Cities, Circles, and Venn Diagrams

I've been in the process of revising a lot of my notes from the last few years, in order to make them more usable / post-able. And lately, that's included a lot of thinking on how to structure cities and other settlements.

I've tried a few methodologies before- spatial mapping, flux space, point crawls, etc etc and haven't really had one click for me yet in that sweet spot.

This is another attempt at thinking on the topic.

A lot of this feels like it's probably obvious, already been thought of, or not terribly useful. But hopefully it helps prompt some good discussion.

------

Upon entering a town, typically as an outsider or visitor you would have easy access to whatever is publicly accessible.

• establishments like stores, public-facing governmental institutions, churches, etc.
• things going on in public venues, on the street, etc
• tourist attractions
• common landmarks
• etc etc

We'll represent this with a big circle, which we'll imagine contains every possible encounter that fits that description. We'll also mark it with a dotted line, to represent it as our easily permeable "entry point."

There are plenty of other sorts of individuals and encounters that might not happen in public venues though.

• a simple invitation into a private residence
• meetings of members-exclusive organisations
• a sage who will only meet with you if you make specific offerings
• an annual party that you at least need to be a friend-of-a-friend to get into
• the heiress whom wouldn't be caught dead hanging around the poor
• and other sort of challenges

Broadly, these can also be represented by another circle. This circle instead contains only the encounters which are specific to that more exclusive local social circle (for the sake of sanity, likely something at the sort of broad group/faction level). Since they're more exclusive, we'll be representing them through a proper sealed circle.

By overlapping our circle to form a Venn diagram, we have in-roads from the publicly accessible into more specific social circles.

• a guide willing to show you exclusive back alley stuff only real locals know for coin
• a recruiter or contact for a specific organisation
• the brother of the guy whose hosting the party, who now owes you a favour
• one of the service workers who cleans the heiress' mansion
• etc etc

[SIDE NOTE] Though these social connections may serve as obvious methods- just like players can knock out the wall of a dungeon- there's always room for players to connive or sledgehammer their way into social circles in unexpected and unconventional ways, or just through random happenstances of fate.

Different overlaps in the Venn Diagram also can allow for different "routes" to reach social circles. Do you learn about the Buccal Fat Ghouls by hanging out with the rich people looking to join them or the homeless people they are disappearing off the streets?

Concentric circles can also be used for more and more exclusive sub-groupings, requiring you to work to penetrate deeper and deeper into a specific social structure as in the post which inspired this one over at Was It Likely?.

By applying all of this at once, along with some dice rolls for random goings on in the settlement, and hopefully something more lively and robust takes shape.

------

Now, how useful is this in practice? No idea.

Actually writing encounter points inside of each circle likely would be a nightmare of graphic design, and using it as any sort of map or visual aide might be a bit convoluted.

Perhaps just as a writing exercise to think of some of the obvious connections that build a town? Or using the categories therein as tags to help organise what sort of inter-faction things are going on in a town?

Things to stew on

---

This post by Ro Pham is licensed under CC BY 4.0, and may be used by anyone with proper attribution.