This article features a sponsorship. It also features affiliate links which have no cost to you, should you use them.One of my favourite types of urban adventure is a survival scenario. I love running games where players are in a city or town faced with a military occupation, famine, natural disasters, uprisings, martial law, industrial accidents, or other horrible stuff.
Towns and cities are perfect for this because civil unrest and panic is inevitable. A chaotic soup emerges, one which PCs must fight to survive in.
We’re going to embrace the nebulous nature of a town or city location. This is code for we aren’t making a dungeon. So what do we prepare for a scenario like this?
Locations
Whilst we aren’t making a dungeon, it can be helpful to know about some important locations in the town/city. Things like a hospital, castle, library, or stuff that might be important in the scenario.
This map snippet from
’s Witchburner has an approach that works well, a few locations and a rough idea of how they are placed within the settlement.
Prep: Make a list of important locations within the city. Give them some brief descriptions and functions. Maybe draw a map.
NPCs & Factions
We want to know about the interesting and important people (or creatures) in the settlement and also about factions, if that’s relevant. They may help or hinder the PCs. They may become allies or enemies. NPCs and factions help the scenario feel alive.
Mothership’s A Pound of Flesh gives you this roster of 6 important NPCs as fuel for the space station’s increasingly tense environment.
Prep: Make a list of NPCs and factions. Give them behaviours and goals, the usual stuff. Work out where the NPCs and factions are based using the locations you made, or add new ones if you need to.
Three Weeks in the Streets
The Mork Borg scenario Three Weeks in the Streets (this week’s sponsor) is a great example of this kind of adventure.
The adventure turns the infamous Galgenbeck into a ‘prison city’, powered by copious amounts of top notch event and encounter tables. It has even got mechanics for a growing mob and escalating food prices all in a neat zine that will easily fuel a campaign. You can back it on Kickstarter right now!
The words above are my own and genuine. Elijah sent me a physical copy of this zine to look at and I was very impressed. I would 100% use this if I was running a Mork Borg campaign that was going anywhere near Galgenbeck.
Events & encounters
To make the environment dynamic and to present threats and opportunities to the players, we want some encounter tables and event sequences.
You can have encounters and events become more severe as time goes on by adding modifiers or increasing the encounter/event die size over time. You can see this in a module like Tide World of Mani, where encounters get more dangerous as an uprising gets stronger.
Check out these event and encounter tables from Classic Traveller’s Prison Planet module, that drive the whole scenario.
And this snippet of Lazy Litch’s timeline of events in Willow
Prep: Make event sequences and encounters. Consider having a mechanism that means they escalate with time or due to other factors. Link your NPCs and locations to the encounters and events.
Resource pressure (optional)
It’s not relevant for all games, but scarcity of resources is a great way to get players to engage in the situations occurring in a settlement. They can’t just wait out this situation if they are going to starve. It also makes players’ decisions more tense as they struggle to manage supplies.
Prep: Consider adding in resource pressures to the scenario to incentivise players to engage in the situation.
Round up
Here’s your prep checklist:
Important locations - know roughly where they are.
Important NPCs & factions - flesh them out and work out where they are based.
Encounters and events - consider how they escalate.
Consider adding a resource pressure to push players to action.
Check out Three Weeks in the Streets for a top tier city module for Mork Borg!
And Lazy Litch has a super big sale on itch right now, as if the stars couldn't become more aligned!
Great article about creating interesting scenarios in a town or city.