The Hustle of the City
Hello Fellow Fools,
This past week was consumed with the fact that another day of my birth accrued like radiation, detectable only its power to slowly break down my body.
I also had some delicious dim sum!
I had the opportunity to try out a local game event - a collaboration between Yotta Quest and the Reading Arts Community Center. It was my first time going, so I didn't come with expectations. But I met some nice folks and taught them Cascadia.
Also, don't forget that GenCon badge registration opened up today! It's a great board game convention that's been running for over 50 years at this point.
The Brain Box
~ divers inputs for creative outputs ~
🎨 Shahzia Sikander, inspired by trip to the Cincinnati Art Museum this week. Sikander's website shows the range of her work, but it was the paintings built into the windows near the ceiling that made me interested in her. Especially juxtaposing her work against artifacts of Nabatean civilization. We can build more robust cultures for our games by thinking about how the present reinterprets its past, especially the remote past.
📖 Some wikipedia tidbits this week:
Ferdinand Cheval - A French mail carrier who spent 33 years building Le Palais idéal stone by stone as he walked on his job. An absurdly massive undertaking.
Shekasteh Nastaliq - A cursive style used for Urdu and Persian, among other languages. Calligraphers would practice shekasteh by writing words randomly on page, with the script floating relative to normal reading patterns.
Ten Town Squares
~ defining features of urban life ~
A town square can be the distinguishing feature to help PCs differentiate the cities they visit. If you follow Sly Flourish's lazy prep strategy, these could easily be the notes for one of your scenes.
d10 | The town square is built around . . . | It’s reputation: | It’s commonly called: |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | A fountain with decorative spouts coming from the mouths of happy pigs. | It’s full of hucksters and peddlers of fraud. | By pure coincidence, [one of the PCs names]’s Square |
2 | A massive, tusked skull encrusted with rubies. The skull is cloven down the middle. | It’s full of pickpockets and street musicians. | Donelcar Square |
3 | An open plaza with mosaic paving that illustrates the mythological founding of the town back in its prime. | It’s pretty safe during the day. Nothing good happens there at night, though. | St. Iberuppi |
4 | An ornate sun dial 20 ft. in diameter. | It’s the pride of the town; they’re fiercely protective of it. | Orbion and Cross |
5 | A massive mechanical clock built into the ground that tracks the seasons, constellations, and notable cosmic events. | An ostentatious waste of public funds that could have gone to those who really need it. | The Heaven Ward |
6 | Five granite colonnades that converge on a central rotunda. | It’s busy each afternoon when markets open, but otherwise it’s uncannily empty. | Goldsieve |
7 | A 50 ft tall olive tree, strips of orange and yellow fabric painted with names of the dead woven through its branches. | The open-secret meeting place for star-crossed lovers and forbidden trysts. | Tram-Ocks (truncated forms of two founder’s names) |
8 | A bridge that spans a massive waterfall. Shops cling to the sides of the structure and hang from it’s underside like stalactites. | The pulse of the town — everything that’s anything happens here. | The Sons’ Crib |
9 | A derelict gallows. | People have an unfortunate tendency to go missing in its crowds. | The Queen’s Castle |
10 | A throne hewn from foreign pink stone. Every surface is engraved with a script so old that only the most obscure historians could read it today. | Protesters and radicals tend to organize here. | Faltubella Square |
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Thanks
Have fun. Be weird.
-Strange Years