time. Some I read as inspirational resources, others I brought to life at the gaming table:

Night City: This sourcebook covered the default urban setting for the Cyberpunk 2020 roleplaying game. Like Thieves’ World it offered up overviews of the city, focused on individual neighborhoods and personalities, and included plenty of adventure hooks to inspire gamemasters and draw characters into the action. A poster-sized full-color map always helped for reference as a game table centerpiece. One summer in my early adulthood I ran an entire Cyberpunk campaign set in and around the city, all based on elements drawn from the sourcebook.

Cairo Sourcebook: The earlier days of the Call of Cthulhu game offered up a host of excellent resources for both adventures and settings. Cairo, of course, carried with it all the mystique of the Middle East and ancient Egypt. Having previously read a Baedeker’s guide for Egypt from the 1920s in my college library, I found this game sourcebook an accessible primer to the city and the many mysteries one might uncover there. It certainly inspired sections of my own Pulp Egypt sourcebook

Mos Eisley: As a Star Wars fan the wretched hive of scum and villainy appealed to me as an urban adventure setting. I first discovered it in 1987 in the Tatooine Manhunt adventure as I immersed myself in West End Games’ first version of the roleplaying game (the beginning of my return to gaming in my later college years). Like other settings, a glorious map served as its centerpiece, the full-color Mos Eisley map the late, great Jennell Jaquays created (which I’ve discussed before). The scenario offered some basic location and character information, later expanded in Galaxy Guide 7: Mos Eisley. For an obscure galactic backwater Tatooine and its cities feature prominently in many of the movies and even more recent streaming releases.

Each of these to varying degrees incorporated the “sandbox” spirit of roleplaying games, large urban environments filled with locations to explore and people with whom to interact; a canvas ripe with potential for characters to follow their motivations and pursue their own stories. They might even make their mark changing the status quo of the city or influencing the larger developments in a meta-plot of the city’s history. B/X D&D focused on dungeon-delving and wilderness adventures (with a hint of higher action for characters building realms of their own). But I feel it — and other games — missed a great deal of potential for urban settings. Certainly a gamemaster could create a narrative-style adventure drawing on elements from the city setting. One could even find territory for dungeon-crawl action in enclosed areas related to the city: sewers, basements, catacombs, abandoned facilities. But the strengths of urban settings play more to character development and storytelling elements...with less emphasis on combat. Unlike a dungeon, the city doesn’t exist to enable murder and pillaging. Here characters can explore places and people, like many other kinds of roleplaying game environments, and manipulate them to serve the characters’ ultimate ambitions.

“All great art is born of the metropolis.”

- Ezra Pound