Making Lychgate Part I: The Map

Medieval Riga, Seat of the head of the real Sword Brothers

This is the first in a series of posts where I want to outline a playable version of the city of Lychgate, the seat of the bishopric that includes the territory of Nightwick Abbey.  I have technically run it before but only in very vague terms. I want to correct that and also just have a city of my own make to run city adventures in.

Specifically I want it to be an adventure site, but perhaps a little less chaotic than the City State of the Invincible Overlord.  The first season of Netflix's Castlevania series has a scene where some priests try to mug a guy, which is about right.

I was originally inspired to do this by Jeff Russell's Middenheim project, as well as the original presentation of Middenheim and Chris Kutalik's Fever Dreaming Marlinko. More recently I've been running the City State of the Invincible Overlord again and am debating incorporating some aspects of that into my presentation. I'm still on the fence about some aspects, and part of the purpose of doing these posts is to make up my mind one way or the other.

On to the map.  I knew I wanted a map in some way based off of Riga because, as I noted in the caption to the picture, it was the seat of the real world Livonian Brothers of the Sword.  However I had to  make it line up with the River Deep and Dark River as they appear on the "official" Dark Country map.  When I was still thinking of primarily designing it by district, I turned it on its side and made this:

The districts are...

Red - The Fires (once slums but then a series of fires occurred allowing the Bishop room to build a new palace and his cronies some nice houses).

Purple - The Low District (Slums)

Orange - The Old Fortress (Middle Class and Upper Residential)
Yellow - The New City (Middle and Lower Residential and market area)

Blue - The Market District (Duh)

Green - The Shanty Town (totally burned to the ground the last time the PCs visited, likely rebuilt by refugees after the recent battle).

These are still going to be the district locations in the final version, but I debated doing a more CSIO-style street by street stocking and made this map just yesterday:

I have a hand written version with a couple of the unnamed streets on here named but no scanner.  In hindsight I have decided to rename the Street of Swords Half Moon Street.

If I end up focusing on districts then I wasted some time coming up with street names.  If I do the more CSIO model I'll still need the districts for encounter table purposes so it was worth my time.  The next couple of posts likely won't need me to make a decision one way or the other anyway.

Next up will be an overview of the city, the watch, and religion.