Proposal: Thieves of Capitol
My first instinct while I was writing the last was to create games that allow me to both play test rules and develop parts of the setting through running games. This development is not merely geographic but also temporal. I think giving the players the chance to learn about the setting through time and space will give them cross campaign insights. For my part it gives me the opportunity to find the place and time in which they'll have the most fun.
Capitol: a City in Need of a Name
My earliest game 5E with the members of my current group took place in my home brew Nentir Vale setting. Nentir Vale is from 4E and much of the customization I made and shared poorly was a reaction to "Humans in Funny Hats" combined with the "Gods of Your World" section of the 5E Dungeon Master's Guide. Adventures on the frontier of a fallen empire are simple enough since they can be for the most part standard D&D adventures. It begs the question, "Why did the Empire fall and what was it like?"
The answers could be explored in the form of a lore document but I don't expect my players to be invested enough to read that sort of document. I believe it's far more rewarding for both myself and the players to learn about the Capitol through play. That means city adventure.
I am, for certain, intimidated by the idea of running a city adventure but, it could also be a lot of fun. To pull it off though I need a lot of advice. After some searching I've narrowed my basic resources to two to prevent analysis paralysis; "Cities of Mystery" and "Blades in the Dark". "Cities of Mystery" because it's a great city building resource and "Blades in the Dark" because D&D a city based game needs non-combat systems to resolve, suspense and so forth. Oh, did I forget to mention I plan for this to be a "thieves" campaign?
Planning Capitol: a City that Still Needs a Name
I glanced over a lot of wonderful advice from The Alexandrian that I'll probably return to but I'm often an impatient sort so I sketched out my own plan.
- Map the City
- Map the Neighborhoods
- Insert Important Landmarks, city buildings, religious buildings, monuments.
- Map the starting Neighborhood in detail.
- Actually write some adventures because that's the part the players actually care about.
- Name the City, don't forget to name the city.
That's basically it. I'll of course need to produce a brief setting guide since certain classes won't work in a thieving campaign. The players should also know what to expect in a game so they can create characters they'll enjoy playing throughout.
Adventures in Capitol: a Joke that's Getting Old
D&D is a great framework for general fantasy adventures but when one wants to run more specialized games additional rules are needed to reward a specialized style of play. Combat is the primary stressor for players but in a city with guards and punitive laws avoiding it would be the better course of action. So we need some a framework to for stealth based adventure design and a system for rewarding players for stealth and planning.
Fortunately some very talented people have solved this problem in the past. Let us therefore mine "Blades in the Dark" for that which we can use in D&D.
- Progress Clocks
- Downtime + 5E
- Laying Low - Reduces Heat but also Reputation
- Consequences - Each mission should have a fall out for better or worse.
- Gather Information - There's a system to remove player actin but I want RP here
- Perhaps have each player invent a contact at character creation. A fence, a talkative barman ...
- Rewards, monetary and reputation
- Need Reputation Mechanic
- Factions + Mausritter (maybe)
- Crew - But I want to make this an ongoing conversation among the players
And this is getting long so I'll stop here for now.