Cities are a great setting for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons adventuresജ, even if they have neither dungeons nor dragons. Human 🍃antagonists are much easier to create compelling narratives around, and setting your campaign in a single location allows for longer-lasting narratives with persistent consequences. Compare the traveling escapades of Star Trek Voyager and the station-bound stories of Deep Space Nine.
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Creating these types of urban campaigns evokes new challenges that most campaigns won't experience. If locations and💧 factions are persistent for a long time you need to play much further ahead around player actions: A singꦅle decision in a session can have consequences that last for months of real world time.
Work With Your Players To Include Their Characters
Certain game settings can exclude characters if the DM isn't careful. It makes narrative sense that the ranger's sabretooth tiger won't be allowed in most establishments, but that means they'll be hamstrung for most of the adventure.
Depending on the game you're running, this is going to be a process of compromising with the players' vision of their characters, the suspensi🀅on of disbelief, and how you design encounters.
For the example of the ranger's companion being left outside ཧconstantly, you have a few possible solutions:
- Provide them with a magic storage solution and accept that someone will inevitably make a pokemon reference.
- Give them a permit for the animal to enter buildings. If they're working with the city government, they'll be able to make it work even if some NPCs are upset by it.
- Hand wave the process for the sake of player enjoyment and not slowing down the game.
- The social part of an encounter can take place inside while the combat is held in a backstreet or sewer.
- Talk with the player and see if they're willing to shelve the beastmaster for another campaign and create a different character for now.
Make Use of Humanoid Opponents
An urban campaign is liable to have a lot of combat against thinking people. This lets the DM play with mechanics that don't appear as often when the party is slaying faceless abominatio🀅ns or wild beasts.
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New Mechanic |
Implementation |
|---|---|
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Reputation Impacts Combat |
If the party has a reputation for using certain tactics, they may 💎face en💛counters with enemies who have observed them in combat and can counter them. A Helmed Horror is immune to three spells chosen by its creator. By d𒁏efault, these are spells like Fireball but can also be player favourites, like Spirit Guardians. |
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Taking Prisoners |
Scenarios like needing to take prisoners, dealing with surrendered opponents and u✱nwilling combatants let the players use their abilities in new ways. A sharpshooter might not have a non-lethal attack by the rulebook, but you can allow them to intimidate an opponent into surrender by pointing a crossbow at a wounded foe. |
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Tactical Enemies |
Mindless undead and wild beasts can be rather easily lured into spells like web, grease, or wall of fire when most humanoids would circle around them or retreat until the spell expires. |
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Varied Ancestries |
Humans, gnomes, and elves are all impacted differently by spells and have acce♏ss to different weapons. This prevents your players from having t🌳oo consistent of a battle plan when fighting their way through the city. |
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Persistent Enemies |
Characters defeated in combat can reappear later as rivals if the players don't kill them (and potentially even i♚f they do). |
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Environmental Combat |
Players often forget to make use of environmental factors in combat. By having NPCs interact with the terrain or buildings encourages your players to do the same. |
Prepare A Variety Of Locations
Not every encounter in a city needs to use identical maps. Creating different districts for your city both keeps the game fresh and expands your world. Prebuilt cities such as Baldur's Gate do this already with the upper and lower cities, but you can use oth♏er dividing lines than class for how your urban environments differ.
- Gang territories with unique cultures. If you're fishing for real-world comparisons, you can have a city split between mafia, yakuza, and triad equivalents.
- Sections of the city are built by different generations of architects as the city expands.
- Sections are occupied by artisans, guilds, and merchant districts.
- City areas are built around geographic features, such as rivers or ley lines.
- Areas with a stronger presence from the city guards or private security.
You want at least one location to have a special significance to the players. A bastion, base oಌf operations, or the territory of a friendl🃏y faction.
Take A Few Trips Outside The City
An urban campaign is still allowed to travel outside the city walls when the plot allows it. If the city setting feels stifling to your players, you don't need to abandon the campaign concept entirely. A short quest to a nearby hamlet, trade ꦉroute, or diplomatic mission can break up the pace with some wilderness combats and then r൩eturn them to the city.
This also avoids the issue of the same city having a half dozen u♉nderground mega-dungeons that somehow never intersect (looking at you, Baldur's Gate 3). Put so♋me in under a rural noble's estate, or in a nearby hamlet.
External threats like invading armies and natural disasters are a good way of getting the players out of their comfort zone and into enemy territory.
There are other methods🤪 you can introduce non-urban combat encounters without your party needing to leave the adventure setting:
- Exotic beasts can appear in coliseums, be smuggled in by poachers, or infest areas as an invasive species.
- New NPC combatants can be brought at any time as mercenaries.
- Magical creatures can be the product of arcane research or science gone wrong.
- Extraplanar threats can appear anywhere at any time, so can make a good diversion during a lull in the action.
🍰 Dungeons &a꧋mp; Dragons: 24 Classic Side Quests
Take a break ꦡfrom your campaign's main story with t🎀hese fun side quest ideas.
