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.

Your Own Ghost

 

When you start to get a name for yourself, your ghost starts to hunt you. You see it splattered across walls, on clothes, in tattoos on your friends and lovers. It shines in bright primary colours, iconic, its every movement invested with potent meaning. Sooner or later you realize it's feeding on you. People don't quite look directly at you when they talk anymore. Look behind you - they're talking to it. It's waiting, building strength until it can kill you and stride out to meet them in your skin.

Anyone who's famous is killed by their own ghost. Che Guevara throttled Ernesto Lynch to death, one hot night in the jungle. James Dean's ghost put its hand on the steering wheel and its foot on the accelerator, just as the car started to turn. It knew what was going to happen. It knew what you need to sacrifice to become immortal.

I am writing a choose-your-own adventure game based on 1950's american hobo mythology, using the structure of Tales of the Arabian Nights. The above is based on a passage I wrote for that game. I hope I'll be able to finish it and show it to you all.

I'm running a Megagame

You get 20 people into a town hall. They run around as all the world's leaders: USA, UK, Japan, Brazil, Scientists, Generals, Presidents and Diplomats, all trying to solve the greatest crisis in world history. Behind the curtain, a cabal of sinister alien players works to destroy them. 

It's X-Com times Diplomacy times 20. I'm organizing it in my home town of Brisbane, Australia. If you're interested, join this Facebook group, or this forum thread, or let me know somewhere else on the internet that you'd like to receive updates.

It's a massively exciting challenge for me. The logistics part is chugging along fine, but I figure y'all are more interested in the game design challenge. There are a lot of interesting questions to answer, like: 

How can I help the Aliens roleplay a genuinely inhuman intelligence?

The Alien Handbook for the first game above says:

"First of all then, the primary victory condition for all Reticulan players is to role play
good Reticulans. The successful resolution of the Earth Crisis is only of secondary
importance to that."

The most important thing for designer Jim Wallman was to make the Aliens feel like Aliens: a completely foreign culture. Core to the game, and the thing you can't achieve in any game medium but Human Beings, is modelling the collision of two completely different cultures and sets of assumptions. That's hard enough to achieve when you're writing a script for a CGI character, let alone when the aliens are humans making actual decisions in real-time.

I've listed the game design levers I can pull to help the Alien players roleplay below. I won't go into specifics, but I don't recommend you read it if you have a chance to play the game.