Cities of Rooms

Whew, things got shaky for a minute there. Just about levelling out, thanks in no small part to some fine folks offering work, so you’ll be seeing some cool new projects before too long. Thanks all.

Not much chance to go out and do fun stuff in July but I did catch a showing of the Cowboy Bebop movie Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. I hadn’t seen it not-dubbed before which was interesting, lovely old 35mm print too... you’re lucky this isn’t a film blog. Suffice it to say it’s a worthy accompaniment to the classic series, recommended. (Cowboy Bebop is my touchstone for Mothership. I don’t recall the exact timeline because I definitely saw Alien for the first time that year, but I don’t think I’d seen it when I did The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 - I had seen the homage episode from Bebop though. Anyway.)

In one of my favourite sequences in the movie, we see a montage of Spike doing some on-the-ground detective work around Mars’ Alba City’s Moroccan district. (Ok a little film nerd time - the production team wanted a vibe that set this place apart from their mostly Pan-Asian/European settings in the series, so they visited Morocco and it really shows. Some of the best painted backgrounds in the film here, and that lovely “real”, lived-in vibe that permeates so much of the show. And it’s all set to this, a great 00s-gone-old-school working class country love song, but in-universe! So good.)

Anyway, the next day or whenever I was watching North American urbanism videos on YouTube, which I do sometimes to feel better about my own life, and this popped up. Take what you will from the overall message but the bit about parts of cities being like outdoor rooms with buildings and other features as walls stood out to me. In gaming, granular city maps are often designed this way, but the real world context and application just connected some more dots for me I guess.

So what’s my point? Well like I said I’m hard at work atm, so I don’t have the headspace to come up with new examples for this post, but it got me thinking about laying out a city more like a dungeon. This is nothing new, but I specifically mean a MoSh city as a MoSh style flowchart map. Transit maps like the good old Tube are essentially circuit diagrams after all, and maps as a series of connections rather than a representation of physical space makes sense in a setting where you can just walk anywhere anyway (I have more thoughts on different ways to represent city space but you’ll have to wait for a particular Big Thing).

And if our districts and streets are rooms, and our flowchart lines are transit connections, then we get interesting choices coming up around traversal. Do the players take the subway to the other side of town or walk the whole way, triggering encounters? Does the subway cost money or have its own encounters, and how does that factor into decision-making? Are there places they’ve been told to avoid, and what will they see as they loop around them? If a place they need to get to is only two stops away, why not save on travel and walk, thereby triggering a whole other event in the spaces between? If they can find a way through the front of a building in one area and out the back into another, can they establish new shortcuts and routes themselves? What about transit strikes? (Great transit scene in the movie too btw, more inspiration.)

And that’s as much as I’ve got today. Electric Bastionland encourages you to lay out a Tube-style map, which is worth a look. And I will, as always, recommend Cowboy Bebop. tschuss x

Are you living in the real world?