A few years ago, I decided I wanted to try a different kind of role-playing game campaign: a medieval urban fantasy that combined traditional story telling with the sort of open-ended, sandbox-like openness of games like Grand Theft Auto.

The setting would be Obsidian Bay, the homegrown metropolis that my friends and I had spent the last seven years building and using as the base of operations for our Blackrazor Guild campaign. The city had expanded haphazardly to fit the needs of our campaign: new non-player characters arose when some new niche needed filling, or at the service of some ongoing story. Even so, while the city was home to most of the player characters, the lion's share of adventures happened elsewhere, outside the city limits.