Let’s be frank, you don’t navigate a town — or a city — like you navigate a dungeon. It’s silly to do design your town that way. How do we facilitate interesting navigation in a town or city setting?

“…the reason we see tentative play in things like the OSR — where people are tapping around with 10 foot poles — or in D&D — where people are making insight rolls or perception rolls all the time — is because those games both have a poor way for players to extract information from the GM to generate certainty, which means that they have to play tentative because they don’t understand the world around them…”

That’s Sid Icarus being interviewed on the Yes Indie’d podcast. It’s a far reaching comment, and I’ll probably come back to it in other posts, because it made me think about how as someone designing an adventure location I can think about making it easy for players to extract information from the referee, and in turn how to make it easy for the referee to extract information from a written key. In the context of a town or city, I think that means how do I make the town gameable by making it easy for players to extract actionable insights from the referee, by making it easy for the referee to extract those actionable insights from the key and put them into the conversation. In this equation, you might say Gameability = Ease of Extraction + Actionable Insights to Extract.

Redirecting Rumours and Encounters

In a town — where everything is close together — you navigate by landmark and address — “go down Bosq Road and look for the house with the red door”. Of course, your town needs a vibe. If it’s an exciting town, you’ll need a random encounter table. You don’t explore a town for secret doors, unless you’re investigating a specific house or space. This means the clues regarding where to go, who to talk to, and why you’d go there, need to be provided through some kind of menu: A rumour menu, for example. The random encounter table and the rumour menu together are our first sources of actionable insights.

This is why I called it a rumour menu: Basically, you need to make sure that both the random encounter table and the rumour menu can be easily accessed by the players. Random encounters are just given to them randomly (obviously), but I’d suggest rumours should be also just given: “You get 2 rumours from a towns person each day you spend loafing about town.” You can roll to see what they’re doing. Maybe have every NPC give a bonus rumour. Maybe even make a PbtA style move about it:

When you’re loafing at the Harp & Harpoon, Roll 2d6 +Charisma. On 10+, roll 3 rumours and make friends with a faction. On 7-9, roll 2 rumours and make a friend. On 6–, roll 1 rumour and make an enemy.

You’re generous with rumours and tension encounters because we’re designing them to provide actionable insights and actionable insights are necessary for navigating the town. You want the town to be easy to navigate through actionable insights because it can’t be sensibly navigated in other ways.

Even a point crawl doesn’t truly make sense, in the context of a town — while you are (obviously) navigating between points, the way you navigate between those points is very different from the point crawl as presented originally in Slumbering Using Dunes. I don’t want to make up a name here, although citycrawl is how people will swing and it’s not accurate: It’s really an information-driven navigation system, a datacrawl. This is why you’re generous in both provision and design of rumours and random encounters — without data to crawl, you can’t navigate.

A city, by the by, is simply a bunch of towns — called districts — hung together. Each district has its vibe, and its own random encounter table. Each district has a unique rumour menu, but at this scale also each big topic has a rumour menu: Perhaps these topics are factions, or events. This is because factions and events are information that travel the city widely, rather than locally, and hence provide city-wide actionable insights. You might have them vary by district, however, as different socioeconomic groups may perceive events differently. Otherwise, design as per towns.

Reimagining the Town Map

The purpose of a map in both these cases is to provide logical landmarks in an intuitive fashion: If you go down Bosq road to the house with the red door, you pass the village green and the Bear-owl Tavern. Maybe you get distracted?

This means, more so than dungeon maps which are about practical traversal, town and city maps should be eye candy: “Wait, we walked past a bakery? Can I go in?” Stick it on the table for everyone to see, so they can interact with it visually, like you do when you’re visiting a town you’ve never been to. It provides us with an opportunity for the sense of discovery we get when we find the cute coffee shop lane, and provides another vector for actionable insights. The map itself: Data you want to provide to your players, so that have actionable insight in order to navigate towns.

Plotty & Petty Overlays

The problem with Against the Cult of the Reptile God, my own Hiss, and the recent Hungry Hollow, is that they recognise there’s another, hidden layer, but fail to present this hidden layer in a compelling or accessible way. The referee can’t extract the information (easily), so the players don’t have access, because in addition to this information-driven-traversal layer, there is a hidden layer, which should be visible to the referee, and that contains plots and social connections.

How do we solve this? You need to have a kind of map overlay, that sorts plotlines that overlap in terms of space, revealing where they intersect and how they change. This means I think playing with key order: Have locations 1-5 not be connected by relative geographic direction, but rather by plots or social relation. Now, plots can be presented together, as a unit — a single spread or set of spreads. This allows the actionable insights to be more easily extracted by the referee. It also means I can have encounter tables or rumour menus serving plot in certain places, if I choose to.

I’m also trying to intuit how to better incorporate petty desires — much as Amanda P lays out here —into this. Petty desires are kind of an additional hidden layer. Are they a relevant player of plot or social connection? Do they provide actionable insights. Oftentimes, for example in my unfinished Mothership module Tragedy of Grimsby-Almaz, the role they play is to provide connections to follow in an investigation. It’s important that so-and-so have a drink with such-and-such each Friday, because they’re the ones to notice the murder. But also, they provide meaning and reason to actions — certain people might put a bad tinge to a rumour because they dislike their competitor for the Biggest Pumpkin. I’m not sure if these belong on the character description, on the map, or on a social overlay, at this stage. What do you think?

But basically, this is something I’m working towards: Flavourful, engaging town maps, so you can approach navigating them visually as you do in real life, keyed out of geographical order but by social or story subcategory, in order to facilitate ease of extracting actionable insights from the world.

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