A City That Remembers Its Dead
In my previous Design Journal entry Custodians of the Final Passage, I explored how a player's love of necromancy gradually grew into an entire class and profession. But somewhere along the way, another question emerged: what kind of world would these characters actually inhabit?
Finding the Right Kind of City
The profession had already grown into something much larger than a handful of spellcasters. There were established institutions, administrative procedures, Clericals, ledgers, and generations of accumulated knowledge.
This institutional side of the worldbuilding started nudging my imagination toward murder mystery and detective stories.
After all, a profession responsible for shepherding souls would presumably encounter its fair share of unusual circumstances. Missing records, wandering spirits, unresolved deaths, and all sorts of situations that might require someone to do a little investigating.
That was an appealing direction.
And once I started thinking about detective adventures in an urban setting, noir wasn't far behind.
I've always enjoyed that familiar style of detective storytelling. The investigators, the clients, the mysteries, and the occasional realization that a seemingly straightforward job is considerably more complicated than anyone initially suggested.
But I didn't particularly want to build a 1920s-inspired fantasy city.
I liked the atmosphere and storytelling possibilities of noir, but I wanted to explore them in a setting that felt a little further removed from the modern world.
Part of that decision also came back to the player who had inspired the Necromancer class in the first place. Their interests in particular kinds of technology, settings, and themes were still very much on my mind, alongside my own preferences.
I wanted somewhere we'd both enjoy spending time.
A city that had developed beyond the traditional medieval fantasy period, with established institutions, recognizable professions, and a certain amount of technological convenience, but without feeling truly modern.
There were several possible directions.
French or English architectural influences could have worked quite well. But the more I considered the possibilities, the more I found myself drawn toward something Venetian.
The canals, bridges, narrow streets, and buildings crowded along the waterfront offered a distinctive urban environment. One that could feel romantic and beautiful in one moment, and rather mysterious in another.
And I suspect the lingering influence of the Necromancer's River of Death had something to do with that attraction.
I'd already spent so much time thinking about Ferrymen, crossings, and waterways that a city built around canals felt like a natural place for those ideas to settle.
Not because the city's canals needed to literally represent the River of Death, but because I liked the thematic connection.
And with that, I was beginning to picture the kind of place these characters might call home.
A Different Kind of Progress
Once I had a clearer picture of the city itself, another question started taking shape.
If this was a world where magic and arcane potential had existed alongside ordinary civilization for generations, what would technological progress actually look like?
After all, people would still be inventing things, developing infrastructure, and finding ways to make everyday life a little easier.
But they wouldn't necessarily be following the same technological path we did.
Magic would simply be another tool available to them.
That opened up some interesting possibilities.
A city might have public transportation in the form of magically powered trolleys. Streets could be illuminated by spritelamps. Shops and households might use refrigeration sigils to preserve food.
All relatively familiar conveniences, but developed through a different combination of practical engineering and arcane knowledge.
Something with a touch of arcanopunk, but without pushing the setting all the way into a modern or heavily industrialized world.
That was the balance I wanted to explore.
There would still be old buildings, narrow streets, canals, and centuries of history visible throughout the city. The conveniences of everyday life had simply developed along a somewhat different path.
And for the kind of detective adventures I was imagining, that felt like a particularly enjoyable place to spend some time.
A Profession That Grew With the City
With the city and technology taking shape, I found myself returning to the Necromancers and their place within it.
By this point in the world's history, Death's abdication was hardly a recent event. Humanity had spent generations learning to manage the responsibilities he'd left behind, and what had once been an emergency response had developed into an established profession.
So I started thinking about what that would actually mean for a growing city.
As neighborhoods expanded, populations increased, and new communities developed, the responsibilities of the Necromancers would have grown right alongside them.
More people meant more deaths, more records, more funerary arrangements, and more opportunities for something unusual to happen along the way.
And the institutions supporting that work would have needed to grow as well.
The Clericals, who had originally emerged from a slightly tongue-in-cheek bit of wordplay during the class's development, suddenly had a much more substantial role to play.
There would be registrars, archivists, family liaisons, people responsible for reviewing contracts, and others handling the countless details that didn't necessarily require someone capable of opening a passage into the River of Death.
I liked the idea that these weren't distant, mysterious institutions operating somewhere outside ordinary society.
They were part of the city.
And I started imagining how ordinary people might actually regard the professionals working within them.
Perhaps something closer to the way we regard morticians, funeral directors, or hospice workers, with a little of the legal and investigative responsibility of lawyers and detectives mixed in.
People whose work carries a certain professional respect, but who often enter someone's life during an exceptionally difficult time.
Their arrival wouldn't necessarily inspire fear or suspicion. It might instead bring relief, reassurance, or simply the comfort of knowing that someone experienced was there to help.
A family might seek their assistance following the loss of a loved one. Someone might report a wandering spirit in their neighborhood, or ask for help understanding an unusual occurrence surrounding a death.
And just as in our own world, different individuals and communities would undoubtedly have different feelings about the profession.
But at its heart, the work was familiar.
These were people helping other people navigate death.
And then there was another interesting consequence of the class itself.
Necromancers could live for an exceptionally long time.
That meant some of these practitioners might have watched the city change around them over decades or even centuries. They could have seen entire neighborhoods develop, old buildings disappear, and small offices gradually expand into institutions that served generations of families.
It gave the setting a different relationship with history.
The past wouldn't exist solely in old books or monuments. Some of it would still be remembered firsthand by people who had lived through it, worked alongside it, and helped its inhabitants make their final passage.
That was where the city's relationship with its dead started becoming more interesting to me.
Not because everyone was constantly surrounded by ghosts or supernatural disturbances, but because remembering the dead was an ordinary, necessary part of how the city functioned.
A City Full of Stories
With the city's atmosphere, technology, and institutions taking shape, I found myself returning to the detective stories that had helped inspire it in the first place.
And that gave me plenty of opportunities to start asking what might actually happen there.
A wandering spirit might turn out to be a relatively straightforward matter of helping someone find their way onward.
A disputed inheritance could become considerably more complicated when one of the people involved was no longer alive.
Or perhaps an ordinary investigation might uncover something that had nothing to do with the supernatural at all.
I liked that range of possibilities.
Necromancers would possess some extraordinary investigative tools, certainly. Being able to perceive wandering souls or communicate with the dead could open up approaches that an ordinary investigator simply wouldn't have available.
But having access to unusual information wouldn't necessarily mean understanding what had happened.
A spirit might be mistaken. A witness might only know part of the story. And even when a Necromancer discovered something important, their professional responsibilities could complicate what they were permitted to do with that knowledge.
That last consideration was particularly interesting to me.
I'd already been developing ideas around professional discretion and the responsibility of handling information learned from the dead.
And suddenly those weren't just interesting pieces of worldbuilding.
They could become sources of conflict within an investigation.
What happens when you discover something that could solve a case, but revealing it might violate the trust placed in your profession?
Or when doing what someone has hired you to do isn't necessarily the same thing as doing what's right?
Those were the kinds of questions that made the detective premise appealing.
And I didn't want every adventure to be connected to some enormous supernatural threat.
Sometimes the most interesting stories come from relatively ordinary people with understandable problems, conflicting interests, and difficult decisions to make.
The city's canals, streets, offices, and neighborhoods would provide the backdrop, but the people living there would be what made those places worth exploring.
That was the kind of setting I wanted to build.
Somewhere that could support an unsettling supernatural mystery one evening, and a relatively mundane dispute the next.
And where both might make for a memorable adventure.
From the Forge: A Place to Call Home
Looking back, it's interesting how much of this setting grew out of what began as a fairly simple character concept.
A player who loved necromancy inspired a different approach to the class. That class suggested a profession. The profession opened the door to detective stories, which eventually led me toward a romantic, gothic city of canals, arcane conveniences, and people going about their everyday lives.
But there was one more part of the process that I particularly wanted to leave room for.
The player.
I'd developed a general picture of the city, its atmosphere, its institutions, and the kinds of adventures that might happen there. But I didn't particularly want to decide every detail of the place before anyone had the opportunity to actually inhabit it.
So I started working collaboratively with the player to figure out where their character might fit.
What part of the city might they call home? What would their neighborhood be like? Where would they work, and who might they know?
Perhaps there's a particular shop they frequent, a neighbor they've known for years, or a local establishment that has become part of their daily routine.
Those are relatively small details in the grand scheme of building a fantasy setting.
But they're also the kinds of details that can make a place feel like home.
And more importantly, they give the player a personal connection to the world before the first adventure even begins.
I enjoy that kind of collaboration because it means the setting isn't simply something I've created for the players to explore. It's something they've had a hand in shaping.
Their choices, relationships, and personal histories become part of the city's fabric, and those connections can naturally influence the stories we end up telling together.
Not because every familiar face needs to become a plot hook or every personal connection needs to be threatened, but because those things help establish what matters to the character.
And once I understand what matters to a character, I have a much better foundation for creating situations where their choices will actually mean something.
That's where I wanted this city to end up.
Not simply as an interesting backdrop for a Necromancer detective story, but as a place where the player could genuinely feel their character belonged.
A city with its own history, its own people, and plenty of stories waiting to be discovered.
Including a few that the player helped put there themselves.
Curious About Collaborative Worldbuilding?
Have a character concept you'd love to explore, or a setting you've always wanted to adventure in? I'd be happy to talk shop and explore what we might create together at a QuestForge table.
