Where Lies the Tabletop's City?

Lately I’ve been really feeling the city. But I haven’t been playing it, and not really for a lack of trying.

The Quinns Quest review of Stonetop has me thinking: why don’t I have a tabletop game that really sells the fantasy of the city-dweller? Stonetop really nails a lot of what I’d want out of a rural hinterlands fantasy: the feeling that the village really depends on you, deep situation into the ecology, a sense of pervading unknown and menace beyond the horizon. It makes good on a fantasy that a lot of D&D clones (and campaigns) flail at with lesser success. What I want, and can’t seem to lay my hands on, is the Stonetop of the city.

Partly this is the stranglehold faux-Medievalism and crypto-Westerns have on the hobby, especially its more adventure-forward, simulationist side. Nothing stops me from playing the concrete jungle in Microscope or Ribbon Drive or Spindlewheel; conversely nothing supports me either. There are “no adventures in civilized lands” in the West Marches (creeping cowboyism!), and running the entire city as one continuous dungeon as in Electric Bastionland sounds exhausting.

This lack-of-city isn’t a phenomenon unique to the tabletop. Wander through the alleys of Dark Souls’s Undeadburg or the marble halls of its lost city Anor Londo; sneak through the plague-emptied streets of Dishonored’s Doskvol; or run-and-gun down the barren streets of post-apocalyptic America in the Fallout series or The Division. In none of them will you find a city, only ruins thereof. Video games often glance away even when ostensibly set in a city.

Some games take place in little pockets of an implied urban landscape: the Sapienza level in Hitman, or the manors of the Aelfir in Spire: The City Must Fall. To me, this still isn’t the city. The caper turns a dungeon-crawler’s mindset onto a modern street grid, whether the players take the role of thieves or assassins or some other crook. The core structure still works if (as in some of Hitman’s other levels) the target is transported to a rural villa. So the set dressing is a city, but the bones are otherwise.

The same goes for a mere hub that’s got skyscrapers dropped in it.

Fundamentally the issue is one of scale and scope. A city is… big! It sprawls, it towers, it connects deeply and thinly and strangely. It’s full of people, and making people up is expensive and difficult.