Oculus - The Upside-down City

Dungeons and Dragons settings are pretty well cut out at this point. It says so in The Dungeon Master’s Guide, that the world is made of a few bastions of civilization, with immense wilderness and unexplored dungeons in between. This is all very true, but a lot of the time, cities end up looking pretty similar to what we know: buildings in a collection, some taller than the other, all-around high walls to keep the people safe from the threats beyond. That’s all well and good, but as Tom Hardy said in Inception, “you mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

The Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Corona - a 16th Century Church in our world built into the mountain

Oculus, The Hanging City

The landscape of the hanging city is so clear in my head, but there's no artwork like it, and such a city is kind of impossible by our architecture. In a game with Dragons, Gods, and people able to walk between worlds, impossible architecture is something we should really have more of. As a group of travelers walk over a range of hills, they'll eventually see it cutting the horizon open. The shape of it is like an open umbrella or a golf tee. A thin spire perfectly in the middle, with a great dome spreading out from the top.

Seven tunnels lead from the plains surrounding Oculus, up to the city's outer streets. These tunnels, lovingly called “the legs” by locals, hold the structure in place, and allow travel into the city from the surface. As years went on, the tunnels have been constantly reinforced to make sure that they can help keep Oculus upright, as too big a seismic shock in the area can send the whole structure, and everyone living within toppling to the ground.

Oculus was once built on an immense hill, something around the size of Australia's Uluru, but in a much more green surrounding. As settlers in that land dug under the hill, they found the soil itself was rich in clay, and great for making bricks. As they dug out more and more of the earth, all that was eventually left after a thousand years, was their underground homes, hanging from the bottom of what was left of the hill. Out of resources, most of the settlers moved on, but not without selling the remains of their hill to nearby wealthy lords.

The Meteora Monasteries - Buildings in our world built out of the rock itself

In the time since the city was founded, people have found unique ways to live. Bridges between the hanging buildings are how people stay connected. Thrill seekers often travel quickly by jumping between levels and from bridge to bridge. People raised in Oculus feel no real fear of heights and vertigo is a foreign concept, while visitors are often encouraged not to look down.

With a unique landscape like that, one hundreds of feet up, and on catwalks and bridges, people must ask if it's a safe place to live. It's not. Lucky for you, the powers that be in Oculus have magical fixes for that. In the unlikely event that a guard rail breaks and someone tumbles to the scraggy brown rock under the city, runic magic carved into the pit by the first settlers would “catch” you and send you back to governmental buildings up. The falling person pays a small “tumble fine” to cover costs of the magic used, and they report where they fell before going on their way. Criminal enterprises often strap items that negate magical effects to their victims before sending them on a plunge.

This is a city I've used often own games, and I encourage Game Masters out there to adapt this strange living model to their own world. It'd even work in a science fiction RPG, changing the magic for targeted teleport systems, or drones that catch you and fly you back up. There'll be plenty more location spotlights on the Apotheosis Studios blog, but places that are smaller than a city, but just as full of life.

Now we want to hear from you. How would living in a strange city like this affect the people and the adventurers in your games? Do you have strange or unique cities like this in your worlds? Let us know in the comments below!

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.