#120: Trudging in the Cess and Citadel!

I. Dear Reader,

What do we talk about when we talk about cities? I'm starting to develop a good answer to that question. If you’re here for the first time, read the introduction post to the series. Previously, we looked at Doskvol, Spire, Endon, Infinigrad, The City (a|state), Eversink.

Today, I'm looking at Into the Cess and Citadel, published by Feral Indie Studios in 2022. It's a 288-page OSR-style setting book. This article covers all of it (except the bestiary). The objective of the Into the Cess and Citadel is to provide the tools for running a city like a dungeon - much like their earlier work Into the Wyrd and Wild was about running the wilderness into a dungeon.

Key Features

• The city in this book isn't named but at the same time, this book is describing a specific place. This is a place where aristocrats go headhunting common people for sport, this is a place where nigh-immortal creatures called Nobles do bizarre things in their towers, and where the city mutates the people who live there.

• Beyond setting, the book features a generalized procedure for running an urban campaign as a hexcrawl. Each 6-mile hex is a neighbourhood. And when the players are inside a neighbourhood, you zoom into that single hex and sub-divide it into sub-hexes. The picture should help. The procedure is interesting. But, of course, it relies on a system of meticulous time tracking where travel costs time and time costs money.

• The first chapter, Rules of the Street, talks about a few of the key procedures in the game. These include the rules for travel, shortcuts and traffic. There is the obligatory large random encounter table and some examples of the hazards of traveling. There is a section on money (very important) and faction relationships. There's a couple tables of ways the city mutates you (positively or negatively).

• The use of money is interesting. The price of everything in the city varies by the wealth of the neighbourhood - there's common, middling, wealthy and opulent. In opulent neighbourhoods, everything is 100 times the cost of common neighbourhoods. This ties in with the travel rules - the idea is that being stuck in an opulent district when you need to buy something is dangerous. So you need to plan your travel and supplies.

  • The book basically wants to make money an alternate form of hit points. Because running out of money will kill you as easily as running out of HP.

• Then, we have To Build A City, which lists out the procedures for mapping the city and populating it with features and problems. There's tables for streets, shops, and for generating buildings and stocking rooms with stuff.

• This chapter also talks about the factions in the city. The factions are divided into: those who rule, those who follow, and those who struggle. Those who rule are noble families, mage cabals, etc. Those who follow are colleges, crime syndicates, etc. And those who struggle are anarchists, artist circles, etc. There's a procedure to randomly generate the relationships between the factions so the artist circles could end up being very positive towards the crime syndicates and so on.

  • Each faction is briefly described with beliefs, structure, locations, desires, and what they can give you.

• I think we already have a lot of material in this book, toolkit-wise. But the book is far from done. After this, there are five chapters that describe specific thematic districts. Each of these districts has landmarks, encounters, monsters and loot. They're very effectively organized - each starts with a one-page overview that really captures the essence of a district before expanding into details.

• The five chapters are:

  • The Undercity, which is a lot like a traditional dungeon except full of normal people trying to live.

  • The Spires, which is the aristocratic district full of tall towers that you can break into and steal stuff. These towers don't have doors at the ground level - that would be too easy for the common folk to access. So you have to scale the towers to reach the walkways that are connect them together. Once you get inside, they're basically vertical dungeons.

  • The Cultivist district is a lush green area ruled by fae beings. It's not a happy place, a lot of people here are basically enslaved as gardeners.

  • The Foundry district is an industrial maze of heat and smog. This is where the capitalists employ free labour through completely above-the-table contracts. Good times.

  • The Archivist district is a place where all information and books are stored and guarded by crazed aberrant creatures called Bibliothecaries who don't like to share.

• The last thing in the book is a d100 table of locations that you can use any time you need something to describe in the middle of play.

Final Thoughts

This is a beautiful, creative book. Even though it isn't my playstyle, it's clear to me that a lot of care and thought has gone into it.

This is a book that wants to give you the tools to run a city as a dungeon and it succeeds. If you're ready to track time by the hour and gold by the piece, you have a procedure for turning an urban space into a gauntlet for survival. But it also strikes me that when you run the city as dungeon, the city can't be a home.

Like a lot of cities we've seen, this one is horrible and I can't see a reason for people to live here. Unless they were forced to! Of course, people could be being forced to live here - a pastiche of feudalism, capitalism, and an even worse countryside might combine to give you enough of a reason to dismiss the problem. But even if you dismiss the issue, it's unclear to me if the adventurers - thieves who steal from the rich and powerful primarily, alongside battling or running away from monstrosities - could ever come to feel any sympathy for this place. For example, you can have a hideout where you're safe but the fancier your hideout is, the more likely that some group is going to try to break in and steal your stuff. This is taut design but it's also a claustrophobic premise - a world without hope, a city without joy. I could see myself using a lot of the tools here but never actually running a game in the way this book envisions it.

Yours thoughtfully,

Thomas

PS. This might be the last installment for this series for the time being! We’ve covered 7 settings so far and I’m feeling quite sated. Actually, that's not true, I could do more… but I’ve been spending money buying games on this series and I’m starting to feel the pinch a little. It’s expensive to write about games!

Also, I might give it some time and do a wrap-up post that tries to capture all my lessons from this series into one essay. That may.happen next week or it might be later. But when it comes, it will be good!

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II. Media of the Week

• AA Voigt takes a look at new game from Caro Asercion, the creator behind i’m sorry did you say street magic. Their new game, Exquisite Biome, is about making up a weird ecology of animals and narrating it like a nature documentary.

• Also, some of the creators of a|state sit down in some beautifully weird locations and talk about the ideas behind the game. It’s a fun chat! (They charmingly call it a video podcast which cannot be a real thing. A video podcast is, in fact, a video!)

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III. Links of the Week

• Loved this write-up in the Jar of Eyes newsletter about Big Bad Con with notes on some panels like Pitching to Publishers and so on.

• I’ve started paying attention to tumblr now and here’s a nice post about the LICHES method of describing rooms - light, interactables, and so on.

• Theory post! Polish blog Common Fortress has a post in English that builds on Vincent Baker’s idea of RPG Essentialism, which is basically the idea that all RPGs are essentially the same game.

• I contributed another article to Sandy Pug School which is about starting your own newsletter.

• Technical Grimoire has an excellent post about online zine stores who will stock and sell indie RPGs.

• Polygon writes about Wyrmwood Gaming, the maker of gaming tables and suchlike, and how the lack of banking credit has made them lean on crowdfunding despite their size.

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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.

• Clever Corvids Productions are telling stories of crime, rebellion, and faith on their Forged in the Dark actual play podcasts!

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This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Two new bundles! The first is a collection of GM guides from Engine Publishing including books about plots, NPCs and more.

• The second bundle is called Cornucopia 2022 and contains games like Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, Wanderhome, Hard Wired Island, ARC and Viking Death Squad.

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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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