#114: Stopping at Endon!
the indie RPG newsletter continues the journey from city to city
I. Dear Reader,
We continue our series, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities”, where we look at urban settings in TTRPGs. To learn more, read the introduction post. Previously, we looked at Doskvol and Spire.
Today, we look at Endon from Magical Industrial Revolution, written by Skerples in 2019. The book is about 150 pages.
Reminder: This isn't a critique or a review. My intention is to primarily just understand what this game thinks is important when it comes to building a city that is fun to play in.
Key Features
Endon is London but infused with the grounded playfulness of the OSR. You ever looked at a low level D&D spell and gone, "Wait a minute, if this is common, the world should look very different"? Well, Endon is the city where magic is taken to its logical conclusion. And that conclusion is that people start being really clever about magic and then the city blows up spectacularly. (The thing about magical cities is that they always Endon a high note.)
There are eight innovations being developed in Endon. Each one is an industrial contraption based on a spell that solves a pressing problem with city life: teleportation solves transport, polymorph solves scarcity, scrying solves law enforcement. But each one is going to grow wildly out of control till it eventually ends the city and, sometimes, the world.
The city changes as these innovations develop and the PCs are given very open-ended ways to solve it. And it is interesting how often these ways fall into two categories: one can be called an "adventure-y" solution (in that it feels like a natural thing for adventurers to do) and the other category is something like "join politics and try to enforce systemic change through the government".
The key pillar of Endon as a game world is clear: money. Every little thing in the city has a price, explicitly listed. Services, goods, everything comes with a cost carefully itemised and easily referenced. The copper piece, the silver piece, and the gold piece are the medium of play in Endon.
The big way to spend money is on magical doodads. This is the place to buy them, sell them, make them, fix them, whatever. There are random tables galore for spells, magic items, magic weapons, and so on. And these are not limited to old favourites, they're explicitly building on the canon and offering ways of combining and remixing spells into new and interesting shapes and forms.
Endon also has a very explicit class structure: the poor, the lower, the middle and the upper classes. Each one gets a page and rules for climbing from one to another. But like everything, this is “class as game”. Each class comes with a maintenance cost. For example: being upper class costs 138 gp a season and you need to own a country house. Fail to pay these costs and you might find yourself slipping down to middle class, and so on.
And as you might have expected, as an adventure site, it comes with rules for law enforcement, healing, lodging, weather, and transportation. There's a few dungeons scattered around the place and a menagerie of things to run away from.
Interestingly, there's also specific rules about mobs of people, how often they form, and how to disband them. Mobs are Skerples’ key tool for signalling the political destabilization of Endon. It’s very simple: if you listen carefully to what they're yelling as they break things, you might figure out what threatens to destroy the city this time.
And last but not least, huge random tables for buildings, encounters, NPCs, and rumours. The bread and butter of the setting.
Conclusions
Also, after reading three urban settings, it has become eminently clear how large London looms as the archetypal city in our imaginations. I don't mean as writers and designers, I mean as a society in terms of what we think a city is. London haunts the very concept of city and there's no exorcising it.
I find the eight impending magical disasters extremely interesting. They give Endon an energy that is mercilessly driving it towards a conclusion. They’re all over-the-top and a little silly but that is the tone of the game. I’m also fascinated by the idea of “doing politics” to save the city. There aren’t clear paths to doing politics though - GMs and players will have to figure out on their own how they want to tackle questions like that.
It’s also clearly meant to sneak up on the players. Initially, they use Endon as a hub to go on adventures. But then they accumulate wealth and start seeing the city as adventure in itself. Of course, it does feel like the city cannot really be saved. Magic is too unreliable, people are too greedy. In the end, the best outcome is probably that the world survives but Endon is a ruin, remembered only as a cautionary tale.
Yours industrially,
Thomas
PS. I’m not sure what’s next up at the moment. Maybe Hillgraab or City of Mists or Infinigrad. After that, I’ll throw up another poll to decide the next few candidates.
II. Listen of the Week
This is a useful talk about Writer Pay and Negotiations as a part of series called TTRPG Freelance Mentorship on Darker Days Radio. There are other episodes in the series but I found this one to be the most helpful if you’re new to being a freelancer in games.
III. Links of the Week
A nice helpful explanation of action rolls for Blades in the Dark that you can send to GMs who are struggling a bit to figure them out
AW Central, a free web app / VTT specifically for Apocalypse World 2e
A reddit thread on Fabula Ultima, the best selling game on DriveThru right now. It’s a good source of info if you want to get a sense if it’s for you or not.
Big, meaty interview with Sean McCoy of Mothership with a lot of detail into the business side of making games.
IV. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
MÖRKTOBER is here! Each day in October, make something for MÖRK BORG inspired by the prompts and share it. An item, scroll, weapon or anything else. Tag it #MÖRKTOBER2022.
This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.
There’s a quick deal for Monster of the Week, a collection of horror scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and a deal on Modiphius’ 2d20 system Infinity and Infinity Factions.
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
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"London haunts the very concept of city and there's no exorcising it. "
What an absolutely gorgeous turn of phrase. I visited London about a decade ago, and I remember thinking that it felt like a vampire, both ancient and modern all at once. This is a fantastic series, thank you so much for sharing it!
I know it doesn't QUITE fight the structure of the series, but I'd be FASCINATED to hear your thoughts (even just in conversation, apart from the newsletter) on how the City role in Anyone Can Wear the Mask factors into "what we talk about when we talk about cities."