Two Types of Cities

19 Oct, 2026

There are two types of cities. Cities that you visit and cities that you live in.

Type A Cities are cities that are visited. That's not to say that player characters can't have long-term lodgings here. Just that the way in which Type A Cities are interacted with and the assumptions made about them via tables and procedures treat the city like dungeons—locations for player characters to uncover secrets and get lost in as strangers. The intended experience is to explore a sandbox thats elicits wonder and discovery in the endless nooks and crannies of people and place.

Points of friction and interaction are:

Faction Relationships. As important in cities as they are in dungeons.
Navigation. This one is optional but very common. Encounter tables for entering new districts and x-in-6 chances for getting lost or detailed maps, point crawl procedures or landmarks to point the way. The more dungeon-like a city is the more navigational friction it'll have.
Exploration and Opportunity. Taverns filled with rumors and blacksmiths with unicorns to sell instead of rooms and puzzles and event tables instead of wandering monsters. Walk in any direction to find a hook to an adventure. There's money to be made stealing from the rich or performing arbitrage or whatever players get up to in a sandbox. In its highest form The Type A City contains hundreds of locations and a thousand interconnected NPCs with secrets, rumors and desires.

Type B Cities are lived in. Familiar. Intimate. To experience a Type B City is to hold a funeral for a friend in the dive bar that you used to chat in every day. To owe a faction a favor after they disposed of a body before the Spirit Wardens arrived. To worry about a cousin betraying your revolutionary cause to the Aelfir. A lot of these cities suck which is fun and very often the point.

Points of friction and interaction are:

Situations. Violent space stations, industrializing ports with gangs and ghosts, megaspires with fascist elves. Type B Cities assume that player characters will be engaging in crime, revolution, investigation or whatever else, and the game text—advice, factions, setting lore, random tables—is written with that assumption in mind. There's flexibility in how players approach Doing Crime (what Crimes?) or Revolution but players buy-in that that is what they'll be doing.
Relationships. Personal connections between player characters and NPCs are usually established right from the start. Bonds for Spire. Contacts for Vampire the Masquerade. Friends and rivals for Blades. Dealing with faction fallout and leveraging contacts and community associations to solve problems helps the city come alive.

Notes

Player and referee behavior can shape how a city feels more than prep and procedures do. Probably obvious but worth mentioning. It follows that a city being Type A or B is independent of playstyle. Yes most Type A Cities exist as tables and procedures on OSR blogs but I know at least one OSR citypost that tilts towards Type B.
As pointed out to me by elmcat a city can also start out as a place that is visited and become Type B as characters spend time building relationships.
Ignore NPC contacts, navigational friction, situations vs. sandboxes etc. (which to be clear are trends not rules) and whether a city is visited or lived in becomes true by definition. It asks what I think all refs should ask themselves. Is your city the characters' home or is it a place to explore and what does that mean? I want my characters to suffer and writhe as their homes crumble and change around them but in no way is my idea of what makes a city feel like a living and breathing place the only one.