I’ve recently been toying with the idea of hexmapping Troika City.
It’s not gone entirely smoothly.
The Problem
So the main problem here is that:
- I want the City of Troika to feel both dense and sprawling, like you could turn over any stone and find teeming adventure.
- Linking adventures to defined physical spaces, especially hexmaps, forces you to spread content out
- There’s only so much premade Troika content.
In other words, I got about this far:
Hex 1: Hotel District
Blancmange and Thistle
Motel Zotel
House Party
Hex 2: Retail District
Whaalgravvik’s Warehouse
Sutler’s (of Get it at Sutlers fame)
Hex 3: Temple District
The Hand of God
Hex 4: Downgate Arches
The Big Squirm
So mild density, but not even enough hexes to form a single flower.
I was hoping to get the Megamidden (a self-created piece of Troika) in there too, but since that’s 13 hexes wide and adding another layer around the outside would add — let’s see here — another forty-two hexes, I think I’ve come up short.
Now there are other Troika modules that could slot in here. The 1:5 series is meant to take place within Troika, so I presume Eyes of the Aeon and Season of the Snail could slot in, and you could probably make sense of slapping Slate and Chalcedony in there. But ultimately, I don’t think it’s possible for there to be an amount of content that gives both the density and sprawl I’m looking for. Even if there was, would it be navigable by players? Would it actually make the game any better?
Take Two
When I was ten years old, my parents took me on a trip to London.
It made an impression: the historic buildings and museums, the Blitz tunnels, the filthiness of the Thames. London was (is) about three times the size of the biggest city I knew. It operated by alien rules, a fact constantly underlined by ubiquitous ads for sex workers plastered all over those red telephone boxes. There was a sense of history and gravity to everything.
My favourite part was the Cab Drivers.
So London, like Tokyo and (presumably) the other great Eurasian cities, laughs in the face of urban planning. Its maze-like construction seems contrived specifically to create the need for professional Cabbies, trained beyond the limits of human mentality to navigate the senseless meanderings of the roads. In the week I was in London, I must have heard about six different Cabbies explain the intensity of their training, the difficulty of the exams, and the depth of their civic knowledge.
And really, there’s nothing that makes a city feel bigger than getting lost in it.
So I’m throwing my hands in the air and surrendering my fantasies of a geographically coherent map of the Troika city. Instead, I want to embrace the chaos of cities.
You want to go to the Temple district? Grab an urban sherpa; folks have died trying to get there alone!
Fancy a trip to Downgate Arches? You must first navigate the cab queue. Hope you don’t get an erratic driver — you could end up testing Gastronomny or losing your lunch!
Returning to a previous adventure site? Sorry, it’s been gentrified. The dungeon is now buried beneath a coffee house and three very snooty baristas.
Is it Fete Day? Oh yeah mate, the Academy of the Arcane goes for a walk on Fete Days. Hire a Cabbie, they’ll track it down for you.
Final Thought
As GMs, we tend to play a good portion of the game before our friends get to the table. These World-Building instincts are the bread and butter of GM solo fun; we’re all playing at the world, to borrow a phrase. But a city is too big to hold entire in a human mind — unless you’re a London Cabbie, I guess.
So forgive yourself.
Lean into the incomprehension, the madness, the size, the mutability, the messiness. Eschew logic and the bounds of space and time.
Ignore maps. Get lost. Beg the locals for guidance.
That’s what being a city is all about, right?
My favourite piece of Troika content we’ve done does not take place in a city. It’s set in a medieval Scriptorium! And if paying for things isn’t your bag, don’t trip, dawg: I’ve got some blog posts that will tune up your Troika city just fine.