Gossamer begins to take shape. I moved south from Shroomsbury into Wormwood and the eastern edges of the Brambles. With 8 pages done, I am now nearly halfway through the Wilting Quarter, and 10% through the city overall.
Wormwood is a sort of urban forest, and also a pleasure-district – a maze of roots and mossy bridges and winding streets, ornate spires emerging from a miasma of perfume and psychedelic mist, all of it overgrown with trees and foliage. As with Shroomsbury, I decided on a few landmarks. Firstly, I wanted a wyvern nest, the beasts domesticated so that their venom would be milked and diluted into one of many potent drugs consumed in the district, many others coming from Shroomsbury to the north. Second, a theatre – I went with an Elizabethan-looking structure, the Grove. Finally I put in the lavish, over-the-top Nymphaeum, somewhere between a shrine and a brothel.
The economic function of the Wilting Quarter is taking shape. Drugs, reagents, poisons, potions – the district is about transformation and liminal states, which fits with the autumn theme of Logris, the fairy realm of Mab. I’m thinking this theme will be echoed in a different way in the part of the city ruled by Titania, Queen of Spring, in the southeast, opposite Mab’s domain.
Next up will be finishing off the bottom corner and the Brambles, a thorn-swathed slum, district of assassins and thieves. It’s also going to include a sprawling witch’s garden where various poisonous herbs are cultivated.
The city as a whole now looks like this:
I was also thinking about how the Quarters will connect to one another – I may end up putting a big bridge between the Wilting Quarter and the Withered Quarter, the wintry section that will be directly east of this part. There’s a nice untaken spot off Deepshade square that would be easy to graft the bridge to without a lot of finnicky re-drawing. Once I’m finished with the Wilted Quarter I’ll likely move clockwise, moving through the Winter, Spring, and finally Summer sections of the city.
Xaosseed
I would be really interested in a follow on post for this going into your brainstorming techniques and how you populate the quarter with stuff – how much are fixed items, how many will be pieces left ‘blurry’ for future use – how do you set your bar on ‘this is enough for now’?
From back in the ‘how to city-crawl’ post I understood you do a lot of prepping to make sure the city feels real and lived in; it would be really interesting to get a zoom in on what you found works well for generating ideas more interesting than ad-lib-ing particularly since you’ve obviously got a successfully pressure-tested system going.
Do you use any particular idea-generation technique or just build out from the single core idea iteratively and see where it goes?
Bearded-Devil
Good thoughts, I’ll for sure expand more in subsequent posts. I’ve got one coming up soon (almost done the Wilted Quarter) and will talk about beginning the process of layering in detail.