Building Lichtstadt City

I've had a ton of work traveling the past few weeks, which is bad for my blog, but excellent for my reading list.  Some things I spent some time looking at, during one flight or another, were different approaches to building a fantasy city.

The ACKS game (Adventurer Conqueror King) provides all sorts of guidelines for the size of cities, density, income generated for the lord, thieves guilds, and the demographics of high level characters.  There are other economic factors too, like the market type, equipment rarity, and trade factors that influence the cost of goods.

I read A Magical Medieval City Guide (a free pdf available at RPGnow) which provides a detailed walkthrough on the structures of real-world Medieval cities, both the power structures and the physical layout.  If you want to know how many buildings are standing in how many wards, or how many glove makers are in the craft's guild, this is the guide for you.

And then there's Vornheim.  Vornheim is a book designed to help you run games in the city of Vornheim, sure, but it's also a guide on how to run city sessions, on the fly, in your own sprawling metropolis.  Instead of focusing on developing background material, Vornheim is about presenting something interesting that can be used to create an interesting game situation RIGHT NOW.  Okay, that's more than just a little useful.  The funny thing about each of these city tools is there's virtually no overlap between them.

Lichtstadt is going to get the Vornheim treatment.

I also think the "tavern-trawling" rules from Backswords & Bucklers will see a lot of use.  Lichtstad is too big to be a home base, so making the starting place a seedy tavern offers a small-town experience in the big big city.

What's your favorite tool for getting a fantasy city ready for game play?  How about mapping - what do folks think of the Hexographer city tool, or the city builder for Campaign Cartographer?

I realize this is a bit introspective (nigh useless), so here's some flavorful background for the city of Lichtstadt for your troubles.  There are three vampire families that lurk in the dungeon depths below the city; Clan Metzger, the Machthaberkind, and the Draganov Coven.

Miscreants, ruffians, and common robbers are taken to the Doleful Keep for incarceration.  Very few criminals survive long enough to see their appointed trial dates.  Nefarious chutes and slides are rigged into may of the prison cells, dropping their inhabitants into the heart of an endless maze.  When night falls, the vampires of Clan Metzger enter the maze, assume bestial form, and ruthlessly run their human prey to ground.  Vampires of clan Metzger feature shape-shifting powers and beast-summoning.

The Machthaberkind have subtly warped all manner of social institutions, but none so great than the many hospitals that minister to the old and affirmed throughout Lichtstadt.  Black clad nuns, the Sisters of Mercy (heh), attend to the sick and dying, fitting hospital beds with clean linens and performing simple funeral rites for those who "pass gently" in the night.  Our Lady of the Blessed Slumber is the largest and best known house for the poor.

Vampires of the Draganov Coven are predatory loners, selecting victims through arcane prognostication and thaumaturgy before dragging them back to their remote lair for languorous feeding.  They're known to keep their prey alive as long as possible, incarcerating them as favored pets, thus postponing the need to consult the necromantic spirits anew and launch a fresh hunt.

A Primer on the Undead of Lichtstadt

There are a few ideas to dig out of the vault regarding the nature of the undead living beneath the benighted city of Lichtstadt:  Hellish Ghosts and Demonic Corpses, and More Hellish Ghosts and Demonic Corpses.  The ideas there are pretty simple; in the old AD&D paradigm, there are Lawful Evil undead that are associated with Hell, and Chaotic Evil undead that are associated with the Abyss. Summarizing the ideas from those earlier posts, wraiths, ghosts, spectres, and similar spirit undead are lost souls consigned by the power of Hell to guard or haunt a locale; ghouls, ghasts, and vampires are all physical undead cursed to spread death and destruction.

Once these relationships are established (and don't take my word for it - they're right there in the 1E Monster Manual in the demon and devil sections) it becomes easier to place the different undead in the setting, and tweak their powers to fit the themes a bit stronger.

Spirit undead attack the soul, and their primary weapons are soul-blasting fear and energy drain attacks.  Corporeal undead destroy the body, eating and tearing the flesh, draining blood, and leaching away physical vitality and strength.

I've already used ghouls as the backbone of a zombie apocalypse (back in the Gothic Greyhawk campaign) so I'm going to take them in a different direction for Lichtstadt.  Vampires will lose their energy drain attacks and rely solely on blood drinking.  The demonic alignment gives me some ideas to mull regarding what lies in the depths of Lichtstadt Dungeon; perhaps there's a demon prison deep in the dungeon, or a portal to the Abyss; maybe the ancient progenitors of the different vampire bloodlines have different demonic patrons (and thus different vampiric powers) and the sleeping forebears of the lineages are deep in the earth (like the World of Darkness "Antediluvians"); it gives me a lot with which to work.

Factions and allegiances are important tools in the megadungeon for the DM to provide opportunities for politics, layers of intrigue, and strategic options for the players; just this small amount of background above suggests many factions among the undead.  At the cosmological layer, you have demons that wish to destroy the mortal world and wipe out life, and devils that wish to corrupt and control the world.  Then the vampires themselves will be organized into competing lineages or bloodlines (perhaps with competing demonic patrons); within the vampire lineages, there are groups that want to maintain as much secrecy as possible, versus those that want to rule openly as lords of the night, treating humanity as prey and cattle. There might even be a few rogues seeking to break their vampiric curse or discover how to regain their human souls.

Besides the strong Law and Chaos aligned undead, there are "The Stitched" - golem-like constructs built through forbidden alchemy.  I like the idea of some nasty free-willed Stitched, genius-level monsters like Frankenstein's Creature, engaging in their own grave-robbing to gather loose parts to make stranger and more gruesome aberrations as footsoldiers and champions to prevent their original masters from ever regaining control of their wayward creations.  Lichtstadt Dungeon is going to be an interesting place.

The Benighted City of Lichtstadt

Ravenloft:  The megadungon

I hit a wall sometime last week; I've had some long days and work travel, the 6 year old is driving my wife nuts , and I got absolutely burnt out on reading history books.  I haven't had much time to write for the blog.   I switched over to reading some fiction, and I let my mind wander towards how my own "dungeon under the city" might look after ruminating over the last post.

Oh - before I forget - on the reading front; I motored through Jim Butcher's Cold Days in just a couple of days, and moved on to Chronicles of the Black Company.  It's super interesting, particularly because it's inspirational for how a tough group of D&D characters might operate if they were a mercenary group in a world populated with ordinary folks and a scattering of powerful characters.  It's not game fiction; you don't hear the dice rolling while you're reading.

With the oldest kiddo, we're halfway through the Earthsea trilogy (night time reading - I'm a good dad) with Elric of Melnibone lined up next.

Back to the dungeon under the city.

I'm envisioning the crumbling, central European city of Lichtstadt - home to corrupt guilds, blue-blooded patricians, and frightened peasants that cower from the things that go bump in the night.  Built on earlier catacombs and ruins, the city sits above a deep, sprawling dungeon where aristocratic undead vie for control of the various guilds and nobles of the surface world.  The sewers give way to catacombs and deeper dungeons where every figure from gothic horror gaming - stitched alchemical golems and undead, vengeful revenants; wrathful lycanthropes, and more vampires than can be counted, all scheme and lurk and wait for the sun to sink below the horizon.  Long have the erstwhile (mortal) rulers of Lichstadt turned a blind eye to the frequent disappearances on the streets after dark, and no one survives for long in the city jail.

The arrival of inquisitors from the great southern church to remote Lichstadt has upset the city's balance of power, and now manipulators meet in darkened halls to debate whether to move against the church overtly or marginalize it through politics and their human pawns.  But this much is true; the church has cast open the gates to the undercity, and it encourages any manner of cunning opportunist willing to risk life and limb in the sewers looking to pocket some gold while striking back against the night fiends.

Lichtstadt would require a serious overhaul to the standard D&D vampire.  Forget about the high level, energy draining monstrosities from the Monster Manual.  Lichtstadt Vampires drink blood through grappling and can die with a stake through the heart.  Vampires would fill a wide range of challenges in the dungeon, from bloodthirsty neonates that don't have many other vampiric powers (other than strength and toughness), to ancient vampire warlords and sorcerers in the depths that lead their own lineages and bloodlines.  Naturally, I'd raid the White Wolf catalog and create speedy vampires, shape-changing vampires, hypno-vampires, and so on.  There's something juvenile (yet funny) about taking all those World of Darkness archetypes and treating them as experience fodder for dungeon delving murder hobos.

If The Black City started out as Vikings: At The Mountains of Madness (before it went all sideways into gonzo sci-fantasy), then Lichstadt is Ravenloft: the Megadungon.  Parking this one in the The Junkyard for now, but my normal brainstorming notebook is quickly filling up with ideas for Lichtstadt.  It's almost too easy.