Many exciting adventures are held in the wilderness or in caverns. Hidden ruins and deep forests are common places for characters to find themselves. Adventuring means exploring to many people. Almost any genre moves away from civilization, so that forest might be on a distant planet, rather than a magical realm. However, whatever your genre you play, you eventually need to resupply. Towns and cities may be just places to sell loot and buy torches, but they can also be places for entire campaigns themselves. The Urban Wilderness can be just as challenging.
The scale of the town helps determine the type of adventures. Don’t be too restricted, however. While it wouldn’t make sense for a tiny village to have an extensive sewer system, for example, you could have it positioned over hidden underground ruins instead. A large city would indeed have cavernous sewers of its own, with attendant encounters. Large cities would also have much more variety of services: a small town would have a simple apothecary, but a large city would have major pharmacies competing with a larger variety of stock.
Campaigns set in cities could involve local politics and power struggles. Every city have both public political parties and factions, plus underground powers and organized crime will control places and people. Factions and families will make and break alliances, and the party can participate in a variety of ways. Thugs and mercenaries groups could be simply hired by one faction and given orders. Characters with family or political connections would be forced to take sides.
One interesting things urban settings is the fact that the location is fairly static. Roving adventures can take place in different environments and usually take some form of travel between them. Urban environments are packed together, with the different environments right next to each other. Travel from the tops of a building down to the deepest cellar is a few minutes in the elevator. This does always allow for exciting chase scenes that run through different environments.
Cities can be in any genre, but the details that fill those cities will be radically different. Very few knights in armor will encounter a subway system, and most modern longshoremen don’t worry about being attacked by kraken. Try not to let that stop you from an interesting encounter, as long as it makes sense for the players and the campaign. Maybe a large goblin civilization would have a peddle-driven trolley in their main capital.
We will be linking in resources to city and urban campaign content, and feel free to submit content of your own.