what follows is a city i used in a short lived urban DnD campaign. When i made this city i drew from many many sources and i made it for my personal use, so you may find some references or material here that is not original to me. I have to the best of my ability stripped out anything i am sure belongs to published books or other bloggers but i cant be totally sure.
for this reason i have completely removed the descriptions of district 9 and 10 which were cut more or less wholesale from other sources, i will make something up and update this post eventually or if you want to use this city that badly make something up yourself
if something here belongs to you and i stole it and you feel like sueing me... please don't
THE GREAT CITY OF GON
"A long time ago some asshole came here and built a house on this mountain. They never stopped coming, the assholes I mean."- Unknown
The Great City of Gon is less "great" than it is awful or impossibly huge and it is less a city than it is an ecosystem or a plane of existence. This "Great" city is officially divided into 10 individual smaller cities, or districts, each of which is further divided into quarters. Each of these 10 districts are unified by common architectural, cultural and historical roots but only very loosely. For this reason The "great" city of Gon is sometimes referred to as: the City of a thousand cities, or The City of ten quarters.
Unofficially, the "great" city is a giant mess that is so sprawling that it is impossible to fit into any kind of logical organized structure. For this reason The "great" city of Gon is sometimes referred to as: an urban hellhole
"On the twentieth day we could smell the city but it was another twelve days before any of us saw her. Victor came over a ridge and just stopped moving, he stared out over the plains towards the mountains, then he turned around and started going back the way we came. He probably died out there in the wilds alone. Lucky bastard."- Rigel, Macintosh. Butcher on Grip street district 4.
The "great" City of Gon is ruled by a being known as the "Great" Earth Lord. It is difficult to tell at times who this Great earth Lord is as each of the 10 districts is ruled by a "lesser" earth Lord, each of whom claims the top job from time to time. Rumor has it that for all the squabbling of lesser earth lords, mayors, barons, earls and Tribunes; there has only ever been one "Great" Earth Lord in Gon. They say he sits on a vampire throne and pulls the strings of all the puppets that dance in his city. They say his eyes see all, and that he built the first house and the first street of Gon on the first day at the beginning of time. They say alot of things but of course, the "great" city is probably to big to be ruled. Gon is ruled by hunger, money, greed, fear, and the mob of people trapped inside her.
"Never take a shortcut here unless you have nothing to lose. This place is so tangled up you will end up lost in another world, you might just be one street over from where you wanna be and you will never know it "- Madam Kurtz to her son just before going to visit their neghbour
DISTRICT ONE- The City OF Wells
"I turned the handle and the rope slowly rose up from the pit. My mouth was dry and i smiled at the thought of cool fresh water. When i reached out for the bucket i saw a man in a fine suit hanging from it with one hand, his legs dangling down into the well. He looked at me but i couldn't see his face and i passed out. Three days later i woke up, dripping wet, in my bed. I am ever so thirsty but no water will enter my mouth, it all just pours down my front as if i had no mouth at all as if i were a statue dreaming that i were a thirsty man." - Bertram may, water carrier, Soot street, district 1.
The city of the thousand wells. It is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water. You know you are in this district when you see the green moss crawling gently up buildings and you taste stagnant water in the air. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape hiding beneath the visible one; according to some people, gods live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffolding of a city that moves entirely upward.
This City is the poorest district, though it supply's water to all of Gon. It is also a place of gambling and houses a great area which is flooded to play out naval battles on even days of the month.
Things to get an adventure going:
gods, both pretenders and true deities, have ears everywhere here. they seek a secret name and wait for someone to whisper it aloud
The spirits of many long dried up rivers and lakes come here and ride the buckets in a kind of retirement.
Poor people earn pennies filling buckets of water and carrying them to other districts
An executioner waits near many wells and enforces strange water drawing laws specific to that well.
A troupe of musicians for hire trouble the waters
echoes and whispers, lost children and drowning hands
windmills and machinery, a mysterious girl and a secret power ala a Hayao Miyazaki movie
DISTRICT TWO- The Giant's Maze
Four Lead towers rise from the walls that surround the district. the towers flank seven Lead gates with spring-operated drawbridges. Inside the walls is the Giant's maze, canals, streets, buildings people; everything in District 2 moves when no one is looking. There are houses which no one has entered in a hundred years because their owners have forgotten the trick to find them. There are dead ends and alleys which no one has ever found and no one has ever walked through. The grey maze is a mystery wrapped in a clockwork riddle, wound by a madman.
No one knows why the streets and buildings in the district move though some have speculated that it may have something to do with the liveing slaves who are traditionally bricked into the foundations of new houses when construction has finished. Others have suggested that the city is built atop a sleeping giant who shuffles the buildings in his restlessness. Of course both theories are silly.
Things to get an adventure going:
the murdur of a primary heir to a dieing noblewoman has caused a rush of hopeful and distant relatives
the seventh wife of a mob boss is carrying a local tax collector's child, the mob boss and tax man look nothing alike
a small room bricked shut with scratch marks from fingers on the walls, no bodies
spirits exhausted from holding up a building's foundations lure victims to replace them
a child debating with philosophers in a temple that moves
DISTRICT THREE- The City Of Towers
In the shadows of the massive spires and lopsided towers of District Three hang tangles of wire and thin walkways, broad bridges and balconies below which, roars life. The district is full of drama and action and clashing personalities and it is never quiet. Too many bodies press against too few walls and the buildings quiver at the footsteps of too many people. the District is like a discordant symphony, a farce with too many characters, it is a play, sometimes tragic sometimes comic but always wild and unpredictable and exhilarating. walk there and risk becoming part of someone ele's story. Every room here has at least four doors and every tower reaches a little taller every year. one day the whole thing will surely collapse and The "Great" city of Gon will lose one half of it's population over night, but until then this is the most exiting center of human activity in the city.
The impossible towers of District 3 are held up by the collective will of it's inhabitants and some small touch of magic . Somewhere in that city is an unspeakable daemon of atrocity and rage bound in chains, it is her power that prevents it all from crumbling to the ground
Things to get an adventure going:
a happy girl promised to a gentleman, naive to the danger he represents
An unspeakable daemon of atrocity and rage bound in chains for a thousand years and suddenly aware of a single rusty link in a single chain.
a man chased and another chasing
12 people living in a single apartment, none realize they have roommates through a bizar farce of moving people and revolving doors
a landlord buried in his apartment by thousands of envelops paying for rent. he shovels them out the window as fast as they come in the mail slot.
DISTRICT FOUR- The Rubble City
The Rubble City is a place of shadows and shades. Once long long ago the district was a massive Arcane tower of impossible height and enormous diameter, owned by a powerful Earth Lord. The Lord's name was lost along with the tower's purpose on the day of the cataclysm that brought it crashing to the ground.
Now the withered termite mound of rubble left over from this tower forms the district. It is a city of tunnels and warrens, dug down into the ruin. a city of catacombs and opulent mansions, ruined halls and rooms that somehow survived the tower's fall. The memories of the dead linger there and treasure hunters constantly burrow through the district looking for arcane artifacts. millions of books from the towers many lost libraries are used as bricks to build homes. Gargoyles that used to perch on the tower's extereor, are hollowed out to make grotesque mansions. Anything lieing on the ground might be an item of incredible magical power or a vital piece of a thousand year old puzzle, or a lump of mundane trash. Most people who live there have learned not to mess with things that might be from the tower's magical past.
Things to get an adventure going:
A Rubble digging slave who has broken his bonds and his master's skull
A Statue, home to manny birds
The corpse of a lord's hound caught in a pile of rubble
artifact hunters equipped for drowsing magical mysteries
militant scholars who actively demolish homes to claim the books that they are made of
"Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as The Rubble City. It was dusk when I arrived there. Before me, in-front of a long abandoned building stood a street performer who resembled a man I had soldiered with and whom i knew was dead. There was an old man selling dried meats in the street, when I turned, he had disappeared down an alley, but I realized he looked like a fisherman who, already old when I was a child, could no longer be among the living. I was upset by the sight of a fever victim huddled on the ground, a blanket over his head: my father a few days before his death had yellow eyes and a growth of beard like this man. I turned my gaze aside; I no longer dared look anyone in the face." - a visitor to the Rubble city
DISTRICT FIVE- Sty, The City Of Eyes
Vast is Sty, the City of eyes, city of goblins and brutalist sculptures of ice. The district is sharp and hard and carnivorous, the streets there are said to eat flesh and drink cold blood from dead veins. The buildings are squalid and nearly as sad as the people within. The district clutches to the steepest and most absurdly inhospitable reaches of the mountains upon which The "great" city of Gon is built. If Gon has a political heart it is district five, the most rich and the most corrupt play games of power in the grey-black streets. their are duels and betrayals and the muffled screams of murdered children at all times of the day.
The people of the district are intense and infectiously melancholy in the way that usualy only Russians seem to be able to pull off. Unless they are dealing with vengeance or actively snuffing out their opponents they are universally reserved dull and certainly depressed.
Things to get an adventure going:
a wizard who claims that only those that truly hate themselves can learn magic. after all only the truly self loathing person has sufficient motivation to alter reality and make themself happy.
the owner of a banquet hall which is often rented out for noble weddings, keeps assassins on staff for obvious reasons.
a man who is literally on fire, headed to kill rival before he burns to death
a cluster of goblin architects
a street where vodka pools one inch deep on the road and in gutters,
DISTRICT SIX- The City Of Pigs
The city of pigs is a large area of shallow pools and sucking waters along the outer rim of Gon where all the sewage from every district is dumped. mushrooms and weeds grow around the stilted platforms and raised roads upon which the people of his district live. strange men squeeze between the moldy shacks and odd sounds gurgle up from below the boardwalk streets. On occasion the people who live there are afflicted with horrid plagues, mutations and symbiotic growths. It is the least populated of all the districts and yet one of the most wealthy as it is responsible for most of the food, that feeds the ravenous masses of Gon.
the food is grown in the black tar that boils with bacteria in the stinking basin that is the city of pigs.
Things to get an adventure going:
newcomers to the city lost and regrettful
a child stuck in the slime beneath the wooden street and a dozen dead adults drowned in failed rescue attempts
a man with four faces who offers trinkets in exchange for just a bte of fresh food
farmers on stilts, wadeing through night soil as something slithers after them
DISTRICT SEVEN- Burg, The Iron City
The city is industry hammered into the shape of buildings. Hot iron, hot tempers poisonous fumes and rust. oh the rust, it falls from the buildings like a red rain and piles in the streets like bloody snow. The rust crawls into your hair and your lungs and your mouth and soon enough the world tastes like blood and your heart starts to beat with the rhythm of hammers and anvils. As the city rusts away to nothing it is built back up again and with each re-forging it is made harder and less kind. everything is a fortress in the iron city. the mines beneath Burg run deep and the metals rise up in neat rows as slaves are herded down in ordered columns, never to return. Live there and you live in the hot red mist of rust and blood.
DISTRICT EIGHT- The Opium Nightmare
thick clouds of addictive and hallucinogenic mists, conceal the endless fever dream that is district 8. Few recall exactly what the city is like, what lives there, or what sort of people call it home. it is not known who rules district 8.. perhaps a euphoric Dijinn... or perhaps a salamander god from the early ages of the world... or perhaps a tiger headed wizard... or perhaps it is only the smoke of the opium that rules there.
DISTRICT NINE- The City of Gold
coming soon
DISTRICT TEN- The Greater Palace
coming soon
