Roleplaying the Urban Personality

A great friend of mine, Bobby DeBoer, has got me and my Skype pals (the "Skype Illuminati") in great excitement over his plan to run a Vampire: the Requiem sidegame emphasizing elements of Lovecraftian horror and urban horror.

Before I enter into my Academic Article™, let's have some background: urban planning has always been a fascination of mine, harking years, years back, maybe as early as I was seven or eight and I first played SimCity 2000. Of course, back then I had only a minimal grasp of density, pollution, desirability and land value, etc. This fascination for urban planning intercrossed with my hobby of roleplaying when I wrote an extensive amount of information regarding an urban metropolis called Defacto City for a long-running Vampire: the Requiem game with then-classmate/later roommate Shafiq Shahimi. Defacto City started off as a joke, a de facto city, but evolved into something quite different as time passed and my own comprehension of urban design grew; in 2008, I entertained the thought of writing a novel (and still hope to have the time and energy to someday write) called "Defacto City: Sights, Sounds and Soliloquys". The idea was that Defacto City the novel would actually be an in-universe guidebook advertising the fictitious city to the readers, interspersed with elaborate first-person journalism style articles and stories and essays about the city.

What got me excited about Bobby's game, to be set in Kingsport, a Lovecraftian New England town with all the hallmarks of good New England horror, was that it was a chance for all of us to play the setting that Dark Providence could have been. Dark Providence was until recently my favorite World of Darkness online roleplaying haunt; while it succeeded at a fair few things, roleplaying the urban personality of Rhode Island was one thing it didn't succeed at all at.

The reason the Providence of Dark Providence became Generic City #491? A healthy disregard for the setting by the players is one factor, but the storyteller team's inability to properly utilize these themes into creating unique locales also doomed it to failure. What are the hallmarks of Generic Cities in the World of Darkness? Bars, clubs, indistinct coffee shops, parks: neither here nor there, places largely without character. Substitute a couple of details and these parks, coffee shops, clubs and bars could be anywhere. London. New York. Toronto. Sydney. Prague. Kuala Lumpur.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Even this city isn't as generic as Generic City #491; sure, the grids and identikit buildings leave it looking bland, but the contour and curves of the coastline give it life."][/caption]

Kingsport is a chance for all of us involved to play the Providence that Dark Providence might have been: dark, full of winding Rhode Island paranoia, an overwhelming feeling of compression from having packed that one million inhabitants — and a fair population of hostile supernatural beings — in the United States' smallest state.

Bobby drew a lot of inspiration from a reread of the Vampire: the Requiem supplement Damnation City ((Hindmarch, W., (2007). Vampire: the Requiem — Damnation City. Atlanta, GA: White Wolf Publishing.)). Damnation City is the definitive sourcebook in the game on utilizing the city and setting as more than just a backdrop, giving character to the districts and neighborhoods that clash, even providing a template for storytellers to make a city to serve as perpetual antagonist.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Bobby's Kingsport map came with these sexy locational cues like, 'The slums of Kingsport, Falwell, are antithesis of the city as a whole, battlegrounds for roving gangs all vying for turf control, while the police force sits and watches uneasily from the sidelines, simply trying to contain the violence in one location so it doesn't spread and corrupt their precious city, rather than dealing with it head on. Parts of this infamous neighborhood are even so desecrated that blocks of buildings have been abandoned save for rats and homeless, a literal ghost town in the middle of the city.' Sexy and descriptive, yes?"][/caption]

Places deserve rich detail just as much as characters: interacting with negative space is rarely an enjoyable experience. While certainly imagination can (and should) be given space, excuse the pun, to fill in the blanks, no place should ever go undescribed. It's bad storytelling, mediocre writing, and one giant leap towards genericness.

The city or 'place' you set your stories in is a perfect platform to broadcast the intentions of your story, and even minimal work can go a long way to perfecting your setting. A hospital can be automatically assumed to be "white" and "clinical"; flesh it out further, and you have an actual place. Think about the clinical and whitewashed walls of a hospital corridor devoid of any emotions, taking exceptions only when nurses in stained outfits hurry from one ward to another, clearly woefully understaffed. The generic park with park benches? In the context of the World of Darkness' urban horror, it could be fleshed out as having deeply winding avenues, flickering street lamps, the rough growl of a nocturnal predatory animal that shouldn't quite be in a park...

The urban sprawl is one of the ultimate tools in fiction: perfectly relatable to our real world, wild and unexplored despite the seemingly neat grids, and very plausibly exaggerated to enhance dramatic tension without sacrificing realism.