Andport: Establishing an Urban Campaign

So I've been doing prep for a campaign I'm going to run over both the table and some PbP. We decided early on that in order for it to really be viable as a PbP (at least the way we would want to see it) it needs to have a heavy sandbox element to it. There will be some sources of conflict inherent in the setting, but ultimately it will be up to the PCs to decide how, or even if, they want to address them.

I felt like having an urban setting would be the best for this kind of game for several reasons. With much of the game being held in PbP I want to encourage the idea that most of the play will be held in dialogue or in characters following their own individual pursuits, and not so much an "adventure". If the sandbox is confined to a single city that helps to give a finite geographical definition within which the characters concerns are located. I'm calling that city Andport.

Another reason for wanting to keep the game in a city was so that I can try something I've wanted to try for a while, which is to model a fantasy game after structures I found interesting in Vampire: The Requiem. I didn't want to model the feel and the themes of that game though. I wanted something distinctly fantasy.

What I did want to capture was the idea that there are all of these organizations in the city working to their own ends. Sometimes a faction will have an agenda that works at cross purposes to another faction (or factions). Other times, or maybe even simultaneously, that same faction will have other priorities that those same factions would be sympathetic to, or even outright support. This web of intrigue inherent to Vampire is what I wanted to emulate.

While everything important to this campaign will be in the city, not everything important to the city will be found within its walls. Due largely to my belief that fantasy roleplaying owes more to the myths of ancient Greece than it does to medieval European or Arthurian legend, I tend to favor borrowing more from that period for fantasy games. So Andport is part of a confederation of independent cities that occupy a peninsula in a particularly well-traveled sea.

Andport's incredibly defensible position has allowed for it to maintain its independence for many hundreds of years while providing a central location for honest traders and travelers. This has caused it to become something of a cultural mish-mash, with both the best and the worst of all peoples being represented. There's a chaotic sense of freedom in Andport which is about the extent of a unique identity for the city. With so many different races and cultures present it's really hard to pin down anything outside of dialect and accent that is distinctly Andportian.

This is, I hope, just the first in a series of articles with which I'll detail the city of Andport.