Nick Weyr’s Cityscapes is a setting with urban fantasy’s dichotomy
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Nick Weyr’s supplement Cityscapes expands on the world of The Gloaming Diaries, a tabletop game where players balance human and fae interests in small towns. In Cityscapes, Nick brings that kernel of setting into cities in order to tell stories of denser populations, new technologies, and different challenges than magical creatures have faced in small towns.
How long have you been making games?
I’ve been making tabletop games for about a year now — Cityscapes was my first project that I managed to release, but I have a couple of plans for some upcoming new projects, one of which is another fanmade supplement called undergrowth which complements the already published Cityscapes.
What tools do you like to use?
I’ve been using The Gloaming Diaries framework — that is, the mechanics in said book for a bunch of my projects, but more recently I’ve been looking at Powered By The Apocalypse as well as Fate for systems that I can take apart for mechanics. I’ve also been skimming a couple of D&D wikis for ideas and general frameworks, but that’s more hit or miss.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
Fantasy. Scifi is fun and all but I feel fantasy’s easier to digest. Not everyone’s a nerd, but everyone’s dreamed of dragons and fairy tales at some point. In particular I like to get into the gritty nuances of having magic be an established part of a setting’s universe and how a world is shaped by the presence of magic and the supernatural. Thematically, I enjoy delving into concepts like fate, personhood, and the cycle of life and death. I haven’t gotten to play with those concepts quite yet in all my published games, but I have a couple projects that should touch on those topics in the future.
“The city is mankind’s bastion, but in certain liminal spaces it belongs to the supernatural.”
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
My favorite part about making games is honestly the writing — I get too into the process and end up with much more text than I expected. I had to decrease the wordcount of Cityscapes for lore and exposition after Ihad finished my first draft. My least favorite part of making games is putting it all together. I’m no graphic designer, and formatting it all together gave me much more headaches than actually creating the content for the game.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
There’s this small little indie card game called The Land Of Glass that I liked. It’s a major slog to go through, but I liked the character driven kind of story it wanted to tell, even if the game itself wasn’t done the best way. If you remove the annoying bits of the experience, it becomes an interesting character study. Though playing the game four times to experience the complete story was a bad choice in my opinion.
Cityscapes is a supplement to the game The Gloaming Diaries. What do you like about that game, and how did you decide to expand on its world?
There are quite a few things that the system provides — though I might be biased in this front, since this game is the whole reason I got into tabletops in the first place. The system itself is quite simple — simpler that Fate/Accelerated, which is already a pretty simple version of Fate. A new player can pick up most of the mechanics in about an hour with some help.
Another thing that really resonated with me is how much is left for the enterprising GM to create and change if they want to. While there are canonical bits of lore and characters sprinkled in the core module, this information can be disregarded if a GM wants to tell a different story. You want urban fantasy? Medieval conquest? A possible look into an advanced future? With a bit of fine tuning and some creativity you’ll be able to run those kinds of games with this system.
I decided to expand upon the world of The Gloaming Diaries because I wanted more urban fantasy. While I am a fan of the general aesthetic and the ideas inherent in small towns, I felt that it limited the potential plot hooks a bit. Moving the focus to cities and the larger, more bustling atmosphere allows more potential scenarios to be made based on the fact the setting is now in the city.
The Gloaming Diaries highlights how magical creatures must work while blending in, but the urban setting of Cityscapes turns that conflict up. What do you think is so compelling to us about urban fantasy?
Dichotomy. City of Mist did this beautifully, but I want to reiterate the point. The pushing and pulling between the mundane and the magical can serve as the best kind of internal conflict for a tabletop — moreso if it’s a natural progression of a character and not something completely bound by numbers or rolls. The city is mankind’s bastion, but in certain liminal spaces it belongs to the supernatural. There are opportunities for outward conflict to happen on both ends of the spectrum.
There are more gloamspun acting together in the city, new currency, safehouses, and things like proximity that are based on higher population density. How did cities inspire you?
As someone who lives in the city, I’m no stranger to strange shit happening. You see weird stuff and people on trains, in public transportation, on the street as you’re walking by. There are also small pockets of civilization in older corners, places where the population density is lower and where nature and the unknown still lurks for people that believe in that sort of thing.
I’m interested in how you use 20th century history to explain why the gloamspun have taken collective action into politics. What was it like telling that story?
It was interesting, to be honest. I did some research on a bunch of 20th century happenings — WW2, the Cold War, the evolution of nuclear weapons, that sort of thing. There were A Lot of nuclear close calls throughout the years that could’ve led to the world as we know it having ended. For immortal beings that call Earth home, having weapons that would have destroyed civilization launched by short sighted leaders was not something they wanted to wake up to. So it wasn’t a leap to make it so that these immortal beings would have a vested interest in keeping the world intact.
What’s your favorite of the new content you’ve made for this world? What kind of character would best embody the setting?
My favorite? It would be the end of the book, where I drop a couple of plot hooks for enterprising GMs to interpret. I tend to leave a lot of this universe up to interpretation — that was the cause of quite a few changes to the original draft. I want to see what other people think of this universe I’ve created and how they fit the disjointed pieces of a timeline together.
The kind of character that would be best for this new setting would probably be a teenager who had just found their other magical half and is now living a double life within the city. What new impulses and wants do they have, and how do they balance that normality with the lingering urge to stay close to the Wood and other supernatural creatures?
