Maps & Cities - Gossamer, Hembeck, Spooky City, GLOG Cities, Bastionlands

I like seeing what sorts of interesting world-building other bloggers get up to. I also like a good map. (For that matter, I'm fairly fond of bad maps!) Recently I've noticed people trying their hands at city-building. A couple have set out to create entire cities in some detail, others have more like introductions or first glances. Some are working alone on a project of their own devising, others are communally riffing on a set of shared ideas.

 

 

The Wilting Quarter by Jonathan Newell

 

Bearded Devil, already the creator of the cities of Hex and Jacksburg, recently started in on a new city mapping project, creating a spooky, gloomy fairy city, named Gossamer. The city of Gossamer is laid out on a streetmap like a stylized spider's web. It's possible that the other three quarters of the city will have different moods, but the Wilting Quarter in the northwest is definitely autumnal and dark, full of bugs and mushrooms. The really nice thing about this series of posts is that Jonathan walks us through his artistic process, and we get to watch the districts accumulate to form the quarter, like watching the highlights from a few episodes of The Secret City. 

Introduction to Gossamer, and Explanation of Process

Shroomsbury District

Wormwood District

Finished Wilting Quarter
 

 

Hembeck by Ruprecht

 

Grindstone Games very recently put out another complete city, this one called Hembeck. Hembeck reminds me of a Roman city after the fall of the Western Empire. The city is filled with temples, towers, and other order-keeping institutions. One neat touch is the use of well-chosen alphabetized names for the neighborhoods, which makes for clear keying, but doesn't feel gimmicky.

Introduction and factions of Hembeck

Districts of Hembeck

Alder Rock and Bowyer Ward

Cheap Ward and the Dockyards

Eastrade, Farcraft Ward, and Greatcraft Ward

Heathgate Ward and Ironthorpe

Jembgate Ward, Kruddlestreet Ward, and Limey Ward

Final Map of Hembeck
 

 

Johannesburg Administrative Subdistrict 7 by Mad Cartographer 

 
Several GLOG-bloggers responded to a challenge that Oblidisideryptch put out on the OSR Discord, and put together introductions to their own cities. The breadth of information that different writers have put forward in response to the same prompt surprised me. We get neighborhoods, landmarks, encounters, goods for sale.

Districts of the eponymous capital city of Meatropolis

Encounters and trades in Shalialas, the city of genies

Buildings and residents in the New City and the Old City

Encounters and trades in Qasira, a city on the coast of the Sea of Sand

Landmarks and factions in the Okavango Subdistrict

 

 

one possible Spooky City by Evlyn Moreau

 

Anxiety Wizard developed a more systematic way to build a fantasy city, and wrote up the process along with an example, the Spooky City. The procedure involves writing a number of important "truths" about the city and its inhabitants, that are constants; then writing 12 landmarks, 30 districts, and 100 random encounters. Then the city itself can be procedurally generated by placing a few landmarks and drawing a crossroads coming off of each. These intersecting lines form the boundaries of the districts. 

So you have sort of an eternal truth of the city, as well as particular instances of the city that different play groups might find. Anxiety Wizard wrote the lists for Spooky City with help from several collaborators, including Evlyn Moreau of Le Chaudron Chromatic. Evlyn in turn rolled up her own procedurally generated Spooky City, and then wrote up a couple others cities following the same instructions. My favorite is the Slumber City, and especially the detail that paprika spice is a dream drug imported from Slumberland.

Spooky City and city-building rules

Two views of a Spooky City

Slumber City

Fire and Ice City

Buttermilk Borough by Simon Forster

 

Addermouth District by Joshua LH Burnett

Misty Tracts by Kyle Maxwell

Inspired by this year's release of Electric Bastionland, and following the advice Chris McDowell laid out for creating new neighborhoods, several people have made their own little sections of Bastion. Bone Box Chant proposes an alternative, watery, dieselpunk city called Phosphene, but the others stick to neighborhoods, filled with a whole variety of interesting sites and complications.

 

City of Phosphene

Buttermilk Borough

Addermouth District

Misty Tracts

 

 

one possible Vornoi City Diagram generated by KTrey Parker

As a kind of bonus, Mazirian's Garden has a procedure for generating explorable cities. This involves creating neighborhoods, then filling them with both obvious landmarks and hidden points of interest. He also wrote some rules for exploring such a city, including both getting lost and gradually learning your way around.

d4 Caltrops also has some advice for drawing interesting city maps. His idea involves a mathematical concept called Vornoi tiles, but fortunately, he also has links to some free online tools you can use to make your own map fairly easily. 

New New Crobuzon - A City of Stones and Spirits

A couple days ago Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque posted an old link to Githyanki Diaspor. I suggested calling this the "New New Crobuzon Challenge" and following the rules to make more of them, and a few people have taken me up on it!

Other New New Crobuzons include:

- New Twain (from Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque), 

- The Last City (from From the Sorcerer's Skull), 

- The City of Emination (from The Benign Brown Beast), 

- Thaw (from Archons March On), 

- a nameless new new city (from Dead Tree, No Shelter), 

- Styx (from Games of the Void Rust Medusa), 

- Pandeimos (from Throne of Salt), 

- New Jericho (from Green Skeleton Gaming Guild), 

- Sinking Shenevar (from Seed of Worlds), 

- and Armjourth (from Mapping the Goblin Caves).

There are two parts to the challenge - first, choose 3 humanoid monsters to be minority citizens in your fantasy city and assign them cultural niches; second, choose 3 horrible monsters and decide how the city accommodates their presence without them destroying everything.

I picked shaitan genies, dhampirs, and wayangs for my minority citizens; and devourers, callers in darkness, and caryatid columns for my monstrosities.

Shaitan Genie from Pathfinder Bestiary

Citizens - Shaitan, foreign disruptors.

The shaitan arrived as foreign merchants, their caravans carting in untold fortunes in gold and jewels. They bought the banks, the warehouses, paid off the city's debts, and earned the right to collect tolls. They charge entry fees at the gates and the ports, they charge beggars and businesses alike for the right to conduct business on their streets and in their bazaar. Yet traders flock from afar for the chance to pay the shaitan's fees.

They are the gaudiest of nouveau riche, building mansions, throwing parties, holding extravagant festivals and parades. Their pashas rival the power of the old families, though they have remained outside city politics, for now. A new class of oread youths, the product of dalliances between the shaitan and humans, are just entering adulthood, buying up so many seats in the university and commissions in the army that the children of the lesser old families are beginning to be blocked out of positions they once considered their birthright.

Dhampir from Pathfinder Advanced Class Guide

Citizens - Dhampirs, untouchable underclass.

Long before the shaitan came, before the Revolution ushered in an elected government and gave power to the so-called "old families", the city was ruled by the vampire oligarchs. For too long, the city starved and suffocated in their iron-strong grip. As the oread are to the pashas, so were the dhampirs to the oligarchs - even their illegitimate children held a higher station than any full human. But when the Revolution drove out the oligarchy and divvied up their estates, the dhampirs were bereft, and remain so to this day.

The most fortunate dhampirs work as skilled healers and caretakers, their hunger met by prescribed medicinal bloodletting. The rest must drink from rats and stray dogs, from the sluiceways at slaughterhouses, from dead bodies awaiting ritual preparation. Rumor claims they are diseased, and they're still blamed for the sins of the oligarchs, generations ago. A few dhampirs take up swords as brigands who steal blood from the healthy, as militants who protect their ghetto from celebratory violence on Revolution Day. These few are the most hated criminals in the city.
 

Wayang from Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide

Citizen - Wayangs, extraplanar artisans.

Wayangs come into the city from across the veil of shadows. They claim the city has a dark twin just across the veil, identical in architecture but with a population and political structure all its own, although strangely, their history also includes a time of misrule beneath vampire oligarchs. Academics debate the meaning of this coincidence endlessly.

The wayang who come here are refugees, exiled from their home for blasphemy or political critique. Whatever their vocations at home, here they are artists, for they control shadow-stuff as easily and fluently as humans control the sound of their own speech. Their concerts and plays are riots of condemnation against the rulers who exiled them, though no doubt much of the metaphor and allusion are lost on human audiences. Still, at their greatest performances, the shaitan pashas sit beside the old families, and even the caryatids gather to watch.
 

Devourer from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition Monster Manual

Monstrosity - Devourers, constructs run amok.
 
The undead bodies of devourers stand two or three stories high, and are all but indestructible. They are thought to be siege engines, escaped from some foreign holy war. They seem to be drawn to the city by the presence of here of belief, although others have been spotted at a distance wandering the countryside. Fortunately, their numbers are few, and they remain mostly confined in the poorest neighborhoods - those places that are poor and remain so because anyone who can afford to move out does so.

Whenever a prayer is spoken or a miracle cast, a bit of its power escapes, just as some of the power of an engine becomes heat instead of motion. This wasted piety fuels the devourers. The cages of their chests fill with divine magic, which takes shape as a ghostly image of the faithful. Usually by the time a devourer has strength enough to lumber about, this image is a composite of a dozen faces, and the deaths and damage they cause can't be easily blamed on one devout. Though the city has rituals, it is officially godless. Though the caryatids guard temples, those stand empty. Prayers spoken within the city are not answered, they are eaten. But still, the people have never fully stopped praying.

Caller In Darkness from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition Psionic Handbook

Monstrosity - Callers in Darkness, undead pollution.

Since the reign of the vampire oligarchs, the city has known how to burn fossils as a source of fuel. Properly interred after the appropriate rituals, a well-buried skeleton will blacken within a year, and the poorest families have long used their own ancestors for winter's heat. Recently, industrialists have discovered that layers of the ancient dead lie beneath the streets, pressed hard as stone by the weight of the city overhead, and even recently excavated grave earth can be compacted to a suitable density.

An unfortunate byproduct of this process is the release of callers in darkness, composite ghosts made from dozens of souls, released simultaneously when the fossil stone is burned. They are largely confined to the industrial districts that safely empty out at night, and will harmlessly evaporate in warm, dry weather. Unfortunately, they tend to accumulate in the coldest, wettest months of winter, and sometimes spill over into the factory-workers' housing districts and the dhampir ghettos, where they are blamed for the untimely deaths of infants and the elderly, and at least once, of an entire housing block whose lives were extinguished in a single night.
 

Caryatid Column from Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition Field Folio

Citizens - Caryatids, guardians of tradition.

The oldest buildings in the city date back to ancient times, and each is home to caryatids, who are made of the same stone as the buildings, who remember every moment of their waking lives since the moment of their creation. The ancient buildings are now the city's most important civic sites - the courthouse, the library, the amphitheater. The caryatids enforce the Ancient Laws inside their buildings. It is impossible for one person to harm another inside without lethal retribution, impossible for anyone to appropriate these sites for anything other than their intended use.

The caryatids never leave their buildings except to pay one another occasional visits, walking along the ancient roadways. They spend much of their time sleeping, motionless, unbreathing. When awake, they seem to enjoy conversing with humans. Their knowledge of history is deep, but constrained to their vantage point, and riddled with gaps from their slumber. They never speak first, but will answer if addressed. They will not speak to everyone, and no one understands their criteria for choosing. They will answer any question if they can, and fortunes have been made, powerful people humbled, by asking the right question of a caryatid.