09-24-2026, 01:06 PM
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.
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.