Gossamer is now half complete, with the Withered Quarter – the section of Gossamer which lies in Annwn, realm of eternal winter and land of the dead, ruled by the dread Arawn – now looming brumous and frostbitten east of the Wilting Quarter.
The sinister little village of Crookhollow is a settlement of woodwoses, a rare colony of mortals in Elfhame. Once denizens of the Gnarl, these woodwoses are unusually settled, unlike their nomadic kindred of the deep woods. The wildmen are worshippers of Arawn, lord of the dead, and practice regular sacrifices by fire, setting ablaze vast effigies containing captive enemies – often mortals kidnapped from the woods at the borderlands of Faerie. Such burnt offerings ensure a place of honour for the denizens of Crookhollow when they die, as they shrug off their rude hides and furs for the resplendant finery of the elfin dead, joining the Fair Folk in their subterannean palaces of stone to live afterlives of langour and gloomy opulence.
Drakesworth
Before Gossamer sprawled to its present size, the district now known as Drakesworth was a barren country shadowed by a dark crag, lair of the horror known as Svafnir, a dragon said to hail from the giant-world of Jotunheim. This monster, naturally, possessed a vast hoard of treasure, and slew all who tried to plunder his trove. The beast, however, had grown somewhat lazy over the long years, spending much of its time dreaming of its lost homeland on its bed of gold, and over time the city spread nearly to its doorstep. Eventually, the Fair Folk struck a deal with the dragon – rather than sending in an endless series of hopeless champions to slay Svafnir or steal its treasures, they would simply borrow from the hoard, repaying what they took with interest. Though initially sceptical, the dragon was intrigued. Thus the Hoardsbank was founded: now the foremost financial institution in Elfhame, the size of its assets having increased many hundreds of times over since its founding. Tunnels wind endlessly into the earth, filled with the gold earned by the bank, while Svafnir has recovered somewhat from his planesickness, taking to his new life as a moneylending wyrm. Some whisper that the dragon is the true master of the Withered Quarter, having grown far richer even the the Horned King. Whatever the case, Drakesworth is now one of the most salubrious districts in all of Gossamer, filled with fine buildings of stone and marble, the offices of much of the city’s professional class. Also within Drakesworth is the Temple of the Royal Sepulchre, resting place of the Royal Family of Elfhame. Here can be found the shades of the former monarchs of Faerie, resting after their centuries of rule, dispensing wisdom to heroes of renown and Faerie’s present rulers.
The Gnarl
Though currently in a state of uneasy peace, Annwn and Tír na nÓg have not always been so. During the War of the Trees, Annwn launched an invasion of Tír na nÓg, and Gossamer – usually neutral even during conflicts – became a battleground. After Queen Titania’s armies drove the Shade-Horde back into the Winter Realm, she launched a counterattack, calling on the forest itself to rise to her banner. Thousands of treefolk marched at the behest of the Queen of Flowers, invading Annwn. In Gossamer, this incursion was turned back at the Gullet and the central canal, but for all their efforts, the armies of Arawn were unable to fully repel the treefolk invaders. Thus the southern edge of the Withered Quarter has become the Gnarl: a sprawling wood in the heart of the city, full of twisting, labyrinthine paths, mossgrown ruins, and secret glades. Though most of the treefolk have since fallen back into slumber, some still stand sentinel against any future invasion, including their general, Grandfather Yew. Rangers sworn to Titania’s service, known as the Petal Guard, also patrol the shifting trails and lurk in wait should intruders seek entrance to the Blooming Quarter without leave. Within the depths of the woods it is said one can also find the tower of Myrddin, a mortal mage native to the wizardly city of Hex, whose manse has many doors and many manifestations, and whose knowledge of matters arcane rivals even that of the Fair Folk themselves.
The Grimdowns
On the surface, the misty mounds of the Grimdowns seem but a few snowy crags, topped with the tomb-markers of the dead. In fact, the district is by far the most populous in all of Gossamer, for each and every mound leads down into the grand Necropolis of the city, a seemingly infinite warren that sprawls throughout the Withered Quarter, deep into the earth, filled with the uncountable souls of the dead. All who die in Elfhame manifest as shades in Annwn, and many come here to the Withered Quarter for at least some of their endless days and nights. Despite its vastness, however, the Necropolis is a quiet, dusty place, for the shades lack the energy of life – without the thought of their own deaths motivating them, most shades are slow, contented beings, either tranquil or melancholic, mere echoes of their previous selves. Entry into the catacombs of the Necropolis is granted only to the dead; the living may visit the tombs and leave offerings, even trading certain objects with the dead, but they may not walk the unending tunnels or gaze on the subterannean wonders of the city of the dead that lies beneath their feet.
The Gullet
Before the realm of Annwn was ruled by the Dread Lord Arawn, the Horned King, it had a different sovereign: the dark being known as Crom Cruach, the Head of the Mound, the Devouring Worm, an entity said to be one of Chthonic Gods, demon-princes of the Netherworld, and rumoured to be brother of the Charnel Goddess Mordiggia. Crom Cruach’s rule ended many centuries ago during the reign of High Queen Nicnevan, when he was sealed deep in the bowels of the earth, buried alive by the Elves. Despite his defeat, however, Crom Cruach is still worshipped in the Withered Quarter by a small coterie of cambions, half-elfin and half-demon cultists. The Cult controls the district of the Withered Quarter known as the Gullet, whose buildings are older than almost any in Gossamer – warped and twisted into quasi-organic forms, their very stones seem to grow and reshape themselves like living things. Though the Cult of Crom Cruach acknowledge the sovereignty of Arawn, they keep their own laws and customs, and have been known to bicker with the neighbouring folk of Crookhollow, sometimes snatching woodwoses who stray too near to the tenebrous avenues of their fell domain.
Howling
Rising above the Grimdowns is the dark castle of Caer Sidi, fortress and home of the Dread Lord Arawn himself, Horned King of Annwn. Carved from never-thawing ice, this grim citadel has never been taken in war, manned by an unblinking garrison of the dead, the formidible revenant-warriors known as the Cauldron-Born, who were raised many centuries past by the Sacred Cauldron, one of the legendary Thirteen Treasures of Elfhame. The area around the castle is known as Howling, for it perpetually echoes with the bestial voices of the Cŵn Annwn, wraith-hounds of Arawn, who form part of the legendary Wild Hunt, which, as part of the terms of the peace with Hell, returns souls from the Netherworld who escape the bounds of Hell for Faerie or the mortal realm. Some claim that those who hear their fell voices lose a year of their allotted lifespan.
The Sty
Enclave of ogres, trolls, and their half-mortal kindred, the Sty is a ramshackle sprawl clustered on the western edge of the Withered Quarter, and one of the poorer districts in Gossamer. The district is named for the hogs raised and slaughtered in the abbatoirs here, chief industry of the neighbourhood. A rare few such swine are not killed, for all pigs are first subjected to tests when they are young to determine whether they possess oracular abilities; hogs born in the Withered Quarter, here at the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead, can sometimes exhibit divinatory power. Such beasts can prophesy the weal or woe of many things, and upon dying their entrails and bladders are inspected by the district’s sage haruspexes and choriomancers to discern secrets of great import. Also of note in the Sty is the gigantic mead-hall known as The Golden Hog, a gilded statue which some claim is in fact a petrified dire boar from Jotunheim; though a rough and tumble place, its feasts are the stuff of legend. Those who venture into the Sty are advised to go armed and in groups after dark, for bands of unsavoury giantkin such as the Needleteeth, the Rednails, and the Gutprickers roam the shadowed alleys at night and are rumoured to snatch the odd visitor for their stew-pots; separating the truth of such rumours from anti-troll prejudices is difficult, but certainly the neighbourhood has been the site of many blood-feuds and street-brawls.
After a couple of months of sporadic work, the Wilting Quarter is now complete, making Gossamer 25% done. Next up will be the Withered Quarter, Arawn’s domain, the wintry section of the city directly east of the Wilting Quarter, across the osseous Spinebridge. In upcoming posts, I’ll also be detailing how I populate districts with additional details; below is just a rough outline of the major landmarks and purpose of each neighbourhood.
The Wilting Quarter is the section of the city ruled by Queen Mab, the Autumnal Sovereign, and thus lies in the realm of Logris. Its districts are dedicated to pleasures and skullduggery, dark delights and forbidden knowledge. Practices the Seelie Court find unsavoury can be celebrated openly in the Wilted Quarter; the laws are few and enforced but rarely by the Queen’s rancid guards, with most disputes being settled with jocular duels which become yet another form of public entertainment.
The Brambles
Originally grown as a defensive fortification to repel invaders from Mag Mell, the Brambles have become a den of iniquity and vice. Poisons are openly bought and sold throughout the district, most notably from the garden of Caprice the witch, which sprawls at the neighbourhood’s pungent heart – a verdant grove of hemlock and nightshade. Blades for hire and assassins can also be found throughout the Brambles, including the near-mythic Nettles, an ancient guild of professional killers whose opulent, temple-like headquarters lies just a few blocks east of the imposing towers of the Thorn Gate. Most infamous of the Nettles are the twin sprite assassins Hellebore and Belladonna, known for such gruesome escapades as the Pigeon Pie Massacre, in which the pair hid themselves in the hollowed-out ceremonial pigeon pie at a banquet in Mag Mell, only to spring from the crust and slay half a dozen elfin nobles before the wine was poured.
Goblin Town
As a rule, the Fair Folk shun most modern technology, scorning the steam-engines and clockwork used by mortals. Goblins, however, are a notable exception, and their shambolic ghetto in the midst of the Wilted Quarter is a seething, stinking swelter of acrid smoke and hissing machines. Though far short of the industrial capacity of cities like Hex and Erubescence, the factories of Goblin Town churn out all manner of strange devices, from repeating crossbows to fireworks to crude pistols to mechanical traps to clockwork toys. Many of these are built from scrap metal and other oddments salvaged from the junkyard in the southern part of the district, the city’s garbage-tip for inorganic waste. The west side of Goblin Town also features a number of fighting pits and monster-gardens, populated with creatures from the wilds of Elfhame and beyond; many such creaturea are bought and sold in the Beast Market.
Grosscastle
The Fomorians used to number among Mab’s favoured peoples: giants, originally hostages in the Enormity Wars between Elfhame and Jotunheim, become the soldiers and servants of the Unseelie Court. They lost their status when their chieftain, King Balor, sought to depose Mab herself and claim Logris for his own, a plan foiled by Mab, resulting in the exile of Balor and his people to the mortal realm. Their ancient fortress of Grosscastle, once the primary military fortification in the Wilting Quarter, now lies empty and moss-eaten, for Mab cursed the castle such that any who slumbers in its depths will be driven mad with nightmares, waking in a frenzy and attacking those about them as if they were monstrous imposters; such was the fate of many Fomorians who succumbed to the spell on the eve of Balor’s would-be coup. Though the fortress remains ungarrisoned, adventurers sometimes venture into its shattered halls in search of the forgotten treasures of the Fomorians, for the giants were renowned for their craftsmanship and magic, and many of their wondrous creations can still be found within the cyclopean bowels of Grosscastle.
Horripilation Circus
Elves and Demons have never quite seen eye to eye, not because of their differences but rather their similarities – a narcissism of small differences often intrudes on relations betwixt Faerie and Hell, and due to the Truce and the Tithe of Souls Elfhame pays the Archdemons, the two are largely content to ignore one another, save for the occasional bickering between Annwn and infernal psychopomps over the fate of certain shades of the dead. Of the various Elfin realms, however, Logris maintains the strongest relationship with the Netherworld, as evinced by Horripilation Circus: a demoniac carnival, put on as entertainment for Queen Mab, a kind of gift to the Lady of Logris from Hecate, one of the dethroned sovereigns of Hell usurped by the Commonwealth of Pandemonium. The circus is a multiversal menagerie involving conjured horrors, otherworldly delicacies, surreal magical specatcles, and a panoply of other pleasures both subtle and gross. Many of the performers are demons; others are damned souls, mortals who have made pacts with the fell powers, and other outcasts, grotesques, and oddities culled from the dark corners of the cosmos.
Rotting Hill
Queen Mab herself is often found in the Wilted Quarter. When Her Moldy Majesty is present in Gossamer, she dwells within the Putrescent Palace, a grotesque fortress perched atop Rotting Hill – a reeking mass of lichenous rock, fruiting bodies, and decomposing vegetation. The Palace itself is a madhouse: crazed corridors loop and twist at impossible angles, packs of wild dogs roam from room to room in search of carrion, inscrutable clocks count the hidden hours of Elfhame, and the mad, laughing, blood-stained Queen herself presiding over it all, along with her numerous fetches, supernatural doubles through whose eyes she sees. The dungeons of the Palace are said to be a labyrinth of impossible depth and complexity, a warren of oubliettes and torture chambers in which prisoners and gaolors hunt one another in bizarre cat-and-mouse chases, sometimes seemingly changing roles and identities as all sense and sanity break down.
Shroomsbury
A district of alchemists and physicians, Shroomsbury is absolutely infested with gigantic fungi of every conceivable variety (and several inconceivable ones), their spores used to produce medicines and potions, as well as many of the poisons sold in the Brambles and the drugs sold in Wormwood. The district is notable for Napping Nog, a giant attacker who was laid low by soporific spores, fallen into a seemingly eternal coma; fungi have grown over his slumbering body, which has also become the centre of its own small neighbourhood. A stonesthrow from Nog lies the Collegium Gargantua, one of Gossamer’s few institutions of higher learning, founded with the mission of studying the sleeping giant; the Elfin enchanters at the Collegium have performed a wide variety of experiments on their softly snoring specimen, including entering the creature’s dreams to quite literally pick its brains for secrets of the primordial Jotnar. At the southern edge of the district lies the Red-Juice Sickhouse, a kind of hospital and laboratory where patients are treated with cures generated from the bodies of fungoid nurses – often with bizarre magical side-effects, to the continued fascination of the Fair Folk chirurgeons. Patients have been known to emerge from the Sickhouse with broken bones set or illnesses treated, while also beginning to age backwards, or acquiring strange phobias, or losing their shadows. Some have reported continuing to grow far beyond the heights typical of their species; others have complaned of developing “backup” ears and eyes; of being afflicted with wereslug therianthropy; of losing their childhood memories in exchange for those of others; of discovering the physicians have produced clonal copies of their bodies for disreputable purposes; and a myriad of other complaints. Still, there’s no arguing with results.
Wormwood
Little remains of the enchanted forest of Wormwood that preceded the Wilting Quarter, but one small neighbourhood preserves something of its eerie charms. Gossamer’s pleasure district, the place is home to numerous theatres, most notably the magnificent open-air Grove theatre, where plays older than some planes are regularly performed with elaborate ceremony, along with the latest bawdy satyr-plays and other lewd comedies, often skewering Faerie’s elites. Taverns, drug-dens, and cafes also abound, many serving absinthe, the signature drink of the district, in honour of the Green Fairy, an ancient member of the Fair Folk who can often be found roaming the verdurous streets, bewitching passersby with intoxicating illusions. Undoubtedly the centrepiece of the district is the gorgeous Nymphaeum. To call this temple of sensuous delights a “brothel” would almost be slanderous, for it is a shrine to hedonism, run by the descendants of the nymphs and satyrs who once dwelt in the ancient wood and have now adapted to city life; the overgrown pleasure-palace is an opulent world unto itself, as expensive as it is decadently luxurious. Finally, Wormwood is also the location of the Nest, a wyvern-aerie. The beasts have long ago been tamed by the locals, becoming far smaller in size and less ferocious in demeanor than their forebears; indeed, it is practically a faux-pas for a well-to-do Elf not to own a jewel-scaled dwarf wyvern, used much as mortals do a hunting hawk.
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.
Four pages into mapping, the results look like this:
Even at this stage I needed to make some adjustments to the image – tiny misalignments, a paper slightly askew here, a scanning margin there, all meant that to make the images mesh I needed to expand and contract parts of the map, add a stairway here and a cluster of fungi there. This can be fiddly, but in some ways there’s a silver lining – these sorts of realignments tend to further disguise the gaps between pages and give the final result a slightly more organic look while still preserving the overall design.
With the images digitally sewn together, I then started adding names. I sometimes have a list of street ideas jotted down, but generally I make them up as I go. I named the giant (Napping Nog) and labelled a few especially important landmarks. There was some space left around some larger structures, so I decided retroactively to make these notable locations, labelling them the Wheezing Tower and the Collegium Gargantua – I’ll figure out details for these locations later, but the Colelgium will likely be a school focused on sleep-magic and psychedelic enchantments, while the tower might belong to a wizardly cabal. Making “discoveries” like this preserves a certain sense of spontaneity during the process.
Up next I’ll be starting a new district – possibly Wormwood, Rotting Hill, or the Brambles.
I’m drawing a new city – Gossamer, capital city of Elfhame – and thought this would be a good opportunity to show my process for desgining and mapping fantasy cities. This is something of a companion post to “How I Run a Citycrawl Campaign.”
Overall Concept
I start by thinking of the overall concept for the city – who rules it, what its economic and political purpose is, what its overall shape should be, its overall aesthetic, and which historical cities I can take as models. For Hex, I knew I wanted to create a magical university town, I knew I wanted the city to be shaped like a hexagon cut through by a river, and I took some broad inspiration from cities like London, Rome, and my home city of Vancouver. For Erubescence I knew I wanted to construct a vampiric capitol where the Night Queen traps her nobles at court with water (since vampires can’t cross it), and the idea of a pentagram stuck in my mind; my real-world references were Venice and Paris, with a little bit of St. Petersburg.
Gossamer, the Big Cobweb, is going to be the central metropolis of Elfhame, placed at the converge of the four realms of Logris, Annwn, Tír na nÓg, and Mag Mell (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer). I want it to be literally cut into four, with two rivers carving the realms up, their confluence serving as the site of the city. Since I like giving cities a distinctive shape, and since I’ve picked the name Gossamer for the capitol, I’ve decided to make the city look like a giant cobweb, with canals taking the place of the webbing. This design is partly inspired by Amsterdam and Bruges, the two cities that I’ll be taking most of my visual cues from this time. The canals of Amsterdam were originally a series of defensive moats that slowly transformed into commercial waterways, which I’ll use as the basis for the web-like design in Gossamer.
This map is astoundingly good.
Getting Started
The idea of the city will be that there are four major “quarters” to it, each technically a different country. Gossamer will thus have a bit of the vibe of somewhere like East/West Berlin and other “divided cities” (this is partly inspired by The City and the City, which I’m teaching this summer). Each of the four quarters will have a different ruler, different laws, and a starkly different feel to it. They’ll also need a unique visual identity, so that while the map looks like one city overall, the quarters also feel quite distinct from one another. In the very middle of the city where the quarters meet will be a dockyard and bazaar.
I decided to start with Mab’s quarter, the Wilting Quarter, a borough of eternal autumn and decay. I jotted down some prospective names of districts: Rotting Hill, Grosscastle, Shroomsbury, the Wartward, the Brambles, Wormwood, and Horripilation Circus. For each of these I made notes on how I wanted each district to look, and its purpose within the city. For example, Shroomsbury, the district I’m starting with, is going to be the fungoid district, will have giant toadstool structures, and will be a significant manufacturer of drugs and potions – the alchemist’s district as well. This means it’ll include lots of wizard’s towers, laboratories, and similar places, but it will also be an organic sprawl of buildings and fungi (I picked this first because I figured it’d be fun and easy to draw – a good starting point).
To make sure that the map coheres, my first step is to find a pattern that fits my picture of the city. After some quick googling I was able to produce this:
This will be the “blueprint” for the Wilted Quarter.
Which, when resized and printed off, becomes this:
The madness begins again.
Each of these sections is numbered so that I know how they fit together. I now have a bluprint for the city and can begin actually drawing, placing the map over each section so that the shape of the canals is maintained. I began in the top right-hand corner. After some consideration I’ve decided that the Wilting Quarter does not have walls, but like Bruges uses waterways for defense (I think the Mag Mell and Annwn sections – names not yet determined – might have walls). I want this part of the city to be a sprawl, with structures throughout even the large sections without canals along the edges – indeed, these hinterlands will be the location of the Fairy Queens’ and Kings’ palaces, as far from their rivals as possible.
With a blueprint ready, I then sketched out roughly where each of the seven districts within the Wilting Quarter would be placed. The four “inner” districts will be the Wartward, Wormwood, the Brambles, and Shroomsbury, while the “outer” districts will include Rotting Hill, Grosscastle, and Horripilation Circus, since those districts will benefit from having more space – the first will be a mansion-encrusted hill, the second a series of gigantic ruins built by the exiled Fomorians, and the third will be a sort of demonic amusement park.
District 1: Shroomsbury
With the basics sketched out, I started drawing.
I use the blueprint to guide the drawing and keep track of things like canal position and which district goes where.
As each section is completed, I scan the results and tweak contrast. The result looks like this, for one page of the map. This section will take 20 pages, which means the overall map will be 80 pages.
I really enjoy drawing fungi.
One down, 79 to go. Shroomsbury needs some more landmarks, something to make it stand out apart from just being made of fungi. I brainstormed some ideas, including:
A giant who has been lulled into sleep by the psychedelic spores and now has buildings and fungi built all over him. I do have a giant head already in Erubescence (a zombified trophy), but I like the idea that this visual links the two cities, who were frequent allies in wars with the Giants before the Seven Years’ Mischief sundered the peace. I also like placing “passive threats” in my cities, like swords of Damocles – things that PCs could “set off” if they disturb, like the infectious Thornmaze in Erubescence or the protoplasmic monster in the Warded Ward in Hex.
A giant compost heap/garbage tip, essentially the cesspits and mass graves of the city, which can of course spawn all sorts of monsters and threats.
Since this is the alchemists’ and apothecaries’ district, a fungal hospital or leper house could be interesting, where patients go to have experimental cures involving bizarre growths and drugs.
I then drew the next page of the city, adding in the fungal hospital. This requires some care, lining things up with the precious page, like so:
Scan, boost contrast, reduce light a little, and the second page looks like this:
Now I simply edit these two pages together. I like to perform some minor tweaks at this point to make sure the pieces segue smoothly. I place broader streets at the join between areas, while occasionally interrupting those streets with diagonal canals or long buildings to disguise the fact I’m piecing the maps together as a series of 8.5/11″ pages.
When I add the first two pages together they look like this:
Looking back to the blueprint, I’ve now drawn the first two pages on the top right corner.
In subsequent posts, I’ll share progress on this map as I complete districts and quarters. I’m going to be starting with Shroomsbury in its entirety, and then we’ll spread out from there. Once Shroomsbury is done I’ll get into labelling and naming things, and then start to brainstorm more ideas for the adjacent districts – I have thoughts for each of them, but the specifics aren’t fully worked out, which is part of the fun.
There’s been some interest recently expressed on Discord and Google+ (before its demise – may it rest in peace) as to how I run this campaign. This is the first of a series of posts on how I approach an urban D&D game. It is, of course, not the only way to run this sort of thing – indeed, I suspect I rely rather less on a lot of common conventions for urban adventuring, most notably by eschewing procedural content-generation methods. I’m going to start by describing the kind of game I aim to run, and then I’ll talk about the procedures and techniques I use as a DM to create and sustain that game.
Urban Sandbox
Sandbox adventures frequently involve sprawling wilderness landscapes, hexcrawls, and similar structures. My goal is to take the feel of openness, freedom, and agency associated with typical sandbox play, but largely confined within the space of a single city. While some adventures have taken the characters outside of Hex (the main city in this game) to places like the wintry wastes of Troll Country, the Gothic province of Varoigne, the guts of the gigantic whale Genial Jack, and the depths of Faerie, the game is centred in and around Hex. In this sense, I am simultaneously adopting and inverting the approach of a West Marches campaign, which aims to cultivate an overarching environment, but also warns against the perils of “town adventures.” Hex is nearly all town adventure, but the town has been transformed into an adventure-worthy space.
I also DM for a large group – currently I have 10 semi-regular players. Because players come and go, skipping some sessions and attending others, the “plot lines” of the campaign are incredibly loose. There have been significant, ongoing events happening in the campaign world: Erubescence’s ambitions, the machinations of the Griefbringer, Hex’s ongoing labour struggles, a conspiracy quietly unfolding in the background which my players are now unraveling. And, likewise, there is a very rough “main quest” which the party dips into: their search for the mysterious volumes that comprise the Organon of Magic, ostensibly for the ancient archwizard and brain-in-a-jar, Master Melchior, whom much of the party actively distrust. Mostly, though, the game is a patchwork of disjointed episodes, a picaresque series of heists, vendettas, delves, and personal quests. This disjointedness is a feature, not a bug; while the players will sometimes pull on a plot thread and see where it leads, we never follow one storyline too long or too doggedly. They drive the “story” such as it is, choosing where to go, what to do, and what interests them most.
The closest literary analogues for this sort of game are Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, as well as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, where a cast of recurring characters are swept up in a series of adventures only loosely connected to one another. Hex has other fictional forebears – Sigil, Cörpathium, New Crobuzon, Camorr, Ashamoil – but structurally, Lankhmar and Ankh-Morpork loom largest. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories also have something of this – London in Doyle’s writing sprawls Gothic and gaslit, a labyrinth of mysteries and fog which the protagonists wander, embroiled in a disconnected sequence of macabre incidents and misadventures.
In designing Hex, I made sure to have the city open onto various other worlds and nested structures. Setting it atop an ancient, gigantic city, I made it adjacent/continuous with a megadungeon that serves as a convenient adventuring location; that dungeon is thick with impossible spaces, pocket dimensions, and portals. The idea is to present such a smorgasboard of possibilities that the players never get bored and always have a host of options as to where to go next. I want to evoke a sense of rich, infinite adventure.
Baroque DMing and Urban Space
At one point someone on Google+ (I think it was Patrick Stuart?) described what I was doing as a kind of counterrevolution. While I run a 5th edition game, philosophically I borrow a lot from old-school D&D – my game features the potential for fairly high lethality (in practice, death is pretty rare because my players are cautious), open-ended challenges, creative problem-solving, an emphasis on an immersive setting, and a prioritization of exploration and emergent storytelling over “narrative.” I prefer puzzles to “balanced” combat, out-of-the-box thinking to skill rolls, rulings to an excess of rules. The one old-school standby which I tend to eschew is procedural generation. I’m not oppposed to random tables inherently, and I do use some occasionally both of my own devising and otherwise, but I far prefer to have prepared as much as possible beforehand. The template I’m looking back to here is City State of the Invincible Overlord, where the city is entirely mapped and keyed.
In navigating the city, I want my players to feel as if nothing is being invented on the spot – the setting should feel as if it exists independently of them, and they are exploring its secrets. It should be suffused with interesting details and a sense of grandeur and verisimilitude. My goal is to produce a feeling of absorption and fascination, an experience of actually navigating a real-feeling, mind-independent space.
This is, in large part, why I wanted a physical, detailed map of the space, so that the players could see the city sprawling before them. It’s a common dictum that this is the wrong way to run cities, the idea being that maps constrain the imagination and pin down what could be a fantastic space too much. In drawing the map, I tried to create a visually appealing and chaotic space that enhances rather than undermines a sense of mystery. Yes, we can all see the Tower of Whispers on the map, but what could be inside such a bizarre spire in the middle of the city? Why is there a giant crater in the middle of the southern half and why haven’t people rebuilt over it? Is that a gigantic dragon statue broken into peices in the lower left-hand corner? And what is with the giant trees? I want players to look at the map and feel excited to explore. And, of course, there’s a hidden space as well – the Old City below, the massive sprawl of tunnels, sewers, caves, and ruins that the PCs have only partially explored.
The aesthetic I’m going for, then, is explicitly a maximalist one – in some ways, “the Baroque” is a good descriptor for what I’m attempting.
The Baroque celebrates excess, as this Jordaens painting, “As the Old Sang the Young Play Pipes ,” illustrates.
Historically, the Baroque was aligned with a Catholic counterrevolution against Protestant austerity and simplicity; Baroque aesthetics strove to evoke a sense of awe and extravagence, with plentiful, ornate detail, complexity, sensuousness, emotion, and drama, in contrast to the dour severity that often characterized the Reformation. My goal in DMing is to create something of this vertiginous rush of complexity and detail, while still making the experience intelligible and player-driven. Indeed, player agency here is absolutely key: it’s vital that the players feel they can explore wherever they wish and find something engaging to interact with. Otherwise, the setting would end up feeling like a very pretty but ultimately flat series of backdrops that the PCs roll by on their way to and from pre-scripted plot points. To ensure this doesn’t happen, it’s important to distinguish between prepping and planning. The former is about providing a detailed, thought-through environment for players to explore and inhabit; the latter is about aiming for a specific narrative arc or set of story beats. I do a ton of the former and almost none of the latter.
A picture taken before a game…Things get a bit more complicated during a game!
During play, I keep the Hex map itself spread out in front of players at all times, so they can see where they are and how locations relate to one another spatially. I don’t always go street-by-street in describing everything as they move around the city – this would make the game very slow – but I do “zoom in” to a district level, street-by-street, once the party arrives in a given neighbourhood. I think of it a bit like how Planescape: Torment (a huge influence) handles city movement: there’s a map with districts, you click on one, and then you “zoom in” to that particular district’s individual streets.
Zoomed-out map from Planescape: Torment.Zoomed-in map.
If the party decides to “zoom in” on a specific location, I always have something ready – I’m not suddenly grasping for details that aren’t present, and forced to make something up or generate something randomly that wouldn’t be as interesting as something I thought up ahead of time. I’ll have descriptions of each street, NPCs worked out, encounter tables when appropriate, and often some oddity or other the party could choose to interact with, like a weird homunculus wandering about outside a condemned building or a vagrant spellcaster painting magical murals on a wall.
When players enter a district for a specific purpose, we “zoom in” to a subsection of the map and switch from general descriptions to street-by-street descriptions.
Consequently, I rely on what I think qualifies as extremely heavy preparation – again, prepping, not planning. What I’m aiming for here is what Joseph Manola over at Against the Wicked City identifies as the essential quality for good roleplaying books: “the contents need to be something better than you could come up with, unaided, simply by following cliches and/or random madlibbing and/or coming up with irrelevant filler.” Whenever I write something down, it needs to be better than something I could come up with on the spot at the table, better than a cliche, and not irrelevant filler. There is no Powered by the Apocaylpse-style collaborative setting-building here: the PCs do have backstories and I do incorporate those into the texture of the world, but I don’t ask them for details about a scene or give them opportunities to shape the world outside of the actions of their characters. Those actions are consequential, sometimes massively so, but they are bound by an in-universe logic and constraints. Similarly, I don’t rely on random die-rolls or other procedural heuristics or techniques to generate street-maps, encounters, or NPCs. It must all get planned exhaustively, so that when the players stray from the beaten track the spaces feel lived-in and authentic and just as interesting as the parts I expected them to visit. This means drawing a crazy-detailed city map with every street and major landmark indicated, and producing extensive notes for every likely adventure location – I’m currently sitting at about 270,000 words for a total of 38 sessions so far (yes, I’m behind on recaps).
Obviously this means a lot of writing and drawing. But, as the DM, this is to me a huge part of the fun: I don’t think of writing adventure notes or drawing maps as work. I have other hobbies and leisure activities and things to do, of course, and a job that takes up a lot of my time, and I do occasionally take hiatuses when things get too busy to keep up with the campaign, but I find the act of creation and then sharing that creation with a group of people incredibly rewarding – so this preparation really isn’t a chore. All that said, I do use certain procedures to make this easier on myself.
Pre- and post-play Procedures
I organize the campaign using groups.io, a wonderful email group service with a lightweight, easy-to-use interface and the ability to quickly and painlessly distribute polls to those within a group. Before every session, I post two polls: the first is a scheduling poll to see who can play when, and the second is a poll of broadly defined adventure possibilities, usually picking up on things the characters did in the previous session, or sometimes reflecting events that have transpired in the setting. Some of these are ongoing, so if the party neglects them, they’ll change: for example, the endless winter caused by the Harrowgast in some of last year’s sessions was something the players ignored in the polls, until rioting in the streets and famine made them take notice. Genial Jack’s nightmares are another example – the players heard rumours that Jack’s sleep was disturbed, but it took them a couple of sessions to look into it, and if they hadn’t, things would have gotten worse and worse.
The polls function a bit like a quest log or journal in a computer roleplaying game, but many of the available threads are generated by the actions of the players, rather than simply representing “available jobs” (though there are some of these too). In a recent session, for example (one not yet posted to the blog), we picked up on the backstory of Caulis the homunculus, whose dead creator had saddled the character with a demonic debt – something the player had included in their back-story since character creation. In another, Comet’s player had mentioned the waspkin was hanging about in the Feypark to avoid harassment by the Crowsbeak Thieves’ Guild, and was getting to know the plants and animals there; this led directly to a fun little adventure where the character shrunk down to rodent-size for some Redwall-style medieval animal hijinx. In the two-part Château de la Marche adventure the party explored a character’s familial estate and faced off against a villain they’d failed to kill in an earlier adventure. In our most recent session, Yam’s player had a clever idea for keeping the reality-warping Book of Chaos safe, and so I wrote an adventure planned around the idea. The idea here is to avoid making the characters passive, but to view them as active agents in a world that reacts to them; the poll, which players themselves can comment on or add to, simply lets me see which direction they’re headed.
Polls indicating a rough plan for future sessions let me prepare adventures and areas for exploration more extensively.In this case, a detail I’d improvised in the previous session led to option 6, which tied for the most popular option. In discussion below, we decided to go for option 6 over option 1… The map above was prepared in response to the vote and discussion above. I hadn’t planned for the party to visit Shudderland as part of a pre-determined plot thread – but once it became clear that’s where they were headed, I mapped it and wrote notes for the surrounding countryside.
Of course, once we arrive at the table, the party is free to go anywhere. But having a broad direction discussed and decided ahead of time not only lets me prep the areas we’re going to play in more extensively, it keeps a big group of players on track and avoids having to recap every single thread of the unfolding game every time we sit down to play. There’s no railroad, and no pre-scripted story, and no invisible walls that keep players stuck in a single area, but there is a consensus going into each session of what the party would like to accomplish. It also means that players who can only come every few sessions – or even those who stop by once or twice a year! – can jump into a session easily without being paralyzed with too many choices.
After each session, we use an extensive Google spreadsheet to track experience, which also shows how much XP each character needs to level. This, along with the session recaps I post here (massively facilitated by the notes my players take), helps a big group to maintain a sense of cohesion. Those who’ve missed sessions can read the recaps to catch up on what they’ve missed and make sure character sheets are up to date.
Adventure Hooks
While it’s always up to the players where they want to go and what they want to do, and I try to plan sessions in reaction to what the players have done previously, I do have some stand-bys for common adventure hooks. These include:
Adventures related to a PC’s faction. Most of the PCs are members of an arcane university (there are eight: Fiend’s College, Umbral University, the Académie Macabre, the Citadel of the Perptual Storm, the Institute of Omens, the Warders’ Lyceum, the Metamorphic Scholarium, and Master Melchior’s School of Thaumaturgy & Enchantment), a thieves’ guild (the big ones are the Crowsbeak and Ravenswing guilds), religious organizations (the chief gods of Hex being the Archdemons, the Unspeakable Ones, the Mother of Spiders, the Magistra, the Charnel Goddess, the Elder Trees, and the Antinomian), and other factions, like the Faerie courts or wizardly cabals.
Adventures related to a PC’s backstory. Most of my players wrote brief backstories with little adventure seeds scattered throughout them, providing plenty of opportunities for adventures.
The “main quest” items they’ve been hired to recover all have adventures associated with them.
Calamities and other events invite PC participation. The endless winter, Jack’s nightmares, looming war.
The two-part adventure at Armand’s ancestral estate was inspired by the character’s backstory and previous encounters the PCs had with NPCs.
Running the Game
During an actual session, I more or less proceed as follows:
Players arrive. Drinks are poured, food is ordered, socializing commences until everyone is present.
The game starts. I start a playlist I’ve prepped beforehand on my Google Home, usually consisting of various ambient/videogame soundtracks.
I go around the table and ask each player what their character has been doing between sessions. Because we play a very episodic game, it is relatively unusual for the group to pause “mid-adventure.” Each player takes 3-5 minutes to respond, so this usually takes beteen 15 minutes and half an hour. For example, Armand’s player has a series of strange botanical/alchemical experiments the character is undertaking.
We segue into what I think of as the “preparation phase” of the game. At this point I will remind the players gently about the objective they voted on before the session. Then I step back and let them play out a quick scene, usually in a tavern or in one of the houses of the characters, as they plan whatever venture they’re undertaking, be it a dungeon crawl, a heist, a political meeting, a wilderness journey, an auction, a trip into the nightmare-haunted mind of a gigantic primeval whale, etc. This usually takes a few minutes, sometimes longer if there is substantial disagreement among the party members about how to proceed.
After the preparation phase is complete, we launch into the “main phase” of the game – however the players want to tackle it. Generally this wraps up by the session’s end, but new adventure seeds will be uncovered, ideas had, conspiracies unmasked, etc. Sometimes the party needs to pause midway through, but this is rare. I’ve become fairly adept at judging how long it takes for a given adventure to be completed. During this phase, I periodically try to check in with everyone – with a big group, its easy to sink into silence and let others take the lead.
The session concludes, and we often briefly discuss what we might do next.
I use groups.io to notify players of XP, update the spreadsheet, and post polls for the next session time and objective. Players discuss any possibilities and hash out a rough plan of what to do next session, ask questions about gear, leveling, etc.
Further Notes
There’s a partially justified objection, both in some OSR circles and in indie/narrativist/story-game circles, of a very prep-heavy style of play, and most versions go something like this: if you prep too much you get precious about your setting and/or your story and will inevitably railroad players, and prep-heavy DMs are usually “frustrated novelist” types who really wish they were authors telling their own story rather than referees of a game. There’s real wisdom here – this is why people dislike Pathfinder adventure paths and bloated AD&D adventures and all that kind of thing.
However, again, heavy prep does not necessarily entail pre-scripting or planning a plot. Indeed, by extensively preparing locations and NPCs, I find myself feeling reassured at the table. I am also never gripped by panic of a blank space on the map – if the players decide to go somewhere I hadn’t envisioned, odds are I have at least some notes for what’s there, and enough modular material (encounters, adventure seeds, weird happenings) that I can make the area feel interesting enough that it doesn’t become obvious when the players are leaving the rough path I envisioned for them.
None of this makes good improvisational skills superfluous. I make things up all the time, improvise almost all NPC dialogue, and of course embellish my notes with invented details. Inevitably, the players will do things I don’t expect and come up with plans and ideas I never would have imagined. Having a wealth of setting information on hand lets me roll with the punches. Prepping locations and NPCs rather than plots means that there’s no “script” to deviate from and thus no “wrong” way for the players to proceed.
Sometimes, players blow bits of your setting up; this is to be encouraged. Illustration by Bronwyn McIvor.
There’s also a long list of things that I gloss over or just plain don’t care about when I’m actively DMing a session:
Precise timekeeping. If the players ask, I tell them a time, and when it’s relevant to the adventure, I keep a loose sense of what time it is in a session, but otherwise I just don’t care.
Precise book-keeping. If we were playing a gritty wilderness survival game or a pure horror game I’d care much more about this, but since the party is in a rich metropolis, I always assume they are well fed and have access to supplies. They still need to buy specific equipment, and sometimes we will roleplay shopping, but a lot of this gets done between sessions. If someone forgot to buy arrows for their bow and would really like to be able to shoot things, whatever, we’ll retcon that they bought them. With a group of 6-7 players per session, it just doesn’t make sense to spend time roleplaying merchant encounters excessively or fussing over exactly how many days of rations they have left.
Sorry Gary, no strict time records for my group…
Rules discussions and minutiae. I and my players are very much “rulings not rules” people. They trust me to make fair decisions. Combat in the game is common but not the main activity most of the time, and I play fast and loose with 5th edition’s fairly flexible rules system, interpreting PC intentions and actions generously, and making quick calls when needed. I can’t remember the last time there was a rules dispute at the table, but if someone discovers a rule that got ignored which might have benefited them or something, I’ll give out Inspiration as recompense.
Balance. I regularly give the players access to magic items that are pretty powerful tools for characters who are at this point mostly 4th-6th level (like the Head of Granny Midnight, the Portal Chalk, or the Rod of Mind-Swap). I also regularly throw monsters at them that are way above their recommended CR. They’ve played enough with me to know when to run and how to play intelligently without getting killed. This is a pretty standard principle of sandbox play generally, but it’s one I try to lean into.
So, there you have it – the procedures and philosophy underpinning my Hex campaign. Let me know if there’s anything you’re curious about – I’d be happy to answer any questions. I plan on writing more posts like this in the future fleshing out additional details both of how I DM and how I design dungeons, cities, and adventures.
