Cities of Phones

 So in a recent post I had some vague thoughts about laying a city out like a dungeon. This makes the city feel a certain way: lets you spotlight traversal, define areas and position them in relation to one another, use encounter systems to emulate a vibe. This city will probably feel busy, maze-like, claustrophobic and sprawling, with a stable concrete layout made ever-changing by its inhabitants and happenings.

But that’s not all a city can be. I don’t feel like I’m traversing a dungeon when I head out into my city. I’m not delving or dealing with encounters, I’m moving freely and easily. I don’t have to learn complex systems, I have them internalised or handled for me - I can roll onto a bus or train or DLR, zone out and my destination comes up to meet me. I barely think about where places are in relation to one another, except to decide if I should just walk or not. I don’t drive, so I don’t have personal dungeoneering costs or equipment to maintain. Apps and contactless payments handle my journey. It’s not a quest… it’s not a dungeon.

So if we don’t want to focus on traversal, or encounters, or even where locations are in relation to one another, how else can we define a space? And why might we want to, what new game modes or vibes could open up to us?

In that post I briefly mentioned a Big Thing I’ve been working on, so I figured I might as well share!

Short answer, it’s a phone book. d100 phone numbers, each with a location on the other end. (Yes these are landline phones, this is Mothership.) Players can use the phone network in-game, but also travelling around between these placers is just as easy as calling. It’s a table of contents, a list of locations they can pick from as and when they want. In the same way that I can just decide to stroll up the high street and walk into any of the shops in any order or combination, the focus here isn’t on movement and space but on an open and accessible list, the points without the crawl.

So here’s what I’ve been working on and a few things I’ve found out so far. Hopefully this is useful to anyone who might want to do something similar!

The biggest drawback as I’ve seen it is that you need all your bits written up front. In a big dungeon-city I can make one “floor” or less at a time, and expand as and when the players get to the edge of my map. Here, every phone number needs to work straight away or it all falls apart. I can mitigate this with generators somewhat - different reasons a number might be disconnected, “filler” entry tables. But it works best with a whole lot of bespoke, specific gameable bits, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve found it easiest to do what I normally do, small individual adventures, and mosaic those into a complete whole. So one phone number might have its own complete mini-adventure at the end of it, or one adventure could be spaced across a few locations that lead to one another. Each adds a little bit to the city overall, and while I prefer to keep things modular I can sprinkle in some interconnected-ness to keep the space feeling cohesive. And numbers can be reused ofc. I can also fill out more numbers with non-adventure-specific game bits, like some of the item-list vendors I’ve posted here already.

The space, btw, is not a whole city. d100 carefully planned locations is a whole lot of game for me to write but is maybe one road’s worth of landlines in the real world. So this is a high street, a typical commercial/residential space, on a space station to give the space clear edges. I’m folding in some of the “at the gates of dawn” setting stuff I’ve posted here too, but the overall size and shape is something like an airport mall in a Stanford torus.

That means I’ve got more than enough distinct locations to be getting on with, without overwhelming the Warden with millions of phone numbers and characters to keep track of. Keeping things modular in individual adventures with their own relevant subset of numbers helps here too. Also means I don’t have to write as much, so I can focus on those deliberately constructed details over generators to fill things out. Detail makes space in ttrpgs anyway. I don’t even have close to d100 yet and this place already feels huge.

So what kind of a city does all this give us, and what kind of a game? I’ll go into that next time!