Help Me Create a City for Nerdarchy
Hey guys, Professor Bill here from Comic Book University, and two things happened on last Friday’s live chat with Nerdarchy. First off, I was promoted. Dave invited me to be a fill-in player for the “Open Legend” game we’ll start playing this Friday (weekly – noon EST) and I said, sure.
I haven’t played in a game for a while and I’ve never played the Open Legend system before, but I was in the chat when Dave and Nate talked with Open Legend creator Brian Feister and I liked the open concept. I was thinking about running a super hero campaign on my own channel and I was torn between using the very old Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Roleplaying system (FASERIP) or using GURPS. Although I didn’t get my question answered (I wanted an example of how to make Spider-Man), I was impressed enough with the concept to think about running my game using Open Legend. When Dave sent that invite to play part time, I figured it would be a great chance to learn the game first hand.
Well, if you watched last Friday’s Nerdarchy podcast, Dave gave us players the homework of making two cities. I had a busy week and only made one city and I made the joke that I’m only a part-time player so I did part of the work and only made one city. Then he sends me the curveball and asks me to play full time. Dave has a 20 charisma, as most of us know, so I knew I wouldn’t pass my save to resist.
Anyway, I went to work after the podcast making the second city. Then I thought about it, this is supposed to be a game where we are interactive with the fans and viewers. So, I have a partly completed second city with a few other ideas, but I want to maintain the interactive aspect.
That’s where the Nerdarchy fans come in.
If anyone is interested, I invite anyone reading this to submit an idea. This city can have any inhabitants, any sectors or ghettos (European-style). We need a police force, an aetherball team (big league and little leagues, why not?), names, prominent figures, businesses, and npcs. Basically, if you can think it, then we can probably use it.
Hell, have fun! Make a pawn shop where the owner is a character with YOUR NAME! You’ll technically be in the game and be able to interact, just put the details of your character so Dave runs him or her correctly. Make your character a sheriff or police officer. Do you have a large family? Maybe make a group of characters named after your relatives and they run a school. How about a fire department? Would you and your significant other like to run the local bakery or convenience store?
This is your chance to add something and actually be in the game!
Now, of course, the final decision for this is up to Dave, but if this city becomes large enough, then it may well be made the capital city. This game should be as interactive as possible, and I really want everyone to be invested in it. I’m a little selfish, too, because the more people who are into our game, then the larger pool of people I’ll have for my game when I’m comfortable enough with the system to run a monthly superhero campaign over on my YouTube channel.
So, that said, I’d really like to see as many ideas as you can muster. Please use paragraphs or bullet points in the comments to make them easier to sort through. Please pay attention to the comments before yours as we can only use so many bowling alleys (OMG Aether Bowling!!!). So, if you’re dead-set on an idea someone else already used, then find a way it could be the competition. Add it into the story line. And guys, have fun with it, I’d hate to see all those comments in the chat go to waste.
Professor Bill
Comic Book University
Class dismissed
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SeptemberFire
April 24, 2017 at 12:35 pmCan I do two?
I want a donut shop named the beholders eye where they sell munchkins shaped like you guessed it a beholders eye.
Can you also make an amuzeement park like in the D&d cartoon?
Professor Bill
May 4, 2017 at 1:51 amI like it.
david
April 27, 2017 at 12:33 pmmy idea was to have the illithid hive mind wage war against the beholder overseer the hive mind realizes the smartest and largest brains are in beholders so they start attacking them in lair separately it gets back to the beholder hive mother and their overseer and they retaliate with a full on assault on an illithid colony.
Professor Bill
May 4, 2017 at 1:50 amI remember you saying something about this in the live chat. I like the idea. Having a potential rivalry that could spread onto th streets is fantastic!
Jeremy
April 27, 2017 at 1:25 pmThe J&A goose farm. It’s run by a dwarven couple (Jarvan and Annabelle) who are outwardly very kind to customers, but occassionally say passive aggressive things to one another, then disappear into a back room from which can be heard yelling, screaming, breaking glass, and the squwaks of geese. Jarvan is short for a dwarf and sneezes frequently occassionally sneezing out a goose feather. Annabelle is tall for a dwarf, towering over Jarvan, and reeks of alcohol, which explains her rosey cheeks. Their passive aggressive insults are usually directed at each other’s height. The shop itself smells terrible due to the geese, but has the best eggs, goose down pillows blankets and coats, and goose meat (served fresh to be cooked yourself, dried as travelling rations, or fried for immediate consumption) in town. There are dead and plucked geese hung in the windows and at a separate counter run by the couple’s son, Jarbelle (a compromise between his parents who both wanted him named after themselves. He utterly despises his name and tries to get people to call him nicknames) who handles butchering the geese, cooking the dried and fried geese, and wrapping the fresh goosemeat for people to take home and cook themselves (which he always encourages since it means less work for him). He is quite clearly bored all the time and doesn’t even blink whenever his parents go at it.
Jeremy
May 2, 2017 at 12:53 pmSorry, I’m not seeing the response to this. I didn’t post it from my account, unfortunately.
Professor Bill
May 3, 2017 at 2:58 amI guess I didn’t reply to this, sorry. I did read this, though, and yes this is great! Just the idea that it’s something so different. I’ve eaten goose before. Kind of oily but I dig the experience. Anyway, I’m envisioning two establishments for the ship. One in the fancy city where they can sell the eggs and even the meat to restaurants and individuals. The down can be sold to bedding stores and every so often the taxidermist from next door will need some “fresh materials”.
Then I see another shop in the poorer district where the geese and the smaller parts of the meat are sold inexpensively. It helps the Dwarven family to maximize profits but it also makes them feel better about the charitable work they do.
Opinions?
Jeremy
May 3, 2017 at 1:38 pmSounds great. Maybe there’s a sister as well and it’s random which two of the four are in which shop for possible rp encounters.
Professor Bill
May 4, 2017 at 1:49 amI love the idea of having the background for an entire family in this game. It leads to them potentially being reoccurring characters.
Le Voyeur
April 28, 2017 at 4:11 pmDimbloom (by Brian Bird)
Dimbloom is a thriving, technologically progressive driven city whose influence is rising. It is Zauntera’s industrial epic center, where engineering, craftsmanship, and innovation are the building blocks upon which this city’s foundations and ideals were set upon. Unlike the stubborn Dwarves of Piatracas, Dimbloom has an open mind when combining the raw value of Steampunk tech with Æther itself. This has allowed the innovators to accelerate inventions with booming progress. The city’s power comes not through military might, but the turbines of commerce and progressive thinking. Fleets of ships pass through its titanic clockwork-gates, bringing trade from all over and resources to workers, and investors from the other cities.
This new found wealth which generates from brand new gizmos, to making daily tasks more simple to even automobiles or other grand machines has caught the attention of Nobles and the Elite of other Cities. They use Coils that have inductors for Æther that is held in the capacitor until resonance is met and discharges a magnetic field of Æther that generates and dissipates a voltage back into the capacitor which allows the process to cycle. This new-tech has given rise to an unprecedented boom in Dimbloom’s economic growth. From Orashul merchant clans funding development to even Alerion’s most prominent Ship enterprises Rumored to be a city where dreams can be a lived reality, Tomorrow is Today, as Future is Present.
A select few, the 1% and prodigies of other cities are selected and personally invited to join the a Think Tank which is the true brain storm of such a surge of progressive advancements in recent technologies. Dwarves and Gnomes heavily make up the majority of the workforce, but there is an outsource of Kobolds ‘hired’ from Kerfluffle to be the busy bodies for the manual labor and dangerous conditions. Humans are rare, and Elves even more so to be found walking the inner workings of the Tech Think Tank. It isn’t confirmed but the company was under suspect for trying to poach blueprints out of Alerion, but who isn’t?, for the design of such fast ship. The allegations were never proven to be true, but one can almost see the bold new marketed ship premiered this year out of Dimbloom isn’t trying to hide some of it’s stolen features, sporting it smugly.
At the head of the Think Tank is a person by the name of Vik. Now Vik isn’t the kind of person you want to go around pissing off or upsetting by any means, and everyone from the skittish kobolds to the burliest of dwarves shake when they hear her temper starting up. Vik is short for Viktoria, but better you never mention it. She’s a Dwarven female who broke off from the stranglehold of Piatracas and their narrow minded approach to seeing how far technology could be pushed if they would just work with all elements. Curvy in all the right places, with a corset and top hat, she runs the roost.
She’s partnered with a Gnome, who’s name is usually left in the shadows and mystery for identity protection as well as any other intellectual properties of the Think Tank’s industry. His wide eyed expressions when he gets a new idea are things of myth and pure pub talk, they say you can see the very spiral of madness swelling up with in his gnomish eyes. But for what is a bit of genius at the price of sanity? Not much is known beyond that of him.
(must be going soon but I have more to add if it’s okay? If you want help fleshing out Kerfluffle still I can jot some ideas down as well.)
Edit note: Add Bounty Hunter Bonds shops around outskirts of city, and interworking circle of a deeper Think Tank that the technological one is more or less a front or progression of, but there is a Think Tank of clairvoyants that use visions from the Void and with in the whispers and echoes from the old ones have learned much arcane knowledge, for better or worst, of truth or falsehoods, they do not know. But it has allowed them to create a lot of these inventions and see possibilities never imagined before. Sometimes a psychic having a vision will bleed profusely while scribbling down on a scroll or textile the blueprints of a new engine turbine or other strange device. And some of the devices they have made or built do not go into public circulation, not even they seem to know why or what they were made for. The price of dealing with the Eldritch is never for the faint of heart though)
Brian Bird
April 29, 2017 at 1:02 amI realized the not-Tesla device I described could be mistakingly similar to the Aetherficers (sc)* that Dave explained keep the cities afloat in the clouds, so what these coils do is run clean and pure off of the aether conductors and the expressed force of resonance would create that current to allow these Devices to siphon in Aether on a smaller scale. The more compact design is what is used for the engine of their transport vehicles, or automobile-Esque machines, that are similar to the landspeeder in a New Hope meets Japanese Domestic Machinery. This magnetic propulsion of the Aether allowing the defiance of gravity. I’m sure some would attempt to create gauntlets that could use similar design theories but implement this manipulation in the palm of your hand with out being Aether sensitive or addicted to drugs.
In general I saw Dimbloom as this visual mixture of the City of Columbia meets Howls Moving Castle, or the like there of. It is heavily lit in neonic tones and eerie backlighting of a turquoise hues along with streaks of whites and greens from the constant discharge of the Aether being so heavily used as a fuel source. A thick mist looms about the city in a fog of war that has assisted in the times of strife. Caused by a mixture of the heavy amount of technology disposing steam through out the sectors and districts as well as an uneasy sensation one cannot quite shake, but swear they hear groans of hunger and a warble from out of the mist.
The Clarvoyant Think Tank could be one of those deep dark cults giving praise and reaching out to the vast cosmos to Gods long forgotten, and receive those images of alien design and advanced ways to produce energy. Strange structures and fetishes of their voidling instructors abound in the center of their dark dealings. The psychics chosen to be apart of this cult are known as breakers and are used in theory to do just that, break the threads of Aether to make contact to the other plane and seek psychedelic visions transmitted telepathically by the Voidlings which result in minds splintering, people becoming schizophrenic, lame and brain dead or even have their brains physically dehydrate as they shrivel up. These contacts result in amazing unique blue prints or designs that the cities could never even dream of. Some other machines are made as I stated, some resembling giant sized mask similar to how Dream from sandman by Neil Gaiman looked and other abstract devices of Eldritch influence. The think tank will also work time to time with the bounty hunter guild or eve press gangs in exchange of muscle and protection for information on the where about a of a mark.
Will not sure if you or Dave had an idea for that city that fell and rose again but if you wanted to use this as a skeletal structure or make it its own stand alone city. Is this even a proper place to discuss this or post the ideas? Not sure if I’m meeting the criteria either or if this is inline with what you have all imagined or discussed.
I will wait for some feedback before I continue.
Brian Bird
April 29, 2017 at 2:38 amAether team is a solo sponsored team by Think Tank Tech. Team name is Oracles, Their colors are Magenta and Purple, with orange trims on the jersey sleeves and collar, maybe some white about for accent and very modern, top of the line sleek suits. The logo is an orange cog gear, with Third Eye open in yellow in the center. Races are a mixture of dwarf to Gnome, few kobold and one human. They usually are that middle of the pact team that are hit or miss, some what solid in clinch moments and make for aggressive burst plays after turtling defensively. But now with some of their new equipment if it is legal, not sure about rules, they have these goggles.
Your quintessential steam punk goggles with leather bindings and brass trims, fittings but where glass for lenses should be, upon closer inspection one would notice a gelatinous viscous that gives the false appearance of a green or yellow glass lense. This ichor is ingrained deep into the eye sockets of the wearers as their entire eyeball has been scooped out or maybe dissolved by contact. It acts as a looking glass or two way mirror in which the Eldritch these Think Tank cultist contact can see into the material plane. It allows the user to see Aether more easily and even almost smell it or taste it in the air.
Not sure if legal in this sport or how that all works lol.
Professor Bill
May 4, 2017 at 1:48 amThere’s so much in this city, alone, that I wonder why we need the other 12 😀
Le Voyeur
May 12, 2017 at 4:28 pmNah, please. I was heavily influenced by all of your original cities here .,,
https://nerdarchy.com/2017/04/nerdarchy-open-legend-cities/
And Dimbloom was just a place holder so if you or anyone else wants to tweak the name feel free to work with it. If it’s suppose to be seen more as this metropolis and capital viewed city by the Kobolds or such. Maybe inserting an NPC proxy for me though could be fun to invent, *crosses fingers* I have been checking out open legend’s creation process…
http://www.openlegendrpg.com/