City Streets

When I was running a city adventure, one question constantly frustrated me: "What does this street look like?" Vornheim will generate the buildings on each side of the street, the layout, and an encounter every so often. That's all great, but it won't help me to figure out that crucial question. What kind of neighborhood is it? How many people are around? What are they doing? Can I steal from them?

All this comes into hyperfocus when a chase scene starts. Can I get onto the roof? Is anything blocking the PC's way? Is there anything they can throw in front of their pursuers? Is anyone in front going to try and stop them? Is there any way to escape from this alleyway?

When I try to think up this stuff on the fly, it just ends up bland and vague. It has the same problem as the D&D wilderness. The PC's spend most of their time groping through an amorphous cityscape with no detail or orientation. Every now and then they hit a sudden point of precise detail, like an encounter or dungeon. Outside of these pre-made bits the city has little personality.

 

Well, I've tried to fix this by making a thing that randomly generates images of city streets. These images let you know what the architecture's like, how many people are around, what they're doing, what kind of shops are on either side of the road, what there is to steal, what the weather's like, etc etc. Art is great, huh?

At the moment this may not be useful to you, internet person. You have to download the whole huge thing up front, some of the images are too big, and a lot of the results won't make sense: crowded streets in the middle of the night, rivers and docks where you didn't expect them, sudden changes of weather. Besides, it's pretty bare-bones; you could get a similar effect with just a folder of images.

However! If this could be useful to you, then I could fix these issues. It'd be easy to sort images into different categories for each district of the city, time of day, street or rooftops. I could add text down the bottom to randomly generate a street name, names and occupations for passers-by, links to randomly-generated buildings, optional encounters, secrets, items.

A while back, Telecanter posted about the idea of a maximalist dungeon. Here's the ideal vision of maximalism for me: A city map. When you click on a street, it takes you to a picture of that street, with randomly-generated passersby, an optional encounter, etc. As you click to move through the streets it keeps track of time for you, and changes encounters to suit. Clicking a building link takes you to a building map, showing what kind of building it is, what stuff is in here, some leading to dungeons and secrets. Clicking a citizen link randomly generates a quick personality and some bits of info they can tell you. You can use it to run a whole city with zero prep, discovering it alongside your players.