As I mentioned last week, I’ve spent the last three years working on a big “city” book for D&D-adjacent games called Pathika, and it’s now text-complete. Below is a snippet taken from the book’s introduction: 

Excerpt from the intro

“Live Free. Burn Bright. Die By Moonlight. 

Vagrants: dreamers who never accepted their true lots in life. They scheme and scavenge their fortunes as adventurers, chasing glory in dark holes. ‘My stars foretell greatness!’ they exclaim as they lie looking up from haystacks, forest floors, and cobblestone streets. Some become heroes for a day, but all are destined to be debtors, charlatans, criminals, absent parents, or ungrateful children, drunk on all that the wise discard. 

Excitement. Individuality. Delusions of grandeur. Belief in a world that will accommodate their fancies if only they give chase. These are the things that cast a vagrant out of proper society. 

Pathika is different. Pathika is home to all vagrants, even those who have yet to step foot within its limits, and all who live in Pathika choose it every morning, as they look at their go-bags and their spare identities, and decide it is not yet time to leave. 

Pathika is hungry. It has arable land, but its farmers come and go with their interests. Much of the food is hunted and gathered from the frontier, which offers limitless, unpredictable discovery and no guarantee of return. Its people accept this. They believe life is only lived in motion. This city is their compromise. 

Pathika is unstable. An entire generation of artisans, scientists, and philosophers could perish in the frontier. Sometimes technology regresses to the bronze age for months at a time, until replacements are recruited from the place some call the Real World. Knowledge is treasured here, but it is fragile. 

Pathika is free. There are rules in Pathika, but they change often, and challenges to authority are immediate and effectual. Pathika’s resistance to structure can make the mundane necessities of life difficult, but its inhabitants would have it no other way. 

Pathika is ours. It is a haven for the romantic, the daring, the unbound. The people of Pathika don’t fit in anywhere else. Here, no one believes they should. This is why, in spite of all its hardships, its population grows.

In your game, Pathika is meant to be a highly unorthodox city, a beacon in the dark of the mundane. And it is always on the brink of collapse.”

The Gist 

Pathika is a melting pot settlement you can place in some corner of your campaign world, preferably on the border of some region that is rife with treasure. While this is a city book, the word “city” is aspirational, as Pathika will change drastically as your campaign develops. Entire districts will spring up or burn to the ground as crises come and go, and the technology level of the city will shift back and forth depending on its population and what is scavenged from the frontier. Some of this change will come from your players’ actions, and some will come simply from the passage of time. 

Unlike other cities, Pathika’s economy revolves around adventuring and scavenging. Adventurers, known here as “vagrants”, comprise the majority of the town’s population and organize themselves into guilds. These guilds each have their own organization, culture and goals, but almost all of them spend at least some amount of time combing dungeons for treasure. Imagine the hub towns from Etrian Odyssey or perhaps a city-wide version of Gilgamesh’s Tavern from Wizardry, and you’ve got a rough idea. 

Pathika is a city of heroes, criminals, dreamers and schemers, and its culture reflects that. Vagrants tend to be fiercely independent, competitive, stylish and ambitious. Most of what gets done in the city is a byproduct of someone trying to one-up their rivals, ensure success on their guild’s next expedition, win the admiration of their lovers and fans, or achieve cultural (or literal) immortality. It’s not a planned city, and in fact resists any attempts at top-down control. While there is a city government, it exists almost as a formality, and primarily acts as a buffer and facilitator of the various guild agreements that keep the peace. Pathika has written laws and a legal system, but all exercise of municipal power must come with the tacit approval of the guilds as a collective. 

While the book will give ample tools and guidance on generating your own version of the city, it includes a pre-written take on Pathika that you can use a base. This version of the city is the one from my own campaign, and takes inspiration primarily from Caribbean, Indian and Chinese culture. Where other fantasy settings may be derived from heavy metal and science fantasy novels, this city leans more toward hip hop and wuxia. However, the book is designed to be useful to those with different aesthetic preferences. 

In the coming weeks, I’ll be doing previews of individual portions of the book and some dev logs on the how and why of the book’s design, but for now enjoy an overview of the table of contents:

A couple things that may not be obvious from the TOC: 

•  “Single Use Magic Items” is a list of 50 consumable magic items of the kind you saw in my previous blog post.
•  “Found on a Vagrant” is a d100 table of items to find in vagrants’ stashes, on their bodies, etc. 
• “108 Vagrants” is a detailed list of 108 sample NPCs designed so that you can flip to a random page whenever you need a character to fill any role in Pathika. As people change jobs or find their fortunes flipped frequently in the city, you don’t need to be particular about who you roll up. You’ll see some samples from this sprinkled in with the other previews to come. 

If you’re interested in updates on Pathika and want to help me secure the budget it needs for a full production book and print run, please join the mailing list and also consider following me on Twitter!

The header image is a rendition of the headquarters from Suikoden, a fantasy reimagining of the Chinese classic Water Margin that is one of the major inspirations for the book. Fanart by Suo.