Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Navigating the City of a Hundred Gods—Another Approach to

In ancient times a man named Patrick Stuart shared a post about wrapping a dungeon around a die to create a non-Euclidean adventure site: http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2011/09/did-i-invent-this.html

I think about it a lot, and have been playing with multiple iterations of the concept for a number of years... but only recently did I consider it an interesting way to approach the "city crawl", specifically the settlement slowly being described in the City of a Hundred Gods series of posts. 

A hex map of a city, repeating endlessly.

Neolithic Megalopolis

PARIAH is described as a "proto-Neolithic psychedelic animist RPG". I don't think "city" would figure highly in a game of word association with those as a prompt. Yet what drew me to the Neolithic specifically was the emergence of urban culture, and how that creates a "third margin" in a game that is at its core about navigating liminality. The pariahs arrive in a place that is unlike anything they've experienced—and this time without the use of entheogens or ritual practice.

This is also a fantasy: it is not my aim to create something that has already existed. Nor is it my aim to create an "accurate" simulation of a "city crawl"—whatever any of those words mean. Instead, the intention is to create an environment that is:
  • Alive: the city is dense, diverse and dangerous. This means calendars, carnivals, encounter tables and things happening with or without the PCs interference. 
  • Alluring: it has to be somewhere that is interesting to the players and their characters. That means there is intrigue, adventure and opportunities to explore.
  • Alien: the city must feel strange not just to the pariahs but to the puppeteers manipulating their moves. Social, political and economic practices are not just unlike those of the hunter-gatherers, but are alien to 21st Century humans, too.
While the moodboard for City of a Hundred Gods contains images of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük alongside Ur and Jericho, it also draws inspiration from other, less obvious places—both real and imagined. Conan's Zamora, Tetsuo and Kaneda's Neo-Tokyo, the Alhambra of the Cordoban Caliphate... even the Castle as experienced by K.

It is the inverse of Marco Polo's Venice: not the same city repeated many times, but many cities in one... and later we will see other ways in which it is turned inside-out.  

Memphis as depicted in Assassin's Creed

100 Gods, 100 Hexes

A City of a Hundred Gods: then a ward for each god. Each ward a hex. Why? because they tessellate. It is not assumed that they are equivalent in size or even shape: it is an abstraction.

Each hex ward has its neighbours, and a typical time it takes to traverse the hex and arrive at them. 
 
The ward has a unique quality and pattern of life, expressed through the special encounters that occur here, varying by the time of day. There might be specific landmarks or more generalised tables of buildings found there or both.

But it has its own god: though other gods may be found there, one god dominates, and there are a hundred.

One for each ward, a ward drawn as a hex.

Districts

Batches of ten or so wards denote a district. Each district contains a generalised encounter table for the day and the night, unique for each district but converging with those of neighbouring districts. The tables tell stories that players might begin to understand.

10 wards to a district, one district to a post.


The Endless Village

Have you ever wandered through a city and wondered: "How did I end up back here?"

The city tessellates because the true derive is non-euclidean: you can walk around and around and around... forever. 

To abstract this, we must put the city limits in its centre. The very central hexes offer ways to a world beyond the city, but these elements are abstracted to take up the least amount of paper space. 

The city is not a pile of buffalo shit on a featureless plain: it is a rich landscape surrounding the unknown.

So again, it is reversed, a city inside-out.

Navigation

The map is a diagram for the GM: it is non-figurative, an abstraction. The players are free to construct their own. there is no opportunity to compare notes: the map either works or it doesn't.    

There are clear routes: 2 or 4 axial "roads", a river and a few canals. But there are walls, and gates and more subtle barriers to entry. A pass requires a ballot. A ballot requires registration. Registration requires...

Well, look: go to the Dusk Gate. Look out for the shrine to the Lucky Gecko—

How do you get to the Dusk Gate? Of all the 100 Gods...
 

Coda

It might not make much sense now but you'll see—soon, I hope, soon!

While this project continues on the blog, I'm working on another PARIAH sandbox over on itch.io. This extensive project currently consists of 15 (and ultimately building to more than 70) zinis for just $4.50. The price is increased each month, so get t while it's still ridiculously cheap:

Special thanks to Marsworms for setting the cogs turning back in 2021with the bronze age city of Tabur.

Oh—Happy New Year!

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Also reminding you that I have a mailing list:
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