A 2E City

[HunterInTheNight]

You've done nothing but prove my point. Now if we only had separate threads to go in depth on each of these splats instead of a bare bones skimming of them, we'd be getting somewhere.

Unless you think such a thread is going to be dozens of times more active than all the individual-line threads you've made combined, it's going to be pretty easy to keep track of the discussion on any given day.

No I don't. And that is also my point. Its not going to be more active than all the individual threads. Its not going to be a tenth as active as the individual threads. That's why I'm doing the individual threads, because while all the splats are connected, they mostly spend their time apart. While keeping in mind that the other gamelines exist in the city, how do hunters fit in? We aren't ignoring the other splats, but they take a back seat, are background characters to the hunters that the topic is about. There is a fully functioning vampire society, how does that affect the hunters. There are multiple werewolf packs, how does that affect the hunters. This topic is about the hunters. Not how vampires work, or geists, just hunters. The rest of the gamelines just set up the context of the city. Because when making hunters, you need to think about the vampire society, you can't get away from that, but its not the focus, and keeping people focused is the goal here. If someone wants to run a hunter game, but have it be a multisplat city, they'd go to the Hunter sub forums and look around. And they'd find this thread and get their answers. I mean, not now. Too many people have posted things off topic in response to the mod's posts, thus making this thread mostly useless. And this is exactly what I was trying to avoid.

[Satchel]

Laptop's finally done defragging, so now I can get real verbose again.

You think so small.

I think in terms of the thing that I am building for, which is how you think when you are building to a purpose without diverting effort from the thing you are trying to accomplish.

The basic small scale geopolitics is only a portion of what I'm looking for, but a vampire's blood supply and a promethean's wasteland are two entirely different things.

Yes, because those are different categories of problem. A Promethean's Wasteland and the extended consequences of feeding and using the Predatory Aura on a vampire's Feeding Grounds, however, both fit the category of "region where a monster's presence is messing with public health," and human contact and the humour-derived sources of Pyros per Lineage fill the same role as blood does for vampires at a lower degree of urgency.

Resources are resources. Doesn't matter whether they're material resources like money and supplies, social resources like trust and connections, geographical resources like access and security, or other things, designing a city's supernatural element as more than a freestanding collection of monsters stapled onto a mortal locale means looking at how those groups interact with their needs in that area.

Hunters are humans, which means most of their geopolitical game is in the mundane sphere, notwithstanding the heightened importance of knowledge, security, leverage, secrecy, and other things that hunting monsters renders extra important. Compacts and conspiracies tend to have more of these things than most characters thanks to institutional inertia and the ability to pool resources, but they still operate most plainly on the fundamentals of setting construction because more esoteric problems are such a regional/case-by-case thing to address.

Even at the basic level, you are going to need to supply 11 different answers.

Again: Many of the root questions about How To Build A City are generalizable and/or heavily dependent upon what you're aiming for in a game.

Does a type of monster need something for its purposes? It will favor settings where that thing is easy to get without too much trouble. Vampires go where the people are. Mages seek out Mysteries. Changelings and werewolves bias their territorial dynamics toward trods and loci. Mummies and Beasts will tend to stick around their Tombs and places they've made Chambers out of. Demons look out for Infrastructure, Hunters look out for monsters, Sin-Eaters look out for the dead, and Deviants look for things to fuck with (preferably conspiracy-related). Prometheans are a smattering of autonomous change-distilleries, but they'll tend to favor places with people to interact with or features that resonate with their humour.

Are there a lot of one type of monster in one area? Depending on how badly they need certain resources, this will have an impact on the surrounding area, individual monsters, and/or the relationships between those monsters based on how they approach acquisitions. Too many vampires in one place means lots of people dying or lots of vampires spreading themselves thin to hunt far from home. Changelings in need of Glamour are either highly active or under attack, and depending on their approach they'll either amp up their emotion-harvesting activities and leave a trail or start foraging/cultivating goblin fruit in the uncertain ground of the Hedge. Demons in a place with lots of Infrastructure have plenty of reason to collaborate and that means opportunities to sell each other out.

Does the monster have pursuers? How committed are they, how obvious are they, and how common are they? How worried is it about them? This will affect individual behavior and group dynamics depending on whether the threat is infiltrators or wolves at the door. Strix, Reapers, and Huntsmen all play on the same paranoia that hunters live with from monsters that can pass for human, whereas Pandorans and Amkhata and the Hosts tend to be a little more stalking-creature threats that you can pin down in isolated incidents as grand cooperative gestures; mixing those two types of threat tends to be a recipe for high tension in a community because the stakes are raised and trust and security become more scarce.

Is one group dominant in the area? On what strength? Are two or more groups in direct or indirect conflict? Over what and to what extent? What, if anything, could undermine the current dynamics of the region? These questions don't change too drastically in their application by gameline, save that some games may have few enough monsters of a type that they're about humans or other kinds of monster instead of, say, bunches of Prometheans in a mid-sized suburb.

Localized weirdness provides some of the easier ways to skew these things, but again, there's relatively little distinction between "a cohort of Devoted has used their conspiracy's Icons to supercharge their Variations, to the consternation of the Renegades trying to take them down" and "the pack of Ghost Wolves that run the interstate have taken a crossroad devil as their totem and now they're unstoppable on the highways and expanding their influence."

The basics will take you a long way.

And if you're going to have all the gamelines being answered at the same time, if will become a pile of confusion, people answering other people, mistakes on which splat they are talking about, turning it into a logistical nightmare.

People are usually pretty clear when they're talking about vampires versus when they're talking about werewolves et al.

There's no logistics here. You ask questions and people answer them or they don't based on what they know. Unless you think such a thread is going to be dozens of times more active than all the individual-line threads you've made combined, it's going to be pretty easy to keep track of the discussion on any given day.

[HunterInTheNight]

This seems grossly unsubstantiated.

Much of the usable advice you are likely to get is generalizable, on account of deriving from basic small-scale geopolitics (like territorial borders and available resources and conflicting agendas) and ludonarrative necessities (i.e. "PCs need to be aware of plot hooks to pursue them," "Characters with established relationships to PCs don't exist in a vacuum," etc).

Much of the specific questions you have about a given gameline can be asked in the Ask A Simple Question threads that already exist in each forum.

Well, thus far, I've gotten plenty of usable advice. None of which fits into your category because those who replied actually read the questions. You think so small. The basic small scale geopolitics is only a portion of what I'm looking for, but a vampire's blood supply and a promethean's wasteland are two entirely different things. Even at the basic level, you are going to need to supply 11 different answers. And if you're going to have all the gamelines being answered at the same time, if will become a pile of confusion, people answering other people, mistakes on which splat they are talking about, turning it into a logistical nightmare. And the specifics to each gameline aren't a single simple question. Vampires for example, become increasingly complicated the more you enter their politics. Not only is their covenant a 'Y' in terms of who are enemies and allies, but the most common positions between cities are also on a clan basis, not even getting into how covenants rule between cities, and we aren't even getting into how elders above the covenant politicking fit into the city's politics, and this is just one part of the overall question. This also being asked in a simple question simple answer thread would just cause another logistical nightmare. And to top it all off, by going to the individual gameline subforums, I get the experts in each gameline. For example, look at the moderator here. He never leaves the VtM forum except for an off topic and moderator duties. So If I posted in the general forum in Classic world of darkness, I'd never get his knowledge on the matter, because he specializes in VtM and that's it. So by going to each subforum, I get those people who live there, and never go anywhere else, giving me more accurate answers to my questions. And that is the end goal here, to get accurate answers so anyone looking for the information, me included, can obtain it concisely.

[Satchel]

I want to know about each individual gameline and how they fit in a wider world. By going in the general forum, the point will be lost in the crossover silliness.

This seems grossly unsubstantiated.

Much of the usable advice you are likely to get is generalizable, on account of deriving from basic small-scale geopolitics (like territorial borders and available resources and conflicting agendas) and ludonarrative necessities (i.e. "PCs need to be aware of plot hooks to pursue them," "Characters with established relationships to PCs don't exist in a vacuum," etc).

Much of the specific questions you have about a given gameline can be asked in the Ask A Simple Question threads that already exist in each forum.

[HunterInTheNight]

They seemed pretty clear about it, you're fine as long as you keep it one thread, here (if you just want to know about hunter) or in the General forum (if you want to know about every gameline, which seems to be your goal). Rather than posting the same question in every individual gameline forum, which seems to be what you've been doing.

I think you'll get the same amount of support and probably more answers regarding crossover, which your threads seem to grow into.

Yeah, they were clear, but then other people suggested alternatives, and without a response, we can't know if they are okay or not.

I want to know about each individual gameline and how they fit in a wider world. By going in the general forum, the point will be lost in the crossover silliness. Because, while the city itself is a crossover, each gameline has its own issues, and problems, even without factoring in the others.

I won't get the same amount of support. the general forum is a joke. And yes, while they have an element of crossover to them, that's not the point. Further more, my doing it in every thread, when someone is looking for their own answers of "I'm running a geist campaign, how would I set the city up." and "I want my geist campaign to be set in CofD, so how would the other splats affect geist" are here for them to find, because the forums are here for all to use.

[nofather]

I just want the go ahead from the mods to continue my quest for knowledge, so I don't get banned/ they get taken down.

They seemed pretty clear about it, you're fine as long as you keep it one thread, here (if you just want to know about hunter) or in the General forum (if you want to know about every gameline, which seems to be your goal). Rather than posting the same question in every individual gameline forum, which seems to be what you've been doing.

I think you'll get the same amount of support and probably more answers regarding crossover, which your threads seem to grow into.

[HunterInTheNight]

I just want the go ahead from the mods to continue my quest for knowledge, so I don't get banned/ they get taken down.

[HunterInTheNight]

I enjoyed the abbey. They were the best "Hunter doesn't mean good guy" compact.

[Primordial newcomer]

Did they really reduce Ashwood Abbey and Aegis Kai Doru to examples in the back of the book?

Yes. They were replaced by the SWORN and the Council of Bones, respectively.

We will likely see them fully written in the companion. Possibly

[HunterInTheNight]

Did they really reduce Ashwood Abbey and Aegis Kai Doru to examples in the back of the book?

[HunterInTheNight]

Well, it all depends if I'm allowed to continue my quest for knowledge, but if that's the route I'm allowed to do it, I will.

As to the actual topic, reading the manuscript is a slight challenge without a usable index. But it seems that compacts always have at least someone in massive cities like this. And then the conspiracies usually have more. But considering the stable numbers of the other splats in the city, how many hunters should fit in LA. Now, I was thinking on this, how to balance a proper hunter population with monsters. Most splats don't leave behind bodies to follow. Even vampires don't kill people often. The ones that do leave bodies behind usually are dealt with by their own. Or the hunters get them first. And there are certainly things that don't care about following their rules. The pure, seers, centimoni etc. So its not like there is a shortage of things to kill. Not to mention the ephemeral and random monsters/urban legends. But too many hunters, and the other splats will get pulled into the crossfire, and that causes issues. So, how many hunters is a fair and balanced number for such a sizeable city?

[wyrdhamster]

Simple solution would be adding a gameline shortcut to renamed title - so titles 'VtR 2E City', 'WtF 2E City', 'MtAw 2E City', 'HtV 2E City' etc. It's 5 minutes of work for renaming the topics for mods, really. CTPhipps, maybe?

[Tessie]

I don't think a general "how to build a city" thread in each game's subforum is a bad idea, but the title should really reflect the different games. I just get multiple "A 2E City" threads in my notifications with no context to which one is which until I click on them.

[wyrdhamster]

How do the various hunter tiers function together? I know the cells aren't that coordinated, the compacts might have a presence, and conspiracies probably have a number. Do these factions have positions in a per city basis? What are the number of hunters in the city and does it vary by tier? I'm going to re read the Hunter manuscript again to get a feel for it, but I think that this community can make it easier to figure it all out.

I can only answer from my experience with running HtV 1E games and read of 2E manuscript preview. I generally envision hunters society based on branches of Hunter Orgs. You can have as much non-affiliate hunter cells on whole city area, but true society will be in Orgs branches - as those are much stable structures, with resources and power on moral society. Generally, when preparing local hunter society - I think about what Orgs would be in area, how would those branches relate to each other - and then add one or two non-affiliate cells, reflecting local history or traditions. Also, I did not found any setting I think off that at least one of almost 100 Orgs ( 1E list & 2E list ) would not fit then. You can also make local Compacts to reflect local flavor better.

[HunterInTheNight]

I'll get less accurate and less sensible answers, as different people will try to talk over each other with their own areas and the answers will get buried and harder to find for me and other people to figure out. But if you insist.