Building Ardra, and the "because city" city
I've been prepping for a hexcrawl - well, a glorified hex flower really - to run in the Black Hack 2e. More on that in a minute. This post is going to be a collection of thoughts cashing out how I'm actually going about creating cities, villages, bandit encampments - the whole settlement spectrum.
A note on the coolness of the Black Hack, because I don't have enough for a whole post yet: David Black has a very cool vision. It's clearly influenced by B/X D&D and Warhammer, but there are subtler notes in there as well, like the old Dragon Warriors books. I'm also a fan of things like the Void, referenced in the creation of daemons and the random, twisted Void spawn. If you hadn't guessed, the Void is basically Warhammer's Chaos, complete with chaos daemons and chaos spawn. It's going to be capital-C Chaos in my game, the ubiquitous sword and sorcery kind, with some beastmen cribbed from Warhammer. Last cool thing before this turns into a post of its own: TBH has codified milestone advancement, by which I mean that the characters accrue a number of "Experiences" which they then use to level up by carousing and telling backstory tales, thus deepening their characters in proportion to their increasing experience - characters expand backwards and forwards in the Black Hack. This seems like another one of those things that was originally a hack to make D&D run more smoothly, but could also be lifted and put into other games - TBH is composed entirely of those (Usage Dice, anyone?). What I appreciate, though, is the codifying of what counts as an experience, which tells you, the player, what the game is about, something my Into the Odd game felt it was lacking.
Anyway, settlements.
I go by the Terry Pratchett model of settlements. Pratchett has said that he always felt the classic fantasy cities to be somewhat unbelievable and pristine, not like a messy, working city at all. I don't think that's entirely fair - Lankhmar and Tashbaarn wear their dirtier sides on their sleeves, and demonstrate the stratification in their societies. Laketown is a planned city, but we do see evidence of the commerce that helps support them. Minas Tirith is a bit of a blind spot... we'll get back to that.
The point is, Pratchett puts his finger on the fact that to make a settlement feel immersive and real, one good thing to do is show how it actually works - how the people feed themselves, who pays who's wages, and where all the dung goes. It's informative, when thinking about Pratchett's writing, to consider him as a player of ttrpgs - indeed, The Colour of Magic reads almost like a series of session reports, and The Luggage (capital T, capital L) is a magic item he once gave to his players to mess with them. Perhaps the reason Pratchett wanted so badly to satirise the fantasy classics is because he saw not just Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and all the rest, but saw them through the eyes of his players and fellow DMs, and saw what they thought were the important takeaways from those works in the campaigns that they created.
It's also possibly why his books concentrate less on epic yarns and the righteous stance of metaphysical good, and more on being so damned fun.
So I've codified the Pratchettian method of settlement-creation into two questions to answer when you create a settlement, as follows:
1: Why is there a village/town/city/encampment here?
2: Where does the food come from?
Not exactly groundbreaking, I'm aware. But the thing is, if you answer these two questions, you can basically extrapolate the rest of your city's features. For an extreme example, take my hub city Ardra.
Q: Ardra is at the northern tip of civilisation, facing the Chaos wastes, yet is quite a big city, basically surrounded by wilderness. So why on earth is it here?
A: It wasn't always a frontier city - it used to be a cosmopolitan city, similarly to Lankhmar, but inland. It's on a river, which provided fishing and trade [adds river] - as the city grew, they eventually relied more on the trade, with a city that was further to the north, back when the wastes didn't extend so far south. But that city got destroyed in the Wizard War [adds ruined city to map], the shock of which also diverted the river on which they traded - now it just goes into the wastes [adjusts appropriately]. Ardra, now the northernmost point of civilisation, had to take defensive precautions, raising walls around the whole city through sorcery, hence its appellation "the city of black walls" [makes note of appellation].
Q: Where does the food come from?
A: Ardra is now no longer a cosmopolitan trade city, and fishing can't support the whole city, so they sent people down to the south to create farming settlements, and to the mountains to mine. But this brought them into conflict with the existent farmers, and with the dwarves who consider the mountains theirs, so there's some tension there.
So you can see that from going "There's a city here", and then asking these two questions, as well as some following up of the answers, we've fleshed out Ardra from a generic fantasy city to a place that is at once opulent, faded, a trade city, a frontier town, well defended, and sliding slowly towards collapse - all in a way that feels like a natural process of evolution. And that might be the most important bit: Its character is changing even as the characters rock up there. It might not evolve noticeably in the time they spend there, but it will feel more like a real place because its on that path of evolution.
Note that none of this is about realism per se - it's about believability, which is not the same thing. But it's also about giving your players levers to pull. If you know the city's surrounded by farmland, then you know where to go to find a couple of rustic types, to buy a horse and cart, who to ask if the winter's been bad etc. Conversely, if the city's nowhere near any farms, you know they live and die by their trade routes, so you know where you can do some lucrative highway robbery, or, in an extreme situation, that it's that much easier to choke the city's supplies in a siege - you probably just need to blockade the rivers. And if your city is neither on a trade route nor surrounded by pastoral land... well, we'll talk about Minas Tirith later.
Note also that I'm not relying on a particularly deep knowledge of historical village planning or the feudal system or whatnot. That level of detail isn't needed to make it gameable and believable (besides which, I don't have access to it). All I'm doing is gently using common sense to apply pressure in some places players could, conceivably, ask questions.
There are three main answers you can give to the first question, "Why is it here?". First is because there's a river there, since that allows for fishing and trade for a small settlement, plus power for water wheels and the like. Second is for small villages that are basically clusters of houses surrounded by pastoral land - farmers need somewhere to live too. And third is because it's defensible; you can almost get away with a nonsensical settlement if it's on a hill in the middle of dangerous country. And note that two out of three of those already answer the second question neatly into the bargain, although defensibility doesn't; you still need to explain who bakes for your fortress-town in the middle of nowhere.
Which brings us to walls. Every fantasy village seems to have walls. Thing is, walls are basically useless unless you're afraid a) of being genuinely besieged by an army, which isn't a problem for a small village (at least not one that a few walls will solve), or b) of the terrors of the countryside bashing down your door and killing you in your bed. That's not a thing that animals do (and for various reasons you should treat most of your dumber monsters, cognitively speaking, as animals), and its not really a thing that bandits do either. If you kill all the farmers, then you can't rob them anymore, and people won't want to live within easy reach of you, so you've bandited yourself out of the banditry career.
The other thing about walls is that they're basically useless without pretty comprehensive patrols, and for a village of even a few hundred people to afford to pay enough people to take the time off from their jobs to stand guard against bandits isn't really feasible. So despite genre conventions, the village guard isn't really a thing. I don't mean by that that it's unrealistic and therefore bad - I mean it falls apart once players start asking simple questions (that they might have legitimate reasons for, other than being troublesome) like "Who pays your wages?"
On bandits, there are two types: Outlaws, and those perpetrating banditry by choice. Outlawry is a good, flavourful reason to be a bandit, and why bandits might band together. The Vikings used to outlaw people to the interior of Iceland, which was a blasted, volcanic wasteland - campaign inspiration for you there. But bandits by choice also existed. In fact, in the ancient and medieval worlds, most of these were professional soldiers, who saw robbery and extortion as an extension of living off the land in between wars. This is a flavourful way of tying the existence of bandits into actual goings-on in the world, such that it explains how there are ten or twenty morally ambiguous men aged between 25 and 40 living together in relative cohesion, all of whom appear to have their own arms and armour, which they know how to use and maintain. Again, this gives actual details for the players to get their teeth into - what you want to avoid is "because bandit".
The best way to be a bandit is by a security racket, extorting humble folk without bleeding them dry - again, the vikings, history's most successful bandits, did this on a military scale. The second is being a road agent, meaning accosting but not killing people on the roads, and taking their stuff. However, most bandits don't live by banditry, since its not all that lucrative. Note that neither of the reasons given above for being a bandit come down to "it pays better than anything else a peasant might be doing" (the professional soldiers option is because it's easier, and plays to an existing skillset). If you are doing enough banditry to make a comfortable living, you're probably making enough of a nuisance of yourself that someone's going to round up a posse to sort you out (then again, that could be where the players come in). Bottom line is: Bandits live off the land, not off the locals. Unless they're a recent addition, they're probably tolerated rather than actively hunted - any group able to rob and extort an area heavily, while also seeing off anyone hired to drive them out have basically become the de facto rulers of that territory. They're not really doing banditry anymore, they're taking tithes.
So, as a study in how to apply the two-question method to a problem case, let's finally look at Minas Tirith, the "because city" of cities.
Q: Why is there a city here?
Well... unclear. It's not in the middle of pastoral land - it appears to be in the middle of a vast, unused plain - and it's not on a river or significant trade route. You can see a river from it, on which sits Osgiliath. But that's miles away, and, if the movies are to be believed, there's actually no road connecting the two.
You know, the two most important cities in Gondor. Which sit across a plain from one another. Within line of sight.
[Sigh.] Deep breaths. Remember the golden rule.
So as far as I can make out, MT is where it is because where it is is defensible, being on a mountain. I say "on", but they've really built the city into the mountain, so it cuts through it "like the prow of a ship". I'm sure I don't need to go into detail about why being at the bottom of a cliff with the enemy isn't the best defensive position. Plus, they're on the other side of the capital (yes, Osgiliath is the capital city of Gondor) from the enemy. But they've built walls, and they seem to have a standing army, though how they get paid is a mystery, so defence is what we're going for.
Q: Where does the food come from?
I feel like we've already covered this, but apparently nowhere. All I can say is there must be vast underground gardens full of mushrooms and asparagus and other things that grow in the dark, because they sure as heck aren't using the Pelennor fields for anything useful.
Using the formula, we can try to shoehorn in some corrections. The best model I can think of is that MT was originally a fortress. The "prow of a ship" thing is cool, but smacks of top-down city planning, in that bad way that makes you ask Pratchetty questions. So we'll put MT on top of the hill, or in a valley. That makes some sense of its role - like Helm's Deep, it's a defence to which the people of the capital can retreat if they're about to be overrun. Which also makes sense of the walls, although the standing army won't be stationed there the whole time (in the books there's some more acknowledgement that the soldiers actually do come from somewhere, but the city still has a large contingent of permanent guards).
What we really want is something like in the film version of the Two Towers, where the movie spends about an hour, total, reminding us that, yes, the people of Rohan have a warrior culture and a standing army, of sorts, but that this doesn't amount to that many soldiers, and that they're not, by themselves, enough to hold back the tide of orcs - the people themselves are called upon in times of great need to defend their homes and families. Again - and I really can't stress this enough - this isn't just about that dirty word "realism". I don't care about realism, I care about genre. And I don't care about "verismilitude", which (sorry Angry) is basically a euphemism for realism. Okay, so maybe it strikes somewhere between realism and the Rule of Genre, but it still hasn't made the leap, quite, to pure RoG, which is what really underlies every mechanic in a (well built and well played) rpg. No, the thing I actually care about is caring, namely, about your players caring.
Nobody cares about the orcs in Lord of the Rings. That's not just because they're evil, it's because they're just evil - there's nothing else to them. They're literally the "because army" of armies (see how I'm tying this together?). And that's not a criticism here. Tolkein and especially Peter Jackson leverage that to present them as this unstoppable force that's un-care-about-able. Uruk-Hai especially are presented as basically mindless except where it comes to killing stuff. Consider that in Saving Private Ryan, even the Nazi soldiers receive some pathos - they were probably drafted, rather than having the noble goal of laying down their lives to stop an evil oppressor in a just war like the good ol' Americans (the film's main thesis, don't @ me), but they're still mostly just people, not murder machines. In LOTR, every bit of characterisation that isn't devoted to showing the orcs as deadly is devoted to showing how unrelatable they are (and how they kind of just love to fight in their spare time too).
In contrast to the orcs, we get loads of scenes showing that the peasants of Rohan are just normies who had to take up arms. It's that simple two-note NPC stuff; you show them in one scene that establishes what their ordinary life is like, what they want to be doing, and then you show them in another having to put that aside to do something they really don't want to be doing, but have to. We expect the because-army to be fighting - that's what armies do. They're living their best orcy life. But the peasant horse breeders who'd really rather be doing anything else, but have to grab an old sword and beat off a scary orc, that's what gets emotional investment, both in terms of sympathy and in terms of tension, the basic currency of any movie or rpg session. If you have a standing army of well-drilled troops with no discernible backgrounds (ahem, Minas Tirith), it's difficult to care about whether they'll die - troops sign up to fight, right? What else would they be doing?
And, to try to draw some sort of line under this, the same goes for settlements, characters, events, you name it. If there's no reason for them to be except for the story, if they're too obviously a "because-x", it's hard to feel too cut up about anything that the story might throw their way, since that's the reason for their existence. So even scratching the surface, just a little bit, of why people want to live here, why these guys have resorted to banditry, what they'd rather be doing with their time, all of that gives players the foothold and details they need to interact with the situation, but also the impetus to care in the first place.
Oh, also, where the hell the food comes from. That's important too.
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