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Gumei [IPA 'gume] is actually a partially intact city from the previous civilization. It is surrounded by mile high sticky pink walls. About 12 years ago, a section of the wall spontaneously opened, allowing people to enter the city. Explorers and wastrels flocked to discover and harness fully functioning artifacts from the previous age and were disappointed to find that most of the city lay ruined. Some of the buildings near the open gate were still sturdy and were settled and slowly humans have migrated deeper into the city.
As people have explored Gumei, they have discovered that the city moves around. Shops will be reordered on the block overnight, and entire blocks will vanish and reappear elsewhere nearby. This makes traveling anywhere rather difficult as even the most seasoned explorers can get lost when all the landmarks switch around and invert themselves. Curiously, the children born in Gumei are never disoriented by the changes and many seem to delight in the disorientation of the adults around them.
As per Justin's suggestions, I thought about what kinds of things one might find in a medieval town dropped on top of a modern metropolis and I got 6+2 districts.
1. Threshold is the cluster of buildings surrounding the gate. The Pink Wardens guard the gate and demand a toll from all who seek to enter Gumei. They are puritanical and corrupt. The buildings are concrete bunkers with slits for windows and the streets.
2. Emergence is a mostly underground complex of broad halls and twisting passageways. Think Grand Central Station in New York or King's Cross Station in London with levels of shops and accessways sitting above tunnels that run everywhere in the city. The lights work in the shop levels. The tunnels sometimes have light and sometimes don't. There are dark things that live in the tunnels and those foolish enough to venture into the dark don't come back. The protected environment has made Emergence a haven for engineers, merchants, and scholars and is the local headquarters for the Order of Truth. It is also the home for a mysterious group called the Tailors, who like to harvest the skins of other people and masquerade as them for a while. Those who lose their skins sometimes break out of crates and closets in Emergence and cause havoc for a while before being put down. The Wool Merchants, the local thieves guild, also makes their home in Emergence.
3. The Street of Blue Lamps is the entertainment, residential, and red light district in Gumei. Every street is lined with golden stalks crowned by blue bulbs which glow with all kinds of light during the night. While there are places to stay in the other districts, the best and worst are found on the Street of Blue Lamps. The Knobbleheads act as protectors for the innkeepers, pimps, and prostitutes. They are crude but have unimpeachable honor. They are vying for control of Emergence and are chiefly opposed by the Pink Wardens and the Wool Merchants.
4. Radiance is under about 10 feet of water, some of which is actually acid and some of which is highly electrified. Rising from the water in the middle of the district is an old carnival with rides that sometimes work, mirror houses that are actually gateways to subdimensions, and houses of horror that are very hungry. Gangs of rabid urchins monkey around the carnival grounds as do robot mimes and hungry magician's boxes.
5. Watermill is where a river enters into Gumei and is channeled through a number of byzantine machines into small pipes and thence everywhere in Gumei. The Engineers, a small enclave of nanos and engineer/scholar types reside in Watermill, studying how all of the machines work. Dargrim's Institute of Technology, a school for nanos, is also housed in Watermill.
6. The last district is Statuary, a huge park in the center of a ruined urban center (like New York's Central Park or, well, all of the gardens in London). It is filled with tall trees and plants of every possible kind. It is also decorated by an uncountable number of grimacing statues. People who enter Statuary at night don't come out again, and some say there is a terrifying tribe living in the trees armed with petrification guns.
The 6 districts are the safe areas of Gumei. The +2 refer to the rest of the city - the ruined portion and Bulwark, a fully intact series of spires cordoned off from the rest of the world by a disintegration field. The ruins are inhabited by squat yellow creatures with sharp teeth and a love of toppling buildings on top of would-be explorers, sentient red mold that replaces organic materials with inert metals, and green mold-spiders that lurk and wait in the dark corners for prey to come along.
I tried several different ways to map out Gumei, starting with Zak S's slacker urbancrawl rules (here) but my lack of colored pens made keeping track of which district went where and how it all connected in a meaningful way difficult. Then I realized that I could abstract the connections even more, using a pointcrawl. So, I started with Threshold, which is the only district that has any kind of a fixed location with regard to the outside world, rolled a d6 for the number of connections and then rolled a d8 to see to which district each connection leads (ignoring repeats). I ended up with something like this:
After cleaning up the drawing and changing one of the links so that I didn't have crossing pathways, I ended up with a pointcrawl map that looks like this:
Each of the notches on a route corresponds to an hour of travel and a random encounter check drawn from a generic Gumei table. Each district will have its own encounter table for rolling encounters within the district, and I'll probably post those later.
The tunnel system (and using child-guides) would allow players to bypass this system and get places faster, but with a chance of ending up in an unexpected and probably worse place.
Thoughts?
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