Ep 28: Magical Industrial Revolution

[misha]

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).