The Rainy City is a system agnostic setting for any fantasy roleplaying game, designed by Rich Forest. The Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City is now on Kickstarter.
Every now and then I find something peculiar and spectacular on Kickstarter. I almost solely look for roleplaying games and supplements and the other night I spotted the The Visitor’s Guide to Rainy City, a system agnostic setting for a doomed metropolis at the end of the world.
The Rainy City is designed by Rich Forest and is a setting that he has been developing and playing for more than a decade, something which he is very passionate about. The setting is influenced by literature by authors like Jack Vance and Terry Pratchett, the history of great cities (especially London, which has a lot written about it in English), and history and fiction about piracy and the Age of Sail.
The look of the zine evokes the style of an early modern European pamphlet. The interior art by Bill Spytma is in a style he’s developed that emulates the kind of woodcut art you can see in those old pamphlets, which also reminds me a bit of those first roleplaying books I browsed through.
What is the Rainy City?
It’s the end of the world. It always rains. Rain beats against the walls. It seeps through the shutters. It pours off the mossy backs of the gargoyles. It turns streets into streams and rivers.
Teetering, damp towers lean against rotting townhouses thrown together in the ruins of a once gleaming city. Servants dash through storms on petty errands. Fireplaces sputter weakly, and spellbooks filled with moldy spells rot in spite of the protections lavished on them for their precious contents.
The Rainy City is a place where the wizards jealously guard their rotting magical tomes, the gargoyles are always watching, the thieves are on the prowl, and the rains never stop. The Rainy City could be at the edge of Plane of Water, a singular city in your own homebrew setting or even a part of the Forgotten Realms that no one has explored yet.
Since the city is system-agnostic you can drop it into almost any fantasy setting.
