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Saturday, February 8, 2014

Bruno Faidutti's Citadels as an RPG city generator

One of the better games in Fantasy Flight's series of small boxed board and card games is Bruno Faidutti's Citadels. It is a card game in which rival players are each trying to build the most prosperous city. There is a buildings deck with a variety of buildings of various powers that the players try to build into their cities and a characters deck with each player having one of the character role cards and that card's special power in a turn (King, Bishop, Assassin, Thief, Warlord, etc). Its a good design and I recommend it to people who play multiplayer games who don't know how many people will show up as it will play well in a fairly broad range of player numbers. It says 2-8, but I'd guess 4 as about the minimum to be interesting. 

Anyway, assuming you have it around, draws from its decks can be an alternative to dice tables for answering questions like "What significant buildings are in this town?", "Who are the important civic leaders?", "What's the next important building the PCs will see going down this street?", "There's a carriage being held up, who's in it?", or even the arrangement of the city by laying a tableau, and then maybe making a couple of swaps to group things sensibly like putting the training ground, mistranslated as "Battle Field" on the card, next to the castle or the fortress.  You might even use the mistranslation literally and have the Battle Field mean the last laid building is being contested, and draw a couple of the character cards for who is contensting it, or a part of the city ruined in a previous siege or as an encounter activation if drawing as the PCs move through the city.


2 comments:

  1. Fantastic idea. I've tried to adapt it to my style of gaming here: http://2ndage.blogspot.com/2014/03/yarg-yet-another-random-generator.html

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    1. That is a cool development of the idea. Thanks for the comment and link.

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