City Works

The fascinating thing about City Works (Mike Mearls) is how completely boring it is. This here is a book written by a future Head of All D&D, with the infinite possibilities of the Open Game License, and it's just dull as hell.

That's not necessarily a huge fault in a utilitarian rpg supplement, but it makes me curious about the early 2000s' d20 ecology. Some things, like Blue Rose or Dragonstar make sense to me as passion projects. Wizards of the Coast threw open the gates of the kingdom, allowed 3rd parties to make whatever they wanted, and that was an opportunity - to address a need, to fulfill a wish, to eliminate a frustration. And oftentimes, even the "bloat" was about something (if only a gratuitous desire for MOAR OF MY FAVORITE THING).

And then you have . . . this. Not a bad book, by any means, but . . . who asked for it? What commercial or creative opportunity did Fantasy Flight Games see that justified its existence? Hell, what was I, the reader, hoping to gain when I picked this up?

In my case, at least, it was easy. Sometimes I just wander into my FLGS, walk over to the rpg shelf, and buy the most discounted thing I can find (in fact, I did exactly that thing just the other day when I got a copy of SLA Industries for 10$ . . . I look forward to finding out what I bought in another few months or so). However, that's a fucking trivial motive. It sheds no light at all onto City Works as a book. In fact, I am clearly wasting everyone's time be even bringing it up . . .

Anyways. I could at least put myself into the hypothetical shoes of a hypothetical customer, c. 2003. "Oh, look, here's City Works, by Mike Mearls . . . a name I've never heard before. . . Oh, but it's been published by Fantasy Flight Games. I know them from such titles as Dragonstar and Midnight, I wonder what fascinating genre twist they're cooking up next. I'm sure this 'definitive d20 system resource for designing and running exciting adventures and campaigns in fantasy cities' will live up to the high standards they've set for themselves. Certainly, it will be worth the 24.95 MSRP, which is just 5 dollars less than the Player's Handbook itself."

And look, I don't want to call hypothetical me a hypothetical chump, but it would have been a bad decision, and I find it hard to believe that there were enough people making enough bad decisions to justify FFG's business strategy.

I should probably unpack that, though. What I mean here is that City Works would have been a bad purchasing decision, not necessarily that City Works is a bad book. I can, from time to time, be a bit whimsical in my use of value-judgement words like "good" or "classic" or "trash" or "bad." Sometimes, when I say a book is "bad" I mean "it's fundamentally flawed, but in an interesting way" (like Planescape or Mage: the Ascension) and sometimes I mean it's just ineptly made (eh, I don't feel like calling anyone else out today, but I'm sure an archive binge would turn up a couple). City Works is neither of those things.  It is "good."

Scare quotes because I'm using that word whimsically as well. It's good in the sense that I can read it and at no point am I going "whoa, how did this clown con his way into the job at WotC?" I get it. This is an effective audition for the role of Primate of All DMs. Mr Mearls is a skilled communicator who gives relevant, actionable GMing advice, his mechanics for things like rooftop chases and the spread of plague are reasonable, and his custom classes are all comfortably tier 4 (i.e. the tier closest to what you imagine fantasy adventurers to be like). I have my nitpicks with this book - it warns us against overusing the stunt system, lest our games lose focus on attacks and spells in favor of wild use of the scenery, which strikes me as the sort of "problem" I'd love to have - but I have no major complaints. It is a perfectly fine GM book.

Which is why it would have been such a mistake to purchase at full price, and why it's so baffling it got the green light at all. I once described the 3.5 DMG as "the quintessential book you read exactly once and then intermittently reference for all the rest of time" and City Works is exactly the same way, except that you're never going to reference it. There are parts you would reference, if they were in the DMG, but you're not going to lug an extra book to your game, or even make an extra trip to the bookshelf. It's good, but it's not that good.

Which really only leaves the random city creation rules as a reason to use City Works at all. I think they'd be fun to use once or twice, just as a goofy little project, but the cities they create are just kind of there. Like, how useful is it, exactly, to have a precise count of residential blocks in your fantasy city? Maybe there's a niche for "I want a highly detailed map, but I don't want to just bullshit it," but it strikes me as a basic weakness that DMs are expected to provide the special sauce on their own. You can create potentially thousands of technically distinct city maps, but nothing about them is distinctive or memorable. And maybe it's just that "making the game memorable" is supposed to be the DM's responsibility, but then what am I buying the book for?

I think a better approach would have been to incorporate a life-path system that tied into the history and politics stuff of the previous chapter, add an additional "wild card" table full of purely fantasy nonsense (i.e. "the city was built around a magical spring whose waters cure leprosy"), and actually give your d100 tables something close to 100 entries each (a lot of these were clearly made with another die type in mind, with exactly 10 entries that each spanned 10 percentage points or 20 entries that stepped up 5 points at a time). I feel like if the streets, blocks, and districts were associated with particular historical or political events, then that would add some sorely needed life to your randomly-generated city maps.

Overall, it's a bit of a stretch to say I "liked" City Works, but I didn't exactly dislike it either. At the end of the day, it's a GM book, and as necessary as those might be for educating and informing GMs, they're always at least one step removed from the things that make a game exciting. Running a game as a GM involves talking about the game, but preparing someone to be a GM involves talking about talking about the game, and that can't help but be at least a little bit dull. This book is no more worthy of complaint than White Wolf's "Theme" and "Mood" sections . . . but hey, I'll complain about those all day long, you have no idea. 

Ukss Contribution: This book does have one major, hilarious flaw however. The last 15 pages are just a preview of Fantasy Flight Games upcoming book "Steam and Sorcery" and I can't quite figure it out. Why would you do this? End your book with an excerpt from a much better book. Why couldn't I have found that book at my FLGS instead?  Are the rpg gods testing me?

Most of my favorite things from this book are actually from that preview section (one suggestion - a campaign setting where a high-tech kingdom of werewolves use giant adamantine chains to hold the moon in place, for infinite power), but I feel like picking something from that would be cheating. It's technically something I read in this physical volume, but it's not really part of City Works, you know.

Instead, I'll go with something that caught my eye for being a refreshing breeze of weirdness in an otherwise pretty staid history section - "The armory is the frequent target of robberies, while some folk use it to dispose of murder weapons or temporarily hide magic items. Sometimes, thieves use it to transfer stolen goods. One crook deposits the item, while his customer uses a disguise to later claim it."

This revolving-door armory genuinely delights me. I keep contemplating it, and I keep coming back to the thought, "that's the opposite of how armories are supposed to work. It'd have to be a pretty strange city to have something like that."

Lucky for me, then, that "strange" is right in my wheelhouse.