The City I Live In, The City of Angels

I am pretty sure I remember the first time I noticed an urban setting in media. It was a film shown on RTÉ (Ireland’s national TV station) sometime around 1984, and it was a pirate base. It might have been in the Pippi Longstocking film Pippi in the South Seas, but that’s now so obscure that I can’t find stills from it to confirm or deny. I got some impression from it of secret passages, winding stairways, balconies, small rooms put to odd uses, bits of ships built into buildings, and doors and platforms that opened directly onto water. I spent some years constructing Lego settlements that met these requirements.

The next major influence was a documentary about Kowloon Walled City, which was probably the BBC one from 1980. The journalist involved was not impressed with the place, and made this clear, with phrasing like “many of the squalid little factories in this festering slum…”, but I was fascinated; this was a whole city with all the functions of a city inside what was effectively one huge building.

I lose track of sequence after that, but those two have been major influences on what my concept of a city in fantasy is, or should be like, ever since. There are, of course, plenty more, although now the concept of a fantasy pirate base that looks like Kowloon Walled City is stuck in my head. Future players will probably not thank me for that.

Let me try to gather a few more things that have fed into the concepts of fantasy cities in my head. Kilkenny, which is one of Ireland’s smaller cities, is one of them; there are medieval bits of it, and a lot of ecclesiastical stuff in the areas I was in in my teens. Edinburgh, which I didn’t see until I was about twenty, but which immediately settled into my brain as though it had been there for ever. Planescape’s Sigil and the Rock of Bral from Spelljammer. The City Forever from Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia books. Blacksand, from Advanced Fighting Fantasy. Neal’s Yard in London (again, not seen until my 20s, but thoroughly settled in nonetheless) and various other bits of London (Seven Dials, Covent Garden, Greenwich). Oddly, Dublin isn’t really on the list; it’s entirely too prosaic and ordinary to make the jump into the fantastic, although a few of the 90s-and-early-2000s markets like Mother Redcap’s and Blackberry Fair made it in.

Anyway. Cities have always featured in my games. They’re not always where the action is, but they’re the places the player characters go to find information and help, to buy and sell things, and to some degree, to advance the narrative. I’ve always had a clear idea of what the cities look and feel like. This is, of course, a huge advantage of the one-writer homebrew setting; if I decide that the city of Tilir Mare is going to be like 19th century Amsterdam, but with an ongoing struggle between various temples for influence over the city, I can do that. Moreover, I can do that without saying it to anyone, and it remains true.

Waterdeep, on the other hand, has been everyone’s concept of somewhere, and comes out as nobody’s concept of anywhere, really, except that everyone knows that plenty of weird stuff happens there, and nobody is much surprised by it. There are maps that detail the place down to the level of every building, and that is where the various RPG city supplements and I part ways.

(Waterdeep, by Vincent Proce)

(For much of this, I am addressing a product that may exist only in my head. I don’t know if modern RPG settings do the detail-right-down-to-the-building-level thing anymore, and I’m not awfully certain if they ever did. But in my head, that was a thing, and I’m pretty sure it was in reality too, because I tried to emulate it when I was first creating cities for my games.)

I have a few objections to this. First, fantasy city maps are terrible, and most people have no idea how many people should be in a given place. Many fantasy “cities” are not much more than large villages when you work out the population, and yet they seem to have hundreds of people at the level of nobility and rich merchantry. Their economies are mad, even when you take into account that there’s magic messing them up all over the place. You can get away with this if you have some room for hand-waving. But if you detail every building, and very few of the buildings are “Slum, about 40 people living here, one family per room”, then your city’s population drops to very strange levels. Efforts to apply “realistic” distribution of wealth, or occupations, or the like, make things even weirder, because when you have made 40% of the city slums, you have to wonder who the three rival magic shops are selling to, and how the city can support even a few bards, let alone several colleges of them, and holy shit, where are the twenty-five different temples getting the money to even stay open?

Now, I love drawing town and city maps. I make a lot of them. But I have learned, from having conversations like this with myself, that I need to not try to draw the whole city. I draw the central areas, and I leave buildings trailing off the edge, and I tell myself - and the players, when they care - that there are outskirts of the city for some further distance, and that it trails off into surrounding villages and farms. Because if I want my high fantasy settings - and I do - I definitely cannot be obsessive about the detail. I worked through the economics of it once, because I was feeling stubborn. The actual calculations are somewhere in the archive of thousands of pages of notes sitting in the attic, but they came to the conclusion that in order to support the college of wizardry I had in mind for the city of Velarin, plus a few dozen temples, plus a tavern where undead-hunters hung out, plus whatever other groups and details I had in there, it would need to be about the size of modern Manchester, and that my hand was going to fall off well before I could map a city that size. Also, the players were never going to be able to engage with more than a tiny percentage of it, in a similar manner to the how they can’t engage with more than a tiny percentage of, well, Manchester.

So Velarin has its map, and its walls, and there are *mumble* kilometres of hinterland of villages and farmland that support it, and it’s all “the city”, even though the walled, interesting bit is about one-twentieth of the whole thing. And it’s a bit like London, and a little bit like Galway, and for reasons of narrative, it has a remarkably high literacy rate, and thereby more bookshops than is really reasonable, so there’s an element of Hay-on-Wye about it too.

And Greth is more like Stockholm, or maybe 19th/early 20th century St. Petersburg, if Stockholm and St. Petersburg had carved wooden animals all over the place, as doorposts and lintels and windowsills and guttering. And Sommerport is a sleepy port town, so maybe Yarmouth or Waterford or somewhere like that, but with better insulation because the winters are fierce, so a touch of Bergen, say.

And there’s room there to handwave, and say “yeah, the city is crowded, but most people seem pretty cheerful”, or “the streets are empty, and the buildings are run-down”, and that’s nearly as much description as you need. Because it turns out that for all the effort we put into the creation of cities, the way that this comes across in play is almost always to do with the encounters we run there. And that’s wholly and completely another topic.

Drew.