city at the gates of hell, pt. 1: inspiration

So I'm currently in a different country finishing up a master's degree, which has made it more or less impossible to play with my group back in the US. I still have D&D on the mind though, and I want to try my hand at something a bit out of my comfort zone.

You see, the two regions of the world that the players have explored are both very *grounded.* Historical. Low fantasy. Believable. Whatever you want to call it, that's the sort of setting I'm used to writing.

I've also never made any sort of urban adventure environment. I'm far more comfortable with a good old-fashioned dungeon romp, or even the wilderness hexcrawl, than I am with the city adventure.

Screw being comfortable. Time to get weird. Time to get messy. Time to make a fool of myself. That's how you learn, after all.

Let's make a city at the gates of hell.

but first, my setting in four sentences

The continent this game takes place on is conceptually North America stretched to the size of Pangaea. Hundreds of years ago an empire of death-worshippers and skilled mages ruled almost everything, and in order to sustain their unfathomably cruel regime, they got into some fucked up sacrifice shit. This ended with the collapse of most of global civilization after they accidentally made a 2000-mile wide demon-infested hell-on-earth crater in the middle of the continent. This event, and the hellscape it spawned, are both simply called (the) Cataclysm.

inspirations

I'm going to level with you, the primary thing which inspired this is Canterlot from the new My Little Pony cartoon.

Canterlot. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

A reimagining of Canterlot, with more city. Plainoasis.

Another remiagining. Imposing. Balthasar999.

Things I like about this:

• It's a city hanging off a god-damn mountain-side.
• Because of that, the entire place looks like it needs magic just to stay up. It's safer for the inhabitants up there (important when you live next to Hell), but it also feels *wrong,* like a city doesn't belong there.
• Lots of towers, terraces, verticality. We'll come back to this.
• Architectual language: curvy, organic, art nouveau, fairy-tale gothic, tall, slender. This contrasts with the established architectural language of the evil empire (known simply as the Old Kingdom by most people in the setting's present) which was: blocky, ponderous, monumental, angular, obsessed with statues/ziggurauts, fantasy Brutalist.
• Bright colors. Too much fantasy is drab and dark. PCs can bleed out in gaudy alleyways too.

So I'll steal pony Minas Tirith. Where does my mind go from there?

We're gonna need way more demons, for starters. Paweł Żarczyński.

wait why is he talking about cyberpunk now i thought this was a d&d blog?

I see all the spires, bridges between buildings, and terraces and immediately I start thinking of cyberpunk, specifically the 1982 film Blade Runner. As this YouTube video points out, the movie uses verticality to distinguish between social classes, with the privileged elite in their towers and the teeming alienated masses stuck on the ground.

This is not a new idea by any means. The afterlife in the Divine Comedy uses this structure. More recently, the WH40K universe used it to great success in the concept of the Hive City. But for some reason my mind keeps coming back to this cyberpunk thing, possibly because cyberpunk is set in cities which are recognizably similar to the ones I actually live in.

So that gets me thinking about two things.

oh jesus christ now he's talking about city planning and cars and shit fuck this

As Zak Sabbath points out on p. 36 of his city-running kit Vornheim (which will undoubtedly be indispensable to this project) cities are distinct from dungeons in that they are meant to be inhabited. Where the dungeon resists habitation, movement, and even comprehension, a well-designed city should facilitate these things.

Note: well-designed. I'm from America, where we have a lot of really badly-designed cities, to the point where I would go so far as to characterize them as hostile.

Now, for the most part, this is unintentional/subconscious: for example, American cities are designed to be navigated by automobiles, which is great!... if you can afford an automobile. If you can't, the city becomes much less hospitable, simply because it becomes a hassle to negotiate the longer car-friendly distances between Locations of Interest.

Sometimes cities are designed to be openly hostile, however. (The Wikipedia article on hostile architecture is a good starting place for learning about this type of design, if you're not already familiar with it.) I have always been interested in how the powerful express themselves through shaping the urban environment, particularly with respect to restraining access and movement.

So let's run with that idea. An urban pointcrawl, where the richer half of the map is prohibitively difficult (even aggravating) to access at first (too bad they have all the fucking money you want). As you level up though, and gain social influence, gradually those barriers start to fall away. The geography of the city for 1st-Level PCs and 5th-Level PCs should be different. Without actually leaving the walls, the environment changes, much like a well-designed megadungeon responds to player exploration.

I feel like having a vertical city makes it easy to limit points of access, while also keeping the rich parts of town part of the constant urban landscape.

Moscow. Ivan Turukhano.

at least this kinda has something to do with d&d i guess

Secondly, I'd like to try and see if I can't incorporate some of the themes and concepts which are common in cyberpunk and other noiry genres. Two big ones are transhumanism and abuse of mass media. I'm not exactly sure how to tackle the second one yet, though I have some ideas.

The first one though. In cyberpunk, you graft on a robot arm when your shitty human arm gets ripped off - in this city, maybe you can get a big fucking demon arm like in that one episode of Rick and Morty and punch people out with it. Functional, but a bit boring. We can do better.

Pictured: Dungeons & Dragons. Apparently. Rick and Morty.

It's been established that the demons in my setting are essentially crystalized emotion/vice/virtue, ala Warhammer. Why couldn't you use a captured demonling to say, cut away your fear? Or desire? Or amplify those things instead? The idea seems really anime to me, somehow. I'm curious to see if I can do it anything approaching justice.

That's enough for now, I think. I've already started generating the city's layout, but this post is already long enough. Look forward to more soon.

- kill your dungeon master -