The Misadventures of Hareng Rouge

Pavements and Princes is the original project I had in mind when I first thought  of this blog. Pavements and Princes is a project to develop a system agnostic ruleset for generating and operating urbancrawls as a sandbox campaign. I’d like to be able to support someone running a West Marches style hexcrawl campaign or a Barrowmazes dungeoncrawl style campaign in a city. I was tempted to call it Easthome. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps one day my sons and brothers will. What I think makes this different from Dungeon 11001 and Hexnut is that I don’t think a fully worked up set of processes exist for urbancrawls. They are the most under developed of the three milieu. Let’s see if that is a problem with the author or the material.

This whole conundrum was kicked off by reading this post by Justin Alexander at the The Alexandrian. He talks about some earlier work on game structures. It’s from ten years ago and I’ve been thinking about it for maybe five years.

Alexander describes a crawl thus

Let’s take a moment to review the characteristics of a ‘crawl (based on our analysis of the dungeoncrawl and hexcrawl):
It uses a map with keyed locations. (This provides a straight-forward prep structure.)
Characters transition between keyed locations through simple, geographic movement. (This provides a default action and makes it easy to prep robust scenarios.)
There’s an exploration-based default goal. (This motivates player engagement with the material and also synchronizes with the geographic-based navigation through the scenario.)
Characters can engage, disengage, and re-engage with the scenario. (You can go into a dungeon, fight stuff for awhile, leave, and when you come back the dungeon will still be there.)
This fourth property appears to exist because:
(A) Material within the ‘crawl structure is firewalled. (In general, area 20 of a dungeon isn’t dependent on area 5.)
(B) The default goal is holographic. (You can explore some of the wilderness or get some of the treasure and still feel like you’ve accomplished something.)
(C) The default goal is non-specific. (You can get a bunch of treasure from Dungeon A then get more treasure from Dungeon B and still be accomplishing your goal of Getting Lots of Treasure.)
(D) The default goal isn’t interdependent. (You can clear the first half of a dungeon and somebody else can clear the second half. By contrast, you can’t solve the second half of a mystery unless you’ve got the clues from the first half.)

https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36473/roleplaying-games/thinking-about-urbancrawls

Dungeoncrawl as a concept is well understood. Lots of examples exist. Lots of resources exist to help you design or procedurally generate your own.

Hexcrawl as a concept is also understood. There are many adventures which are structured as hexcrawls. Toolkits exist to design, run or generate them.

They have their own entries on Wikipedia.

Urbancrawl is more elusive. An urbancrawl is not a series of smaller dungeons set in a city. Perhaps it is not a series of other types of adventure set in the same city one after the other or in parallel.

It might be that the core structures of a crawl, a default action and a default goal which are interesting in a fantasy table-top role playing game just don’t work with the fundamental nature of a city. Cities are safe places. Cities are a human technology that enables large numbers of humans who do not know each other to co-habit and to exchange goods and services. You can’t murder-hobby your way around a city in the same way you can a large dungeon in a wilderness. If you leave bodies behind you as you navigate a city you’ll get charged with littering.

So Pavements and Princes is my attempt to explore what an urbancrawl would look like, and even if I think it could exist.