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A Visitor's Guide to the Rainy City |
A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City (2020)
by Rich Forest, with Andrew D. Devenney,
Alisha Forest and Bill Spytma
Published by Superhero Necromancer Press
System-independent
Hello, and welcome to part four of **ZINEMASSACRE*2020**! This year, Kickstarter ran Zinequest 2, their second zine writing promotion campaign. Despite my utter distaste for the idea of a major fundraising platform intruding on a publishing genre for people with more ideas than money, I have to admit Zinequest was successful in motivating a whole lot of gamers to launch their personal projects. While many of them were completely alien to my interests (“An absurdly punkrock role-playing game zine.” and “A Forged in the Dark TTRPG zine, where you play as a gang of animals stealing food and garbage from humans in a small town.” are probably for other people), I pitched in for fifteen which looked interesting. Here are the results.
***
How much can you ask from a zine? The publication type tends towards the short and ephemeral, the “I had an idea” thought experiment, or the burst of creativity. Buying zines is like buying bric-à-brac from an antiques store – eye-catching, strange, not too expensive, not too disappointing if it does not deliver on the pitch. However, some of them do, and more – here is one of them. A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City is a complete, gameable city in the shape of a 60-page zine. That’s a handful! Perhaps it does not properly belong to the zine genre, and is best thought of as a very compact supplement; something that would normally be 120 pages, but here, you just get the good stuff in half as much. Expressive terseness? I’ve got your expressive terseness right here! At any rate, A Visitor’s Guide is packed – and none of it is a waste.
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Hey, the City looks almost bearable from down here |
The titular Rainy City may be the last large city in existence. It always rains – always always, with varying intensity. Much of the rest of the world has been flooded, and other than the occasional shipful of castaways swelling the local population, seems to be entirely under water. Nobody seems to be able to do anything about the situation – the gods are silent, and the great wizard college of the city has been destroyed in some kind of catastrophe. Fires barely light, and in the rainy season, it has to be replaced with expensive alchemical salts. The rotting buildings, under constant rainfall, are home to increasingly strange beings: puddings prowl the cracks and drains, gargoyles haunt the rooftops in a constant power struggle with intelligent gulls, and the creatures of the sea have come out to play. There are new intelligent races ashore – the achterfuss, intelligent octopus people; mermaids and “deepsies” (regular people slowly turning into fishlike beings); and there are others which have adapted to this new life – aristocratic ghouls, bog-dwelling halflings, and so on. Everything has been upended and become uncertain – the city has no unified government, maybe a third of it is gone, and its future is uncertain. Yet life goes on, and this partially submerged, partially ruined metropolis remains full of teeming crowds, business deals, power struggles, crime, and festivities. It is a rather cheerful apocalypse, as related by the upbeat text of the guide’s fictional narrator – here is a great place to have fun, and some exciting adventures. Is it London? Yes, a little bit. Is it Terry Pratchett? You can bet. It is a lot of things, but in the end, it is its own place, and there is none other like it in gaming.
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Insufferable hipsters duking it out in Vagabond Bay |
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Ms. Stacks, brigand leader |
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Cleverly repurposed witchburning art |
There are no stats in the zine, nor any game-specific information, really. I am not fully convinced it was written for old-school games at all, but do not let that dissuade you. The setting is strong enough to work in an old-school urban sandbox game, in a 5th edition campaign, it would probably work with some of the indies, and it would make for a hell of a backdrop for the heist-oriented Blades in the Dark (much better than the official setting, which I honestly found disappointing). Hell, you could use it to inspire Thief fan missions, which is of course the highest honour there is. You would need to do some work to make it fit any system, but you would not need to do much to make it work well – the content and structure of the zine would do much of the heavy lifting.
This is sort of an intermediate product. It is a superb trove of ideas if you are a Gamemaster looking to run games in the Rainy City, but it is also a booklet you could hand to your players as a setting guide, and let them pitch you ideas. The information is exactly at the level of detail and specificity where it gives a strong idea of places, people, and conflicts, but does not rob anyone of the mystery of actually exploring and interacting with the milieu. And what a milieu it is! Original and with a strong flavour, yet eminently play-friendly and approachable; large-scale, yet having a good eye for human-level interests. It is enthusiastic and funny – admittedly, you can get a whiff of hipster from the usually wry humour, but let that be its greatest crime. This is just well-done, and modestly priced at that.
No playtesters are credited in this publication, but the Kickstarter pitch reassures us it has been in used in games for fifteen years, and I believe every word of it.
Rating: ***** /
*****
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Yum yum yum |
I got it and find it delightful. Looking forward to getting to a point where i can use it.
ReplyDeleteVery promising, especially with the 5 star rating! I was wondering whether this could go with Helvéczia? Thematically, I mean maybe the Middle Marches, not the "real world". To me, the illustrations suggest so: the twist on the 15th-16th century woodcuts had some Middle Marches Helvéczia vibe for me.
ReplyDeleteI really don't think the two would go well together. This is ahistorical, lotsa nonhuman races, cosmopolitan fantasy, where Helvéczia is explicitly rooted in a certain historical time and place, and deliberately provincial. The closest analogy would be Ankh-Morpork - if you want to run a Terry Pratchett campaign, this could work as one.
DeleteOh, okay then! I wasn't sure how weird this is, whether it could have a place in the weirder, surreal parts of Helvéczia, but I see it's too much, then! Thank you!
DeleteI finally got around to reading through this thing. It’s a pretty good chance the Rainy City is in the same world as Genial Jack.
ReplyDelete