09-29-2026, 02:16 AM
(09-24-2026, 01:06 PM)udupi Wrote: 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.
If you haven't read the Oz city guide by Andrew Kolb, it might be interesting. He uses a kind of depthcrawl procedure to give the experience of getting more and more aware of what is going on in any specific neighborhood.
Also, elmcat has an interesting blogpost about creating cities using NPCs as points of interest, rather than physical places. That might be similar to your last suggestion.