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A Visitor's Guide
to the Rainy City
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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
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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 |
The Visitor’s
Guide gives you this city as a travel guide of sorts, first introducing you
to general ideas and customs you may need to know, then proceeding with a more
detailed breakdown of the Rainy City’s places and people. This is an excellent
approach to worldbuilding, since it concentrates entirely on the substantial,
without wasting time on things of little concern to the adventurer. Everything
is to the point, and no text is wasteful – it all focuses on what makes the
city interesting, dangerous, and worth delving into, just like a fine travel
guide takes you to the good stuff. Information is either presented to provide
adventure pitches – job opportunities, organisations you may want to join (or
fight), and exciting locations are given a prominent treatment – or as
concentrated flavour with asides on food and drinks, eccentric customs, the
importance of hats, and other local colour.
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Ms. Stacks, brigand leader
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The Rainy City
is divided into ten major districts, each receiving a mini-gazetteer spanning
around four pages. Each have their own character, from the milling traffic of Old
Town and the industrial monotony of Leeve Town through the eccentric aristocracy
of Embassy Row or the mage towers of Tower Cliffs, to almost rural hinterlands
like the eerie plateau of the Headlands and the marshy, bandit-populated Sump.
In fact, they do not just have their own character, they have their own weather
– sure, it is always raining everywhere, but the rains of Leeve Town are “Steady.
Oppressive. Gray.”, while for posh Embassy Row, they are “Very fine (…) here [the
rains] have a cleansing quality.” Beyond this small gimmick, these sections
have a notated map, information on law enforcement and criminal enterprise, places
you may visit, mysteries and conflicts you may get entangled in, and so on. From
doing “roof duty” wrestling trolls, pudding and chimney goblins in Old Town, to
smuggling in Vagabond Bay or joining a salvage crew on the Headlands, this
guidebook is structured around adventure. There are interesting NPCs like Jenny
“Ma” Weaver, a witch who can weave strands of fate, or Orbeg the Multipotent, a
wizard “whose tower has a level for every lesser potence he has cast behind him
on his path to betterment.” (“Some thirsty-six Orbegs, each less multipotent
than the one above, abide in his tower, each assured in its assurity that it
will one day be the ultipotent.”)
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Cleverly repurposed
witchburning art |
As presentation
goes, the zine is understated, but just about perfect. There are no fancy layout
tricks beyond making sure stuff that belongs together is on facing pages, the
maps are placed where they are useful, and the illustrations break up the
two-column layout exactly where they are needed. It is not obtrusive, just good
at what it does: making the text flow well, and the booklet easy to navigate. I
would be remiss not to mention both the excellent map – every quarter of the
city having its own characteristic topography, street layout and features of
interest – and Bill Spytma’s illustration work that defines the Rainy City just
as well as the text does. Illustrations feature redrawn/altered 15th
to 16th century woodcuts to great effect, and these are authentic,
not to mention very funny if you know them from previous reading materials. In
these reviews, I rarely consider production values as an aspect for evaluation:
here, I will make an exception, because the art becomes an integral part of the
zine.
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 |
