Roads beyond counting and buildings that block the very sun. A city that stretches without measure and whose secrets are without number...

A sprawling metropolis, built on the bones of cities long forgotten, it is as every bit as colorful and chaotic as it is deadly and unforgiving. It is ruled from the glistening Spires above; The Nobles, demigods of flesh made gold, who’s tyrannical whims ebb and flow like bloody tides across the city. Yet, as tall as the city towers above, so too does it descend below, where dark and terrible things roil with hunger beneath the cobblestone streets...

This city eats people. Never forget that.

Into the Cess and Citadel is a supplemental TTRPG book for those seeking to incorporate a strange, colorful, and terrifying city into their role-playing game. Presented within the book is a comprehensive guide to running adventures or campaigns within a fantastical city, along with an overhaul of the adventuring system to better accommodate the unique challenges and benefits of a sprawling urban environment.

Into the Cess and Citadel is designed to turn the traditional city into a more immersive dungeon-like adventure setting.The book provides rules for everything from small urban-dungeon exploration to a total urban conversion with a world filled with disasters, factions and encounters that react to the player's actions. Along with these rules are a series of generators for creating an urban environment from a 6-mile district down to a single building and an essay on how best to run your urban adventures.

Into the Cess and Citadel contains information, tools, and tricks for both players and Game-masters. For players, there are a multitude of options to travel and explore the city, from the squalid Undercity below to the decadent Spires above, each requiring a different approach to survive their hardened and blood-stained passages. Along the way will be complex factions to befriend or combat, along with opportunities to exploit for the many treasures that await in the eclectic districts. Finally, there are a multitude of strange artifacts and cobblestone magics, each embodying the chaotic and frightening nature of the city.

For Game-masters the book has everything you might need to run a colorful and dark urban-themed game. Monsters and encounters that present players with unique challenges and personify the warped spirit of the city, simple rules for providing meaningful depth to city exploration and survival, interconnected and evolving factions that operate in the light and in the shadows, along with easy to use generators for streets, vendors, NPCS, events and more to flesh out the details of your sprawling metropolis.

As well, for groups looking to take the plunge into a fully urban campaign, there is an entire toolbox and resource guide for how to easily prepare and play games with minimal effort, keeping preparations to a minimum and allowing large scale settings to be played quickly and fluidly.

While the contents of Into the Cess and Citadel were designed for D20 style games, this book has been written to be as system-neutral as possible. This means that:

Rules and stats are written bare-bone with the intention of being widely compatible.
Enough information is given that a GM and player can easily adapt it to their own preferred system.

• Rules for traveling and surviving in a city; including exploration, traffic, and hazards.

• Tools for generating unique urban factions and their complicated relationships.

• Guides for running each of the urban environments presented within the book and pointers on how they differ from dungeons or wilderness.

• Step-by-step guides for generating and running three unique city landscapes: the sprawling Megacity, the dungeon-like Undercity, and the dangerously opulent Spires.

• Hundreds of tools, hirelings, contraband and services both mundane and strange.

• Unique districts to explore and exploit, from the grand libraries of the Archivists to the industrial hellscapes of the Foundry.

• Dozens of tables for dressing shops, streets, NPCs and more.

• 50+ monsters ranging from Depraved Aristocrats, Sewer Walruses, and Dire Pigeons

• Magical artifacts, curious spells, diseases, 100 locations and more…

• All written in a system-neutral format for use in most role-playing games.

With tools and options for Players and Referees alike, Into the Cess and the Citadel is a complete resource for a foray into the urban adventure or a total urban conversion.

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