Cities capture the imagination of roleplaying as places where people become who they are. Be it hubs, dungeons, travel locations, they present an opportunity for high-character density. What attempts at cities we find in this art form? Usual caveats apply, you know the drill1.
The cities we inherit
Some exist only as places to visit; they may never become yours. They come to us wrapped up, and we never are allowed to be its citizens — stuck forever somewhere between friendly outsider or parasitic tourist.
City of Lies is alive and vibrant, but your social class will always keep you from becoming embedded in it — no matter what your peers may say, or either or not you bring the Scorpion Clan Coup. The City State of the Invincible Overlord is essentially an open ground megadungeon — and you bring to it the same extractive mentality assumed to this exploration. Life may bloom in No Room For A Wallflower’s Evergreen, but it is still another battlefield in the endless turmoil of the galaxy.
The cities we build
Some games are themselves about building cities, leaving their future fates — and inhabitants, citizenships and politics — as beyond the scope of this paper and to be up to any future art pieces and games.
i’m sorry did you just say street magic is about building a detailed city up from specific details and connections at the street level. Damnation City lets you create a city to fight to be the Prince over, your own little gothic vampiric fiefdom. Beak, Feather and Bone focus on layering the identity of the city over locations into something that truly is a city.
The cities we inhabit
Even rarer are the cities you get to actually call home, more than just places to visit, locations to provide services and little boxed houses for the professional dolls that are always nice to know.
The Quiet Year lets you call a place home — for a year. Mutants in the Night creates a city within a city, understanding what it needs but collapsing as its framework keeps reproducing Blades in The Dark. Dream Askew/Dream Anew achieve this with greater success, allowing to build cities within and without cities that are just as yours as your bones and lungs.
City mirages
If the idea of cities has such an appeal for the roleplayer artist, if they cast a long shadow over the imaginary of our games, why whenever a simulacra creeps into the fiction we weave together it very rarely becomes your city? Why is it so useful to earn citizenship? Why are you so easily restrained to the border of the outsider?
It is not the fault of anyone involved in any step of the production of this art form and its tools, from early design to performance-focused play. It is the consequence of material conditions and limited imaginary, a fruit of this current incarnation of the art form never having co-existed with cities.
Or rather, no living ones.
We cannot create environments where characters can be citizens if we do not even realize we are not citizens ourselves.
What is a city?
Invisible Cities lays down cities as echoes of each other, every single one similar in different ways, a bit of your city reflected back at itself in every single other you visit. This is well interwoven with the conceptualization that cities, are spaces of formation of culture and identity. 2
This framework establishes cities not as merely locations, or an assembly of common and public resources over which you have a shared stewardship3, but an ongoing act of social formation that allows humans to truly become human — to transcend the limitations of the biological imperative over the social. If the village is the domain of kin and family, the city is where the club, clan and cult can take shape. If one sees cities that way, they become an essential requirement for human life: for its elevation, fulfilment of higher needs, care labor and all the other things that makes humans and people as we desire to be.
So, a city is a culture-space, one that exists through living, active participation. This life, made from many lives, exists in a homeostatic feedback of social construction; the outcome of this multiplural existence is obvious. Cities develop a character of their own, systems of ethics and values. They are, alas, not “locations” or “sites”, but social machines that achieve some sort of collective sentience — or may one dare to propose, even personality and different form of sapience, — from its shared existence across its citizens.
Still, the citizen is not a mere cog in the machine; not the taxpayer-consumer homo economicusly moving through the tubes and services of the hollowed city4. The citizen and the city are one; the city is embodied not in brick and mortar but in blood and stem.
What is a citizen?
So, to have a city you need citizens and to have citizens you need to have a city? Well, this begs many questions about what a citizen is. If the cities are cultural-spaces, whose existence and material foundation is in permanent flux, they must be understood as fundamental political entities: since everything that makes the city is subject to the social knowledge construction of conflict between discourses, it must be aware of the violence and costs of its existence and must constantly justify itself: thus everything about it is political.5
Goes without following that the citizen, whatever they might be, must be political too. To be the part of the body of the city means to be part of its body politics. The citizenship body politics are not reduced to ritualized political performances, such as seasonal voting, membership in interest groups, or leaving the affairs of the city to a class of experts and professionals6; every act of the body, every moment in the life of the citizen, breathes into the city the political, the economic, the cultural, the individual, sublimated into the communal of the empowered individual citizen that is never alone — supported and enabled to be their own person7.
If the body politics lays a body to be embodied, community is what makes it a body worth inhabiting, rather than giving in the dissociation and atomization. Without community, no democratic participation in body politics; without true municipal democracy, no citizen8.
No citizen, no city.
Wait, but I live in a city
Unlikely. Like me, you probably have lived in the corpses of many cities, shambling engines animated by the metastatic growth of urbanism. Despite of one may assume form branding and name, urbanism is not the process of city creation and growth — no, we saw that it is community, a democratic body politic and citizens, — it is rather all the parasitic vines murdering cities — and for what matters at this space, villages and other rural spaces as well as many indigenous community configurations9.
Urbanism claims cities and makes them into lightning rods blasting the ground with totalitarian authority, centers of distribution of services and infrastructure — or rather, centers of exclusion of access to services and infrastructure — which are used to trap bodies and minds. These then become atomized professionals dispatched to entrap another with the promises of what humans need within the urbanized remains of the city10. They are machines; not social machines like cities, but urban wheels of pain.
Urbanized cities don’t have citizens. They have “smart” voter-investor-taxpayer professionals that move along the machine-space guts making optimized choices — succeeding or failing despite them. The body politics are dismembered, separated between those to be managed and a distant professional political class. Economy is not part of the citizen’s life, but a disciplinary force upon your life. And communities, such as they are, exist divorced from the zombified city.
Urbanization acts as the grand homogenizer. We can’t escape its grasp even in our imagination. As much as we have problems in finding cities in our art, roleplaying games are filled with magnificent and terrible urbes.
Planescape’s Sigil is a prison of extended gateways, purveyor of services across the universe, a nail doing the work and will of the absent Lady as the ultimate distant totalitarian authority, urbanizing force made beyond godhood. Xanadu shows that even the most friendly and welcoming places can poise the allure of the urban and play with your dreams of chasing citizenship. Spire is the Ur-urbe, the nightmare beating Heart colonizing the cultures and communities that dare to think they lay claim to it. Even utopia can become the urbe, as Coyote & Crow shows with the player character enforced carceral slavery at the center of the urbanized.
It is not our fault that are we haunted by cities. We cannot stop dreaming about what dreaming about them would be like.
And that’s why it is so hard to go back to being the citizens we never were.
Afterword: cities beyond cities
It feels weird to end it here. The desire for the city is strong, and I don’t want to end up with the sour taste of urbanization. As usual, nothing of this is meant to be prescriptive; consider it a window into some of my more uncooked thoughts.
Community, body politics… if that is what makes a city, there are certainly games that do that, right? Then we may get there starting from there? These games make cities without cities. The foremost example that comes to mind is Dialect, as the ultimate game about being a citizen and inhabiting the culture-space of language — of how cities die. Same vein with Red Carnations on a Black Grave, where the city of Paris is the commune and lives and dies with your doomed sad social republicans. Going more and more abstract and into weirder examples, Thirty Sword Lesbians because of its meta-structure also makes cities, because being a lesbian is all about the body politics. Up yet another level of abstraction, Fellowship nails the confederate and cooperative space needed between cities — and every players character is essentially the sapient personality of their own city! — necessary to preserve democracy and freedom against imperialistic power.
Maybe we don’t need to be trapped reproducing the urbe. Maybe we can find our cities not looking for them, but for the spaces where they may be.
If we build them by building ourselves.
Being an opinion is implicit to any critical analysis; I will rather die than be caught prescribing shit; do not see the mention specific games or examples as any statement about them, they were either recommended, popular or at reach and there is no shortage of other games/examples to use for the limited scope of this article.
Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power.
Maurice Bloch, In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social.
Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
Achille Mbembe, “One Exit From Democracy” to Necropolitics
Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism
Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason
Benjamin Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty
Murray Bookchin, From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism
Andy Merrifield, The Amateur