Cities Archives - Vintage RPG

Tulan of the Isles (1981, 1987)

Stu Horvath — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 04:01:00 +0000

Tulan of the Isles (Midkemia 1981, Chaosium 1987) feels a bit different from the previous Midkemia city books. Perhaps it is the addition of Raymond Feist’s name to the cover — Midkemia is probably best known as the setting of Feist’s Riftwar novels. Tulan feels a bit more specific than Carse, more in the mode of Gamelords’ Haven or Thieves’ World’s Sanctuary. This sort of specificity, which manifests in increasingly detailed lore for local history and politics, increasingly becomes the norm for RPG cities as the 80s progress.

The book details Tulan, which, as the name implies, is spread across several connected islands. Unlike the other books, though, we also get a lot of information on the surrounding countryside as well as the nearby village of Hoxley. This is a natural step and gives you an idea of where Midkemia’s design evolution was going to go to next.

The Chaosium version has another Day Brothers cover, again depicting the mustache man, this time in an awkward pose on a dock. Taylor Overbey does good work on the interiors, particularly the detailed, pleasantly cluttered maps.

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The City of Carse (1980, 1986)

Stu Horvath — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 04:01:21 +0000

The City of Carse (1980) gets off the city streets. The idea here is to detail, building by building, a generic fantasy city. The method is fast and brief, listing out the building’s purpose and its residents. This is raw material. More refined information, like plot hooks, are a bit rare, but there are some scattered through the text. In the back are details on some additional important buildings, factions, random street encounters and information on laws and commerce. The result is a ground up depiction of a city. You get a sense of everything and how it all works together the way a resident might, rather than the eagle eye omniscient view we generally take as GMs, which can feel a bit unusual. This approach makes it a bit hard for the GM to see what is going to happen when the players start mucking about, but perhaps that is part of the fun!

Chaosium did a version of Carse in 1986 and its production values make it much more pleasing to use — particularly the maps of the city districts. Not my favorite Day Brothers cover — that mage looks weird and the S&M bartender is an odd choice. I quite like Marco Cardelli’s interiors, though.

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Cities (1979, 1983, 1986)

Stu Horvath — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 04:01:06 +0000

We recently did a podcast on Midkemia’s city books. Consider this week’s posts an echo and an expansion of that.

This is Cities — the original 1979 edition, the 1983 edition that features more professional art and the 1986 third edition (which appeared in two versions, a totally generic one published by Chaosium and one with RuneQuest branding, published by Avalon Hill — this is the latter). They all consist of two parts intended as generic tools for fantasy RPGs — an encounter matrix and the character catch-up, though there is some small variation of the contents of both across the editions.

The encounters are meant to be rolled every few minutes of game time spent on the street, to simulate the bustle of the big city. This works very well and often creates compounding problems — people bumping into you, pickpockets, detours, assassination attempts and on — as a party tries to go from Point A to Point B. It takes a commitment to play like this, but I think it is worth it, potentially pulling your group in surprising directions if used judiciously.

The catch-up is a solo game to use when your character couldn’t make a session — you use these random tables to find out what they were up to while you were away, which is a fantastic, immersive gameplay tool. It ties Bushido (1979) for being, essentially, the first mechanical approach to character downtime.

I love having the opportunity to see the art evolve over time from crummy doodles to more professional work. I really enjoy Richard Becker’s work in the latter Midkemia books. Dan and David Day deliver a serious mustache on the Chaosium version (we’ll see more of that dude) while the late, great Kevin Ramos stippled his way through the interiors.

One downside to these books is the weird preoccupation in both the text and art for slave markets and seedy depictions of sex work. I’d love to see a modern take on these sorts of tables without that stuff.

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Cities

Stu Horvath — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 16:00:00 +0000

“I will find a city, find myself a city to live in.” That’s the chorus of the Talking Heads song “Cities,” and it kind of speaks to how RPG designers approached city design in the early days of the hobby. This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we’re talking about Midkemia Press and their signature approach to cities, called, appropriately, Cities! They were interested in finding ways to create the bustle of city streets and do so largely through piles of random tables — the method was so compelling that Chaosium hired Midkemia to put together a similar system to form up the heart of the Thieves’ World box set!

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