Tabletop games taught me to love cities:  Greyhawk, The City State, Sigil, Waterdeep, Skullport, Tredroy, Nighttime Chicago, Horizon. Speculative fiction made me love them more.

I was a dweeby suburban Texas kid who became a small-town West Texas college student, and spent a long time thinking I wanted to stay far away from cities. The vast directories of strange locations in these books said something to me about a world that was at once smaller and more compact but also so  much larger. I've lived in a lot of cities since, and have never regretted it. It's shaped my own game design work (you can check out the no-art/not-yet-edited version of Dark Designs in Verdigris or pick up the original in Codex Emerald and Codex Childhood).

So for my birthday this year (no, we're not discussing my real age right now), I'm launching a 7-week-long city jam for tabletop RPGs.

What's The Infinite City?

It's that city you love. Sure, you might need to file off some serial number to feel safe writing about it. It might be a city you're a fan of (fictional or non), a city that drives you into a fury, or something you've created on your own. Maybe it's on an asteroid or in an asteroid. Maybe its the port capital of your epic fantasy setting, or that burned out industrial remnants of a once proud union town in your  urban fantasy setting. Maybe its a spaceport. Maybe it's bucolic and just. Maybe it's a strange shadow of a city in our own world, or the post-apocalyptic remnants of it. Pick it and Dig In! Your city, neighborhood, establishment, or whatever might include stuff like...

• Locations, Locations, Locations! Taverns, bars, libraries, government buildings, underground newsrooms, apartment blocks, weird bookstores, shops for coffee/tea/other things you drink. All the material bits of culture and daily life that make cities functional.
• People, People, People! Create some backgrounds, or lifepaths, or character classes, or playbooks, or skins that make the city come to life.
• Dungeons! Dungeons! Dungeons! Cities can contain them. Cities can be them, and dungeons, of course, can be cities in and of themselves. Think of Jennell Jaquay's Thracia or Tom Moldvay's Lost City.
• Systems! Want to write a little minigame about faction moves or political machines or restaurant management? That's great!

Do Your Thing! It can be an adventure module, a location, a character playbook, or some combo of bits and pieces. Look in strange places, pick the genres that interest you, find the things no one else has done the way you want to do them, go wild! I'm just as excited about your 1-page fantasy space port tavern as I am about your fully-mapped out neighborhood.

Maybe a Rule or Two...

Use art if you like, but please be sure you've got the right to do so. If it's commercially available art (like stock art), please make sure you paid for it and used it under the terms of its license.

Feel free to charge or don't charge. You know your own financial situation and what you need to do and can afford to do.

I really want to see what you're going to make, but here's what's definitely NOT welcome in this jam:

• Racism, Queerphobia, Sexism, Classism, or Transphobia/Terfery.
• Other sorts of fascist bullshit.

Systems

Feel free to use whatever you want for a tabletop RPG system as long as you have the right to use it. You might go with Sword & Backpack, Best Left Buried,No Dice No Masters, So You Want to Be an Adventurer?, Old School Essentials, Dark Streets & Darker Secrets, or pretty much any other system. Or write your own. If you like, you can even use the Dark Designs in Verdigris system above.

Looking for inspiration?

• Look at Fortitude from Chuubo's, Fever Dreaming Marlinko, Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites, Umberwell, Bastion, or the space station Prospero's Dream from A Pound of Flesh.
• Look beyond tabletop to Ellen Kushner's Riverside/Tremontaine stories, Charlie Jane Anders mid-apocalyptic San Francisco, VE Scwab's three Londons, China Miéville's Bas Lag, N.K. Jemisin's city of Sky, Robin Hobb's Bingtown, or Mercedes Lackey's Haven.
• Think of the ways we find out about cities in travel books or cookbook intros or even from Richard Scarry.

Art on this page is from Adobe Stock and is used under license.