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Dungeon Delving can be delightful. Wandering in the wilderness is a wonderful way to pass the time. But for the ultimate in opportunity, intrigue, and unexpected danger, try visiting the nearest village, town, or city.
A city is much more than a rest stop, a watering hole, or a placee to but equipment. Any community, from the smallest hamlet ot the most crowded medievial metropolis, offers adventuring possibilities that can't be found in any other environment. Cities of Mystery describes for the Dungeon Master how to create realistic, exciting, and vibrant communities-and gives him the tools to make his creations com alive.
Inside this folder are 12 different street layout patterns that can be combined in a multitude of ways, plus 33 buildings of various shapes and sizes that can be cut out and assembled. The components, scaled for use with 25mm miniature figures, allow you to create three-dimensional city scenes for characters to explore. Also included is a 64-page book that takes you step by step through the process of defining and designing the villages, towns, and cities of your campaign world. The book contains five adventure scenarios that make use of the street layouts and fold-up buildings-ideas designed to get you started on the way to making your cities come alive.
Product History
FR8: Cities of Mystery (1989), by Jean Rabe, is the eighth Forgotten Realms supplement. It was published in June 1989.
Origins: FR Modules. The early AD&D 2e (1989) "FR" adventures were quite varied. Following the NPCs of FR7: Hall of Heroes" (1989), this boxed set was all about designing cities — and not really about the Forgotten Realms at all, despite the branding.
City Tropes. How do you design a city? TSR had many answers for that question over the years; the methodology of Cities of Mystery is surely the most analytical, asking numerous questions like where to put the city, what size it is, and what sort of government it has. There's even a "city design sheet" which provides a place to list all your answers. In fact this supplement feels the most like the design methods of Traveller (1977), where worlds were detailed by combining multiple choices from multiple lists into a unique whole.
Random businesses and random encounters help to fill out the details of the city; this is a design style that was more commonly used for D&D cities.
About the Accessories. Though Cities of Mystery has a hefty 64-page city book, the heart of the supplement is its square-gridded battle mat and the fold-up three-dimensional buildings that can be placed on it.
This sort of battle map was extremely rare in the late '80s, a full decade before D&D went fully tactical. However it was a close match for the mat and buildings in the two "3-D Dragon Tiles" accessories for Basic D&D, "AC3" (1984) and "AC8" (1985). It also precisely matches the numerous fold-up buildings found in the "WGA" series (1990) of Greyhawk adventures.
Adventure Tropes. A number of short encounters end the book. They tend to be just one or two scenes each, of similar length to the adventures in TSR's "Lair" books (1986+). Each adventure features an encounter built using a few of the battle mats and buildings, showing their power as a new style of full-color, three-dimensional geomorphs.
Exploring the Realms. Despite the branding, this supplement has virtually
nothing to do with the Realms. It's a generic supplement on creating cities, followed by some generic adventures, and a bunch of generic accessories.
About the Creators. Rabe was the Network Coordinator of the RPGA in 1989, working on products like LC1: "Gateway to Ravens Bluff, The Living City" (1989). This was one of her first digressions into the larger world of D&D design.