Design Diary: Evocative City Sites

There is a new preview for A Witch's Choice Patronage Project for The Rituals of Choice Adventure Path. Rite Publishing has released the current draft to the senior patrons, and have opened up the patron forums for the project

There is also a nice review of our newest product Items Evolved: Conflict on Emerson's Bookshelf. 

Our next Items Evolved book that deals with races and classes is now in editing. 

Monsters of Verdune the follow up to Veiled Denizens and Mythical Monstrosities is currently in layout. 

I have also started a new systemless project tenitively titled "Evocative City Sites"  It will consist of 10 urban setting tropes, in essence these will  be set pieces that a GM is reasonably likely have present in any city setting he is running and are likely to be places that are present in the minds and expectations of the player characters. 

For example the Trauma Inn,  a place where adventures only want to rest and heal up so they can get on with the adventure. I am going to justify the trope of the Trauma inn (a Rpg video game trope that sleep can heal just about everything, including death), in that it is acutally a mystical site, that is taken care of by an Zen Survivor/Cassandra figure, they focus all their efforts on healing PC "heroes" and the stay is even free.  Also i wanted subvert the normal lack of Inn Security in adventure games.  Our Trauma Inn  actively tries protect with a zelous group of eliet guards, that is led by an immortal and the secret passages he knows about always get you away from your enimes rather than them using them to find you asleep. This is not the Rob-U While-U-Sleep Inn    

I will be handeling each of our sites in this fashion justfying, inverting, subverting and playing the trope straignt to create a unique encounter and then adding that little something extra to make it an evocative location. 

In creating the descriptions in the immersive first person point of view of a "hero traveler" so that A GM can provide the information a Player Character would want to know,  I call this "useful flavor" (TM) in a manner similar to the Volo's Guides, I also took some inspirationf rom the location description template, Npcs will be presented without stats using the 7 sentance npc rule plus multiple choice secrets for the GM to use.  

Each site will be about a 1,000 words. 

I have The Rogue's Gallery (Bad guy bar), and The Next Inn (Trauma Inn), and am working on an Abandoned Warehouse next.