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+--- Thread: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution (/showthread.php?tid=19)
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Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - JimMonsoon - 09-22-2026
Very interested to check this setting out. Not that I will be trying a city crawl any time soon.
I think I can guess how y’all will respond to Electric Bastionland in this regard, but curious if any of you have read Andrew Kolb’s Oz which is his take on a city crawl. Very detailed, but maybe a lot of prep to reskin if you’re not into the specific flavor.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - HawkCohenDC - 09-22-2026
I thought the discussion of the distinction between prep-GM and adjudication-GM was very resonant. I have often internally thought about the distinction between prep-GM and table-GM in the same way and it raises the question for me of how much distinction there is between the two. It often feels like different cultures of play expect different levels of separation. This comes back, a bit, to the Quantum Ogre discussion as well as fixed-prep/blorb styles. How much do we privilege preparation or the labor of preparation over what the current mood at the table? I'm going to link them twice in the same post but elmcat has an interesting take on it here: https://elmc.at/fullstack-refereeing/
The other discussions resonated a bit less. The only city based gaming I've done has basically been "you're in this real world city circa XXXX" or "you're in what is basically the real world" which obviates some of the discussion. It is ironically much easier to mentally simulate New York (even as someone who only lived there for a sum total of six months) in a satisfying way than it is to do so for Sharn or Waterdeep or Coruscant. There are some interesting blog posts here that get at this but as foreshadowed, here is elmcat's, which provides a heavy procedure that does some of that abstracting: https://elmc.at/sandbox-settlements-prep-run-and-thrive/
I do think this is an area where having heavy procedures can help, particularly as put in the framework of abstracting parts of the simulation in much the way video games do. It's the attempt by Blades, by depthcrawls, right? No one's gotten it yet in a way that is satisfactory to the hosts (or to me) but some substantial amount of abstraction is necessary. It's just the balance between that abstraction and the inputs seems off. To me, I think the application of Fronts or a similar system could help here. Fundamentally that's what the innovations /are/, actually. But that may be one of the necessary tools to create a nicely simulated city.
Lastly on the prep and reading side. I would be very interested to hear from people what modules they have read that can be run without prep. I have had an acceptable (at best interesting, never amazing) time running pre-made modules without substantial prep. I agree modules require less prep at this point, but I still find that I need to engage with them at least in a research mode but I almost always need to adjust them for personal/table preference and world detail.
There are a cavalcade of assumptions underpinning every module and it often feels like unless it is a one-shot or the module is big enough to contain the majority of the needed setting, I'm doing a lot of work to align with the simulated world. It is (sort of) the promise of Paizo's whole deal with Glorantha and is one of the things they get right. There's a plethora of content for both setting and system. On the other hand if I pick up The Isle or Caverns of Thracia or Black Worm of Brandford and apply it to an existing setting it's going to be disjunct.
Misha said, on another platform, that a lot of the value of modules to him is the concrete legwork and intentionality. The map, foreshadowing and signposting, those are difficult parts of prep. I totally agree. But I find myself, quite often, rekeying rooms, adjusting treasure, or entering a research mode. I do not have the statistics for anything in my games fully locked into my head except for "normal man" types and every table I play at has house rules and cultures that require some revision to most monsters. I think the dream of a fully playable out of the box module is nice (or at least the just read/skim version) but even the quintessential "well made" modules do not reach that for me in a campaign environment.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - misha - 09-22-2026
(09-22-2026, 12:13 PM)JimMonsoon Wrote: I think I can guess how y’all will respond to Electric Bastionland in this regard, but curious if any of you have read Andrew Kolb’s Oz which is his take on a city crawl.
I do love EB, but it basically gives you nothing on the 'what do adventures look like' front. I still need to look at Oz.
(09-22-2026, 01:13 PM)HawkCohenDC Wrote: I think the dream of a fully playable out of the box module is nice (or at least the just read/skim version) but even the quintessential "well made" modules do not reach that for me in a campaign environment.
For me, I think the distinction is between prep that I can do and prep that I have to do. Adjusting to taste is great, but it's pretty opt-in. If there are big bits of information that are simply missing, it's something that I don't have any choice but to add onto my mental load--this might be something relatively simple and low-stakes like "what does the village look like as you walk into it" or something more high-stakes like "how many devils are in this room at any given time". I'm already spinning a lot of plates in my head when I GM, so I really appreciate it when the book anticipates the types of mundane questions that come up in play and has an answer for them--especially if they're tied to bigger subsystems, like treasure quantities, regional politics, or thematic throughlines.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - HawkCohenDC - 09-22-2026
(09-22-2026, 02:49 PM)misha Wrote: For me, I think the distinction is between prep that I can do and prep that I have to do. Adjusting to taste is great, but it's pretty opt-in. If there are big bits of information that are simply missing, it's something that I don't have any choice but to add onto my mental load--this might be something relatively simple and low-stakes like "what does the village look like as you walk into it" or something more high-stakes like "how many devils are in this room at any given time". I'm already spinning a lot of plates in my head when I GM, so I really appreciate it when the book anticipates the types of mundane questions that come up in play and has an answer for them--especially if they're tied to bigger subsystems, like treasure quantities, regional politics, or thematic throughlines.
I think this is a great articulation of that distinction and put in those terms I would agree.
I think part of what might be happening is that my particular feeling of what is needed varies from some folks. That question you raise of regional politics is a great example of something that a lot of adventures lack or that will necessarily be adjusted to fit any ongoing campaign. Same with how something looks, if my villages are a little less Dolmenwood and a little more New Sun, for example. Lastly I find that a piece of prep I am always doing is mapping relationships. Partially because I think that even when they are included (most adventures nowadays) they are usually presented in a scattershot or less useful way. For me those relationships are such a driver that I need either a deep understanding or a convenient mapping.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - KurlyJ - 09-23-2026
I honestly don't understand why the hosts feel that MIR is better for prep than BitD. The city info in MIR hardly ties the locations to other things in the group and mostly gives vague flavor. The NPCs it lists for the locations are often minor characters. (Give urchins, anyone?) And then most of the book is a series of tables, laid out in such a way that you can't easily find what you want. It also has lots of weird setting-changing bits spread out through the book, never brought together anywhere.
BitD gives you important NPCs and factions, tied to locations, and gives you succinct and easy to use tables about the setting in a few easily used pages. The weird parts of the setting are mostly summarized in places, so you're not running into details you didn't know about as you GM.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - sam_the_bold - 09-23-2026
Quote:I honestly don't understand why the hosts feel that MIR is better for prep than BitD.
So I agree that for sure, MIR is not genuinely ready for play. It still takes a lot of prep to get the book to the table. And I definitely agree that it's sprawling, and not always so well-organized.
That said, I still hold that MIR is genuinely more helpful for prep than Blades, simply because it includes more specific on-the-ground details. I'm thinking here of things like lists of prices for goods and services—including, say, attorneys, a thing I've often run into needing in Blades—lists of specific spells and magic items (compare this to, e.g., Blades's handwaving rules for rituals), the generic floorplans for housing, the rules structures for things like the Season and the Monarch and crime & punishment, random street encounters, and so on.
While none of these are quite done up to the sterling level of legwork and prep that we like best on the show, they are all a heck of a lot closer to being ready to go than the stuff in Blades. While I still need to situate all of these elements in my particular version of Endon (and do a hefty chunk of prep besides), there are lots of pieces here that feel like they are very nearly ready to go without significant further modification. Is there lots of cruft in between the usable bits? For sure. But there are usable pieces in there, and pretty decent ones, too. By contrast, most of the erstwhile content in Blades so zoomed-out and abstract that it requires heavy further prep to get anywhere functional. There are some snippets that are decent—I enjoy the demon-generator table—but I think lots of it is basically just lore that requires more legwork to be playable.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - sam_the_bold - 09-23-2026
Quote:Lastly on the prep and reading side. I would be very interested to hear from people what modules they have read that can be run without prep.
So at my open table campaign I've been running for the past few months, I run exclusively prewritten adventures connected only very loosely. Other than reading and taking a few notes, the only prep that I've done has been to draw a little overworld pointcrawl map connecting each adventure, and then stick 1–3 magic blue coins into each adventure, usually just in the biggest already-extant loot pile. The reading takes time, definitely, but otherwise my prep is effectively zero, like <10 minutes per adventure.
Here are the adventures that have gone well for us, where I felt like I was on top of things for 95%+ of gametime without doing significant improv or spending forever looking something up:
- Aberrant Reflections
- The Black Manse
- Beneath Harlowe House
- The Waking of Willowby Hall
While we haven't gotten to them yet (Black Manse is taking a while), here are some others I am pretty confident will also run more or less fine out of the box, all of which I've run before in one campaign or another:
- Secret of the Black Crag
- The Isle
- Kidnap the Arch-priest
- A Familiar Tower
- Mike's Dungeons
All of these are, obviously, very standard dungeon-y adventures: pretty tight enclosed spaces, limited opportunities and items, mostly devoid of complex social dynamics. Everybody knows how to run and play these, and while we definitely have had some very fun and memorable moments, it's true that they are, for the most part, basically just standard dungeon dragon affairs. But you can run them by doing basically nothing more than reading!
The big challenge from here, in my mind, is trying to apply this same level of thorough-preparation in an environment that is less familiar and constrained: mysteries, maybe, or navigating big social hierarchies, or going on long road trips, or whatever. Something that's still just as prepped and ready for play, but new and fresh.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - udupi - 09-24-2026
Walid's point on the temporal aspect of city play prompted me to think about how long it would take in real life to achieve a conceptual handle on a city, compared to a dungeon environment. If you dropped me in a moderate size cave for ~4 hours, I think I could come back with very actionable, detailed knowledge of it: I could map the area, give you a list of the main hazards, and have sampled a fairly complete list of the bugs/mushrooms/whatever lives down there. Compare that to spending 4 hours in a city: my map would be very rudimentary and incomplete, and I wouldn't have encountered enough people in enough contexts to give you a statistically significant impression of what the general vibe is like (if you live in a touristy city, compare how different the average tourist's perception of it is to your own).
It's fair enough that RPG city modules tend to have a very superficial and 'tourist's guide' feel, because even if the adventuring party (or some members thereof) are locals, the players at the table are essentially tourists. I'm not sure we should expect the RPG market to be able to innovate a solution to this where the financially better resourced and much larger real-life city tourism market hasn't come up with a way to give you an authentic but compressed city experience.
That said, I think this suggests some interesting avenues to try. The cities where I've had the most authentic experiences as a tourist are where I got recommendations from a local. Maybe a city supplement consisting of entirely of interviews with locals, tripadvisor-style rants about local businesses, daily routines of random people living in X, Y or Z district, would be a cool thing to have.
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - misha - 09-24-2026
(09-23-2026, 03:19 PM)KurlyJ Wrote: BitD gives you important NPCs and factions, tied to locations, and gives you succinct and easy to use tables about the setting in a few easily used pages. The weird parts of the setting are mostly summarized in places, so you're not running into details you didn't know about as you GM.
I largely agree with Sam here, but I do think BitD handles factions much better than MIR, and to be fair factions are probably the element of a city that play is most going to revolve around.
I also think it's important to make a distinction between book content that gives you the seeds you need to improvise play, which BitD is great at, versus book content that takes cognitive load off by answering mundane questions like the prices of goods and services, which MIR does way better. I actually prefer the latter approach (but don't begrudge people who prefer the first), since coming up with adventure seeds is the fun part of prep but thinking through budgets and street names feels more like busywork.
I do think that the "so you're not running into details you didn't know about as you GM" becomes a bigger deal in city adventures than dungeon ones, and is one of the core difficulties in trying to detail a city for simulated play (as opposed to just being a backdrop for whatever adventure the GM preps that week).
RE: Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution - HawkCohenDC - 09-25-2026
(09-23-2026, 08:43 PM)sam_the_bold Wrote: All of these are, obviously, very standard dungeon-y adventures: pretty tight enclosed spaces, limited opportunities and items, mostly devoid of complex social dynamics. Everybody knows how to run and play these, and while we definitely have had some very fun and memorable moments, it's true that they are, for the most part, basically just standard dungeon dragon affairs. But you can run them by doing basically nothing more than reading!
The big challenge from here, in my mind, is trying to apply this same level of thorough-preparation in an environment that is less familiar and constrained: mysteries, maybe, or navigating big social hierarchies, or going on long road trips, or whatever. Something that's still just as prepped and ready for play, but new and fresh.
Totally. I think part of the issue is that my current dungeon game setting deviates enough from the standard to need adjustment. But even so it's largely reworking treasure and replacing enemies with other enemies. More on the "an hour of work, primarily research" rather than "make a full dungeon of equivalent size" which probably takes four times as long.
And I anticipate some of the imported dungeons I've added to Hot Snack Island (mostly because I do not like the provided dungeons much when compared to the flora, fauna and factions) like Tower of the Plangent Mage, Aberrant Reflections and the Maggot God adventure I can't remember the name of would slot in more easily.
That said I do want to shout out a recent positive experience with running a mystery mostly out of the box. Rejection, a recent Delta Green mystery ran pretty well out of the box although it was missing at least one map I chose to put together between the sessions of the two-shot in which it fit. I agree it's a challenge to do those things and that the more open ended nature (similar to interacting with a city) means the mode of play can tip towards more complexity and become difficult to encapsulate in a single product.