Charmonde Localities

Again, if you play Numenera with me as your host, Wednesdays at 7pm, exit forthwith!

Per the wilderness turn of the hazard system, locality events are mechanical changes in the area you're in. What does this mean for pointcrawling a city?

There are two things to consider - the scope of the locality event, as well as what it is. The scope could be the node the PCs are currently in. Perhaps a smallish riot breaks out, or a street play, which guards will try to shut down for blocking roads. Perhaps a literal fire sale at a store, a palatial parade. Some of these wouldn't necessarily affect an entire neighborhood. Some would route around through different nodes with (tiny) minds of their own.

This is also an opportunity to bring in Haven events as described in the system. So perhaps a bomb goes off and guard patrols become more common (and less likely to shake people down, as their coworkers are everywhere). Haven events will definitely affect every single node the PCs can go to in the urban pointcrawl. They could spur adventures and change the entire reason the PCs are in the city in the first place. The PCs might seek to flee the city only to find, in Charmonde's case, that its screaming walls are up and walking away would lead to death. Or in other towns, getting out has become onerous (not impossible) as the culprits could get away, or enemies are outside the walls, or the priests said the devil is bathing in the moat. It's not impossible to leave - it's just not easy. And finding a route out would be valuable information for many people in the city.

Haven events in a given urbancrawl turn should still be haven events. They should affect the city for weeks or months, and to make sure the entire world doesn't seem to be ending, they typically shouldn't pile up on top of one another every 20 minutes, or hour, or however often you roll for a turn passing. Winter and a jailbreak and an insurrection and a monster invasion is just too much for the tone of my game, but feel free to pile them up if fitting your own style. Personally, if I roll a locality event, and a haven event from that, haven events are off the table for the rest of my two-hour session. Probably for longer.

For Charmonde, my locality event table will look like this. Roll a d6 and

1. Bridge Slavers Student Festival - likely university students performing theatre, getting guards off the PC's backs, and occasionally making good anti-slavery points. Or just being drunks.
2. Crater Day - citizens celebrate the last defensive war Charmonde had. The reasons for the war and the source of the crater are contradictory. Food and drink are cheap, crowds are rife with thieves.
3. Nobles Duel at Pauper's Bridge - it seems like everyone wants to turn out and hang off the narrow bridge, watching the offended party and the offendor duel with smallswords atop the bridge's highest tier. Gambling and an unofficial pre-duel show of acrobatics and fighting prowess.
4. Royal parade winds through much of the city and every bridge. Dress codes will be strictly enforced, and waves of guards will pass through before the Queen to check for illicit speech or roguish characters.
5. The sonic wall misfires and no one can get into or out of the city for half a day. Anything that can sell out in that time period is going to sell out, and people will bemoan the lack of control their betters have. Quietly, of course. Rabble-rousing is a crime.
6. Roll on the Haven Events table. If re-rolled, the PCs feel as though someone stepped over their graves.

I forgot Charmonde's Patrols

I completely left this out of the earlier post.

The Guards of Charmonde

Numenera Stats:

Level 3 (65% of the guards)

10 hp, 1 armor

Level 4 (35% of the guards)

14 hp, 2 armor

Either groups armed with a club, and either a spear or a heavy crossbow and 20 bolts. In my game, NPCs armed with heavy weapons do level+1 damage or 6 damage, whichever is more. This gives NPCs a chance against heavily armored, mutant murderhobos. 

For LotFP I'd probably give them 1+1 or 2 HD, an AC of 14 or 16, and morale of 10. The lower ranking guards are clad in a soft, shimmering fabric that hardens when hit quickly (mechanics for The Slow Knife are left to you, dear reader). 2HD / Level 4 guards have the same setup, adding on breastplates of glass-steel. 

They tend to use clubs and attempt nonlethal takedowns of unarmed criminals. Otherwise it's spears and crossbows.

 In addition to their physical resilience and armament, Charmonde's guards are well-furnished with cyphers. For any patrol of 4-10 guards, 1 guard will have a pouch of 2 cyphers which allow him to cast Scan as a Nano - which allows the guards to inspect and search people coming into the city. As for the rest, roll a d6 for every guard.

1. Detonation (web), level 1d6+2, might roll to escape. (For OSR games, make a strength check. Players within the 10-foot range of the detonation could save vs. breathe weapons to avoid getting stuck, otherwise, strength check.)
2. Same as 1
3. Detonation (flash). Level 1d6+2. Speed test or blinded for a minute. For OSR games, a speed test could probably be a save vs device or vs magic).
4. Same as 3
5. Metal Death, level 1d6+2, foam spray. Covers a 3 foot cube, turns all metal within to glass. And not glass-steel, plain old regular glass.
6. Subdual Field, 1d6+3. Operator can create an invisible field within 100 feet. The field has an area of 40 feet. Violent acts within the field are impossible and the effects last for 1d6 rounds after leaving the field. Field lasts for a minute. 

I'd say for whatever system, roll 2d6 when encountering guards. On a 2-4 they're corrupt, pretty much there to shake the players down for whatever their Scan finds, willing to sell the PCs a pass that they've been inspected and aren't carrying anything too crazy - no WMDs or artifacts that will help the war effort. Of course, the price of such a pass is fairly high, and it's not for sale until the PCs relinquish any interesting cyphers, which will probably never arrive at the royal armory. If the PCs follow these guards and don't get made, they're probably taking the goods they've stolen to a nondescript house in the quiet Neighborhood of No Note...

Otherwise they're bored and by-the-book. The city does depend on people coming in and trading, so excessive corruption gets stamped down on. 

Some laws of Charmonde

• Cyphers and artifacts that can seriously help the war effort shall be taken with compensation, remediated via a receipt and a legal process that most people can't afford to get through. Cyphers that affect large groups of people at once, or that could level buildings, are definitely within this category; cyphers that give someone a few points to their pool or the like are not. 
• Only nobles may where pointed shoes.
• Only nobles may wear their hats tilted. Regular citizens who wear hats do so with quite a degree of trepidation.
• Sedition and speaking ill of the Queen is not tolerated; other forms of speech are generally protected. Of course, sedition can cover a great many things.
• Only authorized folk should enter the sewers beneath Charmonde.

Pointcrawling Charmonde

If you play Numenera every other Wednesday or so, over Roll20, with Charlie as your GM, leave now or forever spoil your enjoyment (maybe). (Hopefully not.)

Background

Charmonde is a city from the Steadfast, a collection of kingdoms in the Ninth World. It's very much part of the Numenera setting, but hopefully the work I've done to elaborate on it could be of interest to anyone.

It is a city located in a rich, mercantile kingdom, ruled by Queen Armalu, who rules from Charmonde. She is rumored to never leave her palace. Sealed within it, hidden from the spores and vagaries of the outside world, she is far older than any normal human.

So a ruthless queen - who treats her subjects decently as long as they stay in line. A rich kingdom on the edge of a series of kingdoms, getting into war footing with a group of people to the north. Armalu has asked for funds from the southern kingdoms to help pay for common defense; the southern kingdoms balk, figuring she's as likely to invade them as their common-yet-unmaterialized enemy to the north.

City of Bridges, City of Screaming Walls

Charmonde is bisected by a river. The city is as much bridge as anything else - six span the river, which is close to 300 feet in width. Buildings dot the bridges or cling beneath them. Temporary merchant stalls go up along the Merchant's Bridge, while taverns and coffee klatches cling to the underside. The Merchant's Bridge is all ancient glass-steel and stone - sun and moonlight dance through it. The Immigrant's Bridge to the West is a and the Guard's Bridge at the extreme East were made by humans of the Ninth World, from a patchwork of wood and iron. They are built to allow / force boats through monitored chokepoints, to ensure the Queen gets her due and that no contraband is brought into the city.

The bridges to the Empiternal House are a gilded metal that seems warm to the touch. The Poor Bridge is narrow and tiered, it seems to be made of living tissue. In places something like a pulse can be felt, and the tissues of the bridge can bleed, scab, and grow. Since humans have lived in Charmonde the Poor Bridge has grown at least 2 tiers, accompanied by terrible howling.

The city has no walls, but four towers along the periphery of the city can emit a howling, rending sound. When activated by Aeon Priests and Royal Wizards, the cacophony kills those who would enter Charmonde. The Immigrant's Bridge and Guard's Bridge are the closest Charmonde has to a wall, as they box in ferries and boats traveling up and down the Jerribost river. Guard stations along common roads into town tax travelling merchants as they enter, and roving squads of guards remain alert for those seeking to avoid tolls or worse, bring contraband or sedition into the city.

Pointcrawling Charmonde

Pointcrawling is an alternative mapping scheme to hexcrawls, and quite well suited to an urban environment. Not all locations lead easily to others, via well-known streets. I wanted to create something more abstract that a street-by-street layout of the city until I need such a thing, generating street layouts if needed via the urbancrawl rules Zak S created. 

So the PCs can, following signs and main streets, get from point to point according to the map below.

 Within a square, if specific streets are needed, generate them via the rules urbancrawl rules above, keeping in mind that the broad thoroughfares between points are generally easy to spot and follow.

Travel between points should take 20 minutes.

Travelling from point to point in Charmonde isn't the only option; it's possible for PCs to break away from the lines between neighborhoods. It just takes time and effort. Finding a shortcut between, say, the southwestern slum and the Noble's Quarter should be less difficult than a shortcut between the same slums and the Merchant's Bridge.

In Numenera's system one can have a level 4 Intellect task to find a path between adjacent but unconnected points. Skipping around the map should increase the level of difficulty; finding a way across the river without going over a bridge should require a trip to the sewers, which will be detailed in a coming post.

In Lamentations of the Flame Princess, anyone can search, as it should be, though not all searchers are created equally. The party can put forth their best searcher and let him or her search once per turn until a route between adjacent nodes becomes connected; for 'skipping' over or past nodes, make a test per node skipped. To have two people search for a route, the party has to split up, which could be problematic. The entire point of taking up the PCs time in the city is to potentially throw random encounters at them, after all.

Encounters in Charmonde

Use the Wilderness rules from The Hazard System - I plan to ignore rolls for resource exhaustion during the day. Roll whenever it seems appropriate - when the PCs arrive in the city, when they move into a upscale node, when they go something conspicuous. I know strict adherence to the rules of Numenera means the GM never rolls, but I feel like a world engine like this is better than GM Fiat dictating every encounter. 

So each <appropriate time unit>, roll a d6

1. Encounter
2. Perception of/about a potential encounter
3. Locality Event
4. Perception of the area / hints of a hidden area
5. Nothing / Resource Exhaustion
6. Lost - went too far or entered an adjacent node

Lost PCs with a map can probably spend a turn figuring out where they wandered, roll under INT+2 or (Numenera) make a level 3 Int check. Given the nature of a pointcrawl, getting lost might mean they get some kind of bonus for finding a path between nodes, if they started and ended in disconnected nodes. 

Getting lost may be getting into 'too fiddly' territory; I might let it happen once and see how it goes in play. Resource exhaustion, likewise - the PCs aren't really going to be getting exhausted from walking around, nor using up torches or supplies.

General Encounters

1. Patrol
2. More Patrol
3. Slave (escaped) who needs _________
4. Drunk students
5. Beggars
6. Pickpocket
7. A rogue who figures the PCs could help _______________
8. Noble and retinue, willing to ___________ if the PCs ______________ and are obsequious
9. Confused visitant, one of Numenera's aliens
10. Printer's Men looking for illegally reproduced books
11. Sentient Octopus in a mechanical walker, chipper voice from vocoder
12. Ferry worker looking to offload some ___________________
13. Fiery academics debating __________________________ relevant to the PCs
14. Prisoner transport. The prisoner drops a slip of paper no one sees. 
15. Convergence Agent
16. Angry Proselytizer of Angulan Knights, who hate mutants (everyone is a mutant)
17. Someone who seeks the PCs - bounty hunters, henchman of betrayed crime lords, old friend if the PCs have scrupulously avoided trouble

Cross out anything after it's happened once, other than patrols. The city is rife with patrols. For more encounters, I'd shamelessly steal from Zak's urbancrawl rules about Who Are You And Why Are You In My Way Table (Vornheim) - just replace goblins with visitants or sentient, chipper octopi. If people are fighting octopi, they're royalists convinced the cephalapods want to take over the city.

Locality events and perceptions of hidden node attributes are coming in a later post, along with Charmonde Sewer Generation rules.