Neon city

Neon city
Neon signs stacked up the buildings of a street in Kabukichō, Shinjuku, Tokyo, at night · Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

A megacity of towers so tall the streets below never see the sun, lit instead by signs in every colour. Underpasses, night markets and nightclubs are packed at every hour, and millions live in flats the size of a cupboard. Everything has a price here, a camera is always watching, and the gangs and the companies split the streets between them.

Light
Lit
Going
Easy

Hear it

Hazards

  • Smog and smoke. Exhaust, factory fumes or the smoke of burning wrecks hang in the still air. On a bad day it stings the eyes and the throat, and the far side of the street is a blur. D&D 5e: Ordinary smog is Lightly Obscured: Disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight. Thick smoke is Heavily Obscured: a creature trying to see something in it has the Blinded condition. Starfinder 2e: Smoke (GM Core): a circumstance penalty to visual Perception checks, by how thick it is; creatures seen through a lot of it are concealed, and it cuts off all sight at half a mile or less. Archives of Nethys
  • Crowds. Bodies shoulder to shoulder in the markets, the stations and the queues. A crowd hides whoever wants to vanish, slows whoever wants to run, and stands between a shooter and the target. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: a packed crowd is Difficult Terrain (each foot of movement costs 1 extra foot) and gives Half Cover against ranged attacks. A ranged attack that misses a target in the crowd by 5 or more hits a bystander.
  • Watched streets. Cameras on every corner, face scanners at every gate, drones overhead. Every face is logged somewhere, and a face someone is looking for draws security within minutes. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: for each hour a wanted creature spends in the open, roll a d6; on a 1 or 2 it has been recognised, and security arrives in 1d4 × 10 minutes. A good disguise, or a DC 13 Intelligence (Investigation) check to plan a route through the blind spots, makes it a 1 only.
  • Crossfire. A gang quarrel, a raid or a battle line: shooting breaks out with little warning, and rounds go through thin walls and parked cars as if they were paper. D&D 5e (House rule): House rule: while a firefight goes on nearby, each creature caught in the open makes a DC 12 Dexterity saving throw at the start of each round, taking 2d6 Piercing damage on a failure. A creature behind Half Cover or better is spared.

What may happen

  1. Warm, oily rain falls on the avenue, and every puddle holds the reflection of an advert in a script nobody in the party reads.
  2. A noodle stall under the overpass serves eleven customers at once on four stools, and the cook never looks up from the steam.
  3. An advertising drone follows the party for a block, singing a jingle with the name of someone in the party spliced into it.
  4. Behind a laundry, a market sells weapons, medicine and borrowed identities by the hour; the seller wants paying in a currency the party does not carry.
  5. A whole district goes dark for ninety seconds. Without the hum of the signs, the street can hear the rain.
  6. The queue outside a nightclub runs round the block; the bouncer lets in one guest in ten, and a man near the door offers his place for a price.
  7. The same grey car has stayed two turns behind the party for the last kilometre.
  8. A family of six lives in a flat the size of a lift; the beds fold into the wall, and the grandmother sleeps sitting up by the window.
  9. A back-alley surgeon fits cheap implants in a shuttered shop, and one of her patients is bleeding on the pavement outside.
  10. Smog warning: the sky is the colour of weak tea, and the vending machines sell filter masks at twice yesterday’s price.
  11. A small child cries in the crowd of a night market; the bracelet on her wrist blinks an address three levels down.
  12. Three youths with painted faces have closed the underpass and charge a toll to cross.
  13. Corporate security in matte armour seal a tower lobby. On the street nobody looks at them, and nobody walks past either.
  14. A running courier bumps into the party, presses a data chip into someone’s hand and is gone into the crowd before anyone can speak.
  15. Forty floors above the street, an old man grows tomatoes on a rooftop under a grow lamp wired to the building’s sign.
  16. A karaoke bar empties into the street in a brawl over whose turn it was.
  17. A billboard flashes a wanted face that looks a lot like someone in the party, above a reward in large figures.
  18. The lift of a hundred-storey block has been dead for a week; on the stairs, people sell water by the landing.
  19. In a booth at the back of an all-night diner, a fixer has a job that pays well and starts tonight.
  20. Three shots, two streets away, then sirens that never come any closer.
  21. In the press of the crowd, a hand brushes a pocket a little too lightly.
  22. Flying cabs stack in layers above the avenue, their lights a slow river; far below, a cyclist weaves between stalled trucks.
  23. A torn power cable sparks over a flooded alley the party has to cross.
  24. At dawn the signs switch off block by block, and the city turns grey and ordinary.
  25. Two debt collectors drag a man out of a capsule hotel; he shouts that he has already paid.

Adventure hooks

  1. A data broker pays well for one file kept in a corporate tower, and the last two crews she hired never came back down.
  2. A nightclub owner wants guards for one night: the night a rival gang has promised to burn her club down.
  3. A street surgeon has found a tracking chip in a patient and wants to know who put it there before they come looking for it.
  4. Every night for an hour the cameras go blind across six blocks, and no one official will admit it.

Who and what is met

Each is an SRD stat block under another name, as game masters reskin them.

Other places among the stars

Orbital station, Derelict ship, Colony outpost, Precursor ruin, Asteroid field, Gas giant orbit, Deep space relay, Terraforming works, Prison hulk, Research lab, Crashed freighter, Nebula, Junktown, Spaceport, War front, Alien hive, Living ship, Undersea base, Lava foundry

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 ("SRD 5.2.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

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