Urban Geomorphs: Common Quarter Block 3 and 4 (PDF)

This Map Monday, I have not one, but two new Last-Minute GM Urban Geomorphs for the Common Quarter: Block 3 and Block 4. Both are still mostly common laborers, although in Block 4, there’s a craftsperson of one kind or another.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the future of the urban geomorphs. Although unique places, merchants, and inns still make a lot of sense, if you are reusing city blocks for the residential areas – the intention of the series – you’ll wind up with a lot of repetitive intrigues going on. Part of this is because we aren’t mixing and matching houses from different blocks.

Now, you could do exactly that: swap the description of a house in one pamphlet with one from another pamphlet. But that leads to some handling problems. But I think I have a solution to make the residential areas work better, one that actually involves something I’m already kind of doing.

More on that in a future post.

Urban Geomorphs: Stables 2/Common Quarter 2 (PDF)

Map Monday this week is another Last-Minute GM Urban Geomorph. Or rather, not one, but two! Urban Geomorphs: Stables 2, for a larger stable than seen in Stables 1. Room for ten horses! Or giant horned jackals, or some other mount! For this geomorph, there’s only one house. The stablemaster doubles as the farrier. The second is Urban Geomorphs: Common Quarter Block 2. More common laborers for your enjoyment!

I have to fix one or both of the first two urban geomorphs, because I found some errors. I may also post some new thoughts I have about urban geomorphs sometime later this week.

Urban Geomorphs: Stables 1 (PDF)

Here’s a bonus urban geomorph pamphlet for the week: Urban Geomorphs: Stables 1, the one I hinted at yesterday. I wanted to show the difference between a residential block and a shops and services block. There would be one other kind of block, of course: a unique feature. Residential and commercial blocks can be reused within a single town or city, but unique features can only be used once each per city. (We’ll have to see if I can inject enough randomness to allow unique features to be reused in other cities…)

I also updated the common quarter block 1 geomorph. There was an error in the Random Personal Info and Quirks section: the last two entries can be repeated. This is why I used a “checked box” for those two lines and an “unchecked box” in the first four entries. You can mark an “X” in an unchecked box when it’s been used.

An aside: I hope everyone understood how those quirk lists are supposed to work. Roll a d6. Count from the first entry, skipping entries that have already been used. In other words, if the result is a 1, use the first unused entry, if it is 2, use the second unused entry. If the result of the roll is more than the number of unused entries, use the last entry.

There will, of course, be more urban geomorphs. And I was discussing with Scott Anderson in the comments what other accessories I might make to go along with these geomorphs.

Urban Geomorphs: Common Quarter Block 1 (PDF)

This week’s Map Monday is an urban geomorph, a town or city block usable in any map. Behold! Last-Minute GM Urban Geomorphs: Common Quarter Block 1. I’ve been working on this since before I posted the review and discussion of Lankhmar, City of Adventure.

My thought process was this: when I was doing the Instant Village series of pamphlets, I tried to do a town (Revelode) and mentioned then that I noticed a problem: the pamphlet format is just too tight a space for a town map, let alone a city map. If I insisted on doing towns and cities in the pamphlet format, I’d have to split the map across several pamphlets.

Which is when I though of Lankhmar and its geomorphs. One of the problems I had with Lankhmar was that I thought there weren’t enough geomorphs. There’s only twelve. That lead to the idea: “Why not do more geomorphs for Lankhmar or a similar city?” And that in turn lead to: “Why not do each geomorph as a pamphlet, so that a GM could randomly pull a pamphlet out and use that for unique locations in a city?”

The pamphlet uses several random rolls to make the geomorph reusable. There’s a random jobs table specific to this city block (everyone’s a simple laborer.) The head of the household’s name is random, as are the number of additional people living in a household. In addition to the built-in randomness, the GM can always ignore the map key and use the map for another city block with no special encounters or custom encounters they write themselves.

There will be more urban geomorphs. I will also continue the Instant Village series, focusing on villages and hamlets there instead of towns.