Roleplaying Games
When Genius Loci Get Weird
Exploring strange cities in RPGs
In some urban weirdness stories and campaigns the focus for the weirdness are not the characters, but the settlement itself. Everything else flows from that source of strange energies. The city or town may look normal on the outset, but as the characters experience more of it, they find out that there’s weirdness everywhere.
For the writer or GM this is the perfect excuse to go wild. Like Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, the location attracts creatures, ideas and things from all possible worlds. There may be some level of weirdness control to keep tourists happy and the town out of TV, but often the residents are so used to it that they cannot really tell when something should be considered abnormal.
This trope is not too common, but it comes up in different media. Twin Peaks in live-action TV, Gravity Falls in animation and Night Vale in podcasts. All of those have their own mythology and history full of odd little details and big conspiracies. And they all lay in that weird zone between horror, humor and uncanny. The city of Amber in Roger Zelasny’s Chronicles of Amber is a special case. As the center of all realities, it is projected to all of them and visited from many of them.
Weird Cities in Roleplaying Games
Bastion in Electric Bastionland is the only important city in the world. As the game system has progressed, so has the city. It has passed from medieval to steampunk to early 20th century. The city is home to humans, aliens, constructs and stranger things. The characters start with and encounter magical, supertech and magitech “oddities” all the time. The city itself is full of adventures, but often the characters venture out to the Outlands or beneath Bastion to the Underground.
Ebon Eaves in tremulus is a procedurarlly generated town for the campaign. At the beginning players are asked a series of questions. The GM then consults a chart for the answers and the town is detailed according to them. This creates a new version of the town in every campaign.
The Edge in Over the Edge is the biggest city on the island of Al Amarja. It too is visited by beings from other places and times, and some of them end up living in the Edge. Even though the island looks like it’s influenced by its location close to Europe and North Africa, it really is a mirror image of the USA. Everyone on the island is the hero of their own story and most described NPCs are equal in power (and weirdness) to the player characters.
Sigil in Planescape is the metropolis of metropolises in the center of the multiverse. As such, any sentient being in any D&D world can be found there, living in relative peace. Also, almost anything can be found for sale in Sigil. There are magical gates to many planes, so it is a cross-roads to those who cannot travel the planes by their own means.
