Hi y’all, I’ve been making some posts recently referencing my homebrew Crown and Skull city B-N347H (was originally different, but one of my players suggested that spelling and I like it better); I have a pretty intense last semester of school coming up so I have been looking into low/no prep gming, I want to run a city centered campaign that I can run for about 3-4 hours per session without prep which is a tall order, but I think I have found a way. When I think of no prep gming 2 games come to mind, Crown and Skull and Blades in the Dark (I have been running CnS for months now in a way I don’t count as low prep because most things that occurred were prepped or planned), the idea is to make a very fleshed out city with the hex tables and dungeons from CnS to populate the wilderness surrounding it. I have a bit of freetime left so I’ve been sitting in the yard and writing for a few hours a day, because of this I think I’ll have a fully useable city by the time school starts.
So far I have a map and I have planned out my journal pages. I am stealing BitD’s layout entirely because its awesome. 12 districts, and 7 landmarks. Each district has a short description, 3 notable npcs, a description of the general vibe, a description of the streets, a description of the buildings, a few locations, and some stats about the district. The only changes I made were that every district has 5 locations instead of 4, and each location has at least one npc.
This should leave me with approximately 67 locations, 60 of which having at least one “common” person to interact with (shopkeeps, bartenders, guards, drugdealers etc). 36 important characters (faction leaders, high ranking corpos, sherrifs, etc): this + a table of random npcs/encounters, factions and faction conflict, and a table of secrets should leave me with 67 locations, over 100 npcs, some random encounters, and I feel that this should keep me going for at least this semester if not a few months after that.
Here is the general description I wrote of the city: B-N347H is the capital city of the underdark run by a superintelligence named Q.U.E.E.N. who controls the people with a tranquilizing mist. the surrounding wilderness is dark caverns and a sea of inky black tears, both are inhabited by dark and unfriendly creatures, because of this travel outside is dangerous but profitable when a job comes up. The city is generally safe but recently a drug called B0057! has been going around that can counteract the tranquilizing mist (called simply “tranq” or “the mist” by locals) thid has led to breakouts of violence scross the city. Perhaps the most potent of these being when a group of railworkers for “Ghostwood Shipping” went on strike and got attacked by a corporate hired paramilitary, fought back, and became the militant micronation “3ND 0F 7H3 L1N3”.
Crime is on the rise, the city is on the brink of corporate warfare, the oil that powers its technology is running out faster than anyone wants to admit, but still the days keep moving forward.
All that being said, I feel the urge to use this forum for my devlogs until I finish this setting, and then possibly publishing it if people are interested, would that be interesting to anyone? Is this even the right category to post this in?
Either way I’m excited for this and what I’ve got so far is really really fun if I do say so myself.
Good luck, man.