Locations & Active World Building - Olor: The City of A Thousand Smells

 As a reader and GM I'm fairly allergic to lore. Nothing turns me off running a game more than having to slog through pages of terse world building. But at the same time I love running games in fantastical and fully realised worlds - I love those moments where things feel wondrously alien and coherent at the same time. Although sometimes I feel like it can be a struggle to balance these two things.

One of the first OSR books I read was Yoon-Suin by David McGrogan and I was amazed by the evocative random tables that filled the book. Instead of presenting a long quasi-historical account of geography and architecture, Yoon-Suin lets you build your own mosaic of characters, locations, factions and sexy slug merchants. You paint your own picture. 

I like to think of this as active world building - presenting a world in motion, full of active participants living their lives and showing a culture not telling you about it. The information presented should take the reader on a journey - but it should be their journey. They choose what order to read the book and what details are important to them or they can even leave it entirely up to chance. I think that gives a reader a wondrous sense of discovery not just from the text but how they engage with it - in how ideas can be combined and digested. 

For the Celestial Coast I'm trying to present setting information how I like to read it - in small and usable chunks. Which means following one of the great OSR maxim  - if information can be presented in a random table then put it in a random table. 

My plan for issue one of the zine is to have the core rules, character creation including 36 backgrounds and a series of double page spreads for some key locations within the Celestial Coast. Each of those key locations will consist of a series of random tables which I hope will deliver enough active world building that the reader is able to build their own version of that location in their head and at the table. 

d20 smells in Olor - The City of 1000 Scents

1. Sharp, piscine aromas splatter from portside vendors frying freshly caught whelks to add to their bubbling pots of fish soup. 

2. The odd petrichor scent of salty stone after a calcified rainstorm clears.

3. A synthetic vinegary zest flows from jars of roewine fermenting outside cheap restaurants.

4. Ammonia whiffs of cephalopod ink when morning papers filled with militaristic bravado are delivered to filthy street corners. 

5. Stark floral pheromones at the exclusive natural philosophers’ markets, where merchants sell precious variegated flowers found only in the peaks of the Lupine Mountains. 

6. A pungent sulfurous pong of onionmen scurrying under feet in the sticky sewers. 

7. Mild nuttiness from overworked longshoremen washing their crusty hands with adipose soap. 

8. Algae infused incense burns as Orthodock sailors prayers to their Drowned Saint. 

9. Syrupy noxiousness of a gastric garbage heaps slowly eroding the city’s litter. 

10. A metallic sweat pierces the nostrils when passing the rusted statue of the deposed King of Gualle.

11. The burnt sweetness of black honey sold to fundraise for an old priest's mellification.

12. A warm, bitumen effluvium in the late afternoon when lamplighters fill the streetlights with oils extracted from fallen stars. 

13. Pine scented smoke rising from cliffside mansions of the fishing magnates as they fix the prices of the daily catch. 

14. The ripe fruitiness when carts filled with juicy flat peaches are brought down from nearby mountain villages. 

15. Traces of damp wood emanate from recently refurbished fishing cottages by the Vieux Port, painted in pastel colours that twin the more affluent City of Peaca. 

16. A dehydrated urine mist clouds the street where those with the Celestial Sickness lay their rotting beds. 

17. A rich earthy bouquet spills from top restaurants when cooking rare cuts of truffalo meat, bought at exuberant prices from shady poachers returning from hunts deep in the Lupine mountains.

18. A bittersweet waft of gunpowder reminds starving sailors of their failed revolutions. 

19. The halitosis smiles of solarmancers selling their revolutionary star-powered technological wonders (guaranteed not to burst into flames this time). 

20. Rotten bile and terror are the last things you smell when in the presence of the Living Fatberg that lives deep beneath the city.