 Goto [ Index ] |
Dreaming Cities - the Book
The book is a sturdy 272 page hard cover, printed on durable paper. I can tell, because Dreaming Cities followed me into a rainstorm and survived with only little water damage on the corners of the cover. We can be glad that it was build to last, as the publisher closed down this year and it will probably be quite hard to find a copy of this book in the near future.
Artwork & Layout
To be a bit blunt, the cover of Dreaming Cities, a color piece by Marta Dahlig, sucks. Big time. It is basically just a guy and a woman in a bad blend of street wear and Celtic chick in front of a huge tree (Yggdrasil? see the World at Twilight setting…), accompanied by two ravens with gleaming eyes (some more Norse symbolism, now that I think of it). In the background, a city with gleaming skyscrapers in front of a lake or river. This might sound like an evocative starting point, but the two (human?) characters are a bit strange concerning their proportions and, at least to me, the whole piece wasn’t able to get out any reaction from me.
Fortunately, the interior black and white art by Adam Jury, Kelly Hamilton, Anne Rouvin, Melissa Uran, and UDON, is much, much better and leaves little to be desired. I like the fact that the three mini settings each have their “own” artist with styles that match the genres. All interior art is in the form of two page spreads. That’s right, there are no pictures within the text whatsoever.
And while the spreads are great, the rest of the book is what we call “Bleiwüste” (lead waste/ desert) in German – pages upon pages full of tightly packed printing in small letters. Although one might say that this is a good use of space this makes Dreaming Cities tiring to read. I guess that in a White Wolf style layout, the text would in fact have been spread out on 500 pages.
Dreaming Cities - the Content
Dreaming Cities is divided into 14 chapters, ranging from 2 to 42 pages. I will not go through the book chapter by chapter but will divide it into three parts: set up and game mastering, rules, and settings.
Set up and Game Mastering (Chapter 1 and 11)
Dreaming Cities is supposed to be a toolbox for building your own urban fantasy campaign. Like many “universal” games, the writing style is less evocative than that of more focused games. On the other hand, what it does make rather clear is what urban fantasy is about, with the most complete genre explanation including numerous sources (novels, films, and roleplaying games) that I have ever seen in a game.
The actual game mastering advice is somewhat of a mixed bag. There is only a very general explanation about what gaming is and next to nothing on GMing techniques. On the other hand, we get a rather long entry on how to run online and convention games. While especially the section on conventions makes a lot of sense (building characters beforehand, some useful advice on time management), it is a slightly odd text. First of all, there is nothing Dreaming Cities specific here, so it could have been in any RPG. At the same time, all the other GMing advice is missing, so why is only this here?
Most of the game mastering section is focused on how to create urban fantasy specific themes. While this may sound like a good idea, a problem I had is that the themes are explained with examples which remain unspecific (as this is a toolbox) without giving any general explanations on how to use them. Something like checklists might have been nice.
There is another problem embedded in this: while Dreaming Cities is supposed to be universal, the rules (see below) and the way of writing clearly present only certain ways of urban fantasy - the heroic, the fantastic - and less gritty or mysterious styles of play which would certainly also be possible.
Rules
I haven’t actually played Dreaming Cities, but given that this is not the first incarnation of the Tri Stat system, I will assume that the rules work. Nevertheless, reading them gives of a different vibe. While this may be just a gut feeling, they appear very unintuitive and more complex at a second glance than I first thought. One reason is the customizability of the rules.
The basic die roll is two dice which have to be rolled below or equal to a combination of one of the three stats (body, mind, soul) and an appropriate skill. The dice used depend on the campaign level, which is supposed to make an adjustment between different settings easier. Sounds easy? Well, during the game it probably is, but can you guess how hard it was to find this out by reading the book? It is on page 96, after about 80 pages of tightly packed rules. This happily continues with an unbelievable “combat flowchart” on page 99, which looks menacing to anyone who would like to use it. The actual combat rules are so easy, that you don’t even need the chart!
The core of Dreaming Cities is the attributes, though. Attributes are special qualities a character might have, many of them being supernatural powers (which makes the magic system somewhat redundant). Again, there are scaling rules and attributes are deliberately written in very general terms. You can make them cheaper at character creation by adding “defects”. Certain combinations of attributes, restrictions of attributes, and other defects will be used to emulate classic powers of supernatural powers, for instance linking shape-changing to phases of the moon or whatever. There are so many options and possibilities here that I don’t know where one could start or end. Chapter 7 offers some templates, but they only scratch the surface.
The rest of the rules seem solid, though a very theoretical language and the use of terms such as anaemic (page 265, I was too lazy to pick up a dictionary to check what it means) don’t make Dreaming Cities fun to read. To add insult to injury, the appendices with the equipment and rules for breaking objects only have page references to “p. xxx” . On the plus side the book has a comprehensive index, but the letter size is impossibly small (6?!).
The Three Settings
Something I was looking forward to after fighting my way through 180 pages of boredom while on the commuter train were the three fleshed out mini settings. Although none of them could really make me want to play the game, they all deserve to be dealt with separately.
Nightmare Chronicles by Jamais Cascio
The first setting is based on the idea that demon like beings from another dimension called Ashigath have contacted earth and have agents here. They and their world appear as nightmarish things to us and vice versa. Player characters will be one of the few people in the know, who have an ability to see the creatures for what they are. There are a number of magic options as well. All in all a lot like Hunter: the Reckoning. In contrast to the next two settings, this is about grand plans and world conspiracies. I had hoped that one could do more with Dreaming Cities…
World at Twilight by Jason Blair & Liz Rich
This is basically human avatars of legendary creatures which have returned to a generic North American city. There are numerous NPCs with little background stories, most of them bad puns based on legends or fairy tales (“Hank and Greta”). This is sad, because the setting has some potential, if the authors just hadn’t stuck so close to the framework of unnecessary references and made World at Twilight more metaphorical and more fantastic.
Small Folk by Phil Masters
Probably the most focused and well thought out setting, just not my cup of tea. You play small folk - tiny gnomish humanoids, which are organized into different socio-cultural cliques with different supernatural powers. These cliques are named after the classic fairy kinds, like goblins, sprites, or knockers. There is extensive information on the small folk’s physiology, society and way of thinking as well as plenty of useful story ideas. It just feels too much like a Disney movie to me…
Dreaming Cities can certainly be used for fun games of urban fantasy. It is just a terribly boring read and I don’t see how I will use it for a game. I will be happy to try it out as a player though.
