Cities Personified: World-Building Thread

Instead of a single personification, why not multiple? Tokyo is constantly attacked by Godzilla, but the Sailor Scouts and Sentai Squad fight him off. If you want, just file off the copyright.

I lived in Paris for six years.

And that ain't the personification of fucking Paris, let me tell you.

So literally Kancolle: Cities edition?

I was thinking about that...

Oh my god yes.
But only in Japan.
The cities in other countries think its weird and kinda skeevy but Japan fails to see the problem.

So how do you guy see it?

> Seattle is a hipster city that only fights using obscure weapons you probably haven't heard of

...

I thought that was Portland.

No, this is Seattle.

What the hell does Hollywood look like?

Regardless of everything else I think we all know what L O N D O N would be like as a character.

Jerry Epstein.

The fat red headed nastybeard guy who was putting up Sharia Law signs?

Here we go

> a powerful city dies
> surrounding cities have to cover for him despite being underleved as fuck in comparison
Pic unrelated, is waifu Vatican City

This is hell

What, like, Toronto?

> in their own domains personifications have flawless senses of direction and instinctively know everybody by name
> when visiting other cities they have the worst senses of direction imaginable

i love this idea.

What about city's powers?
I can see Vegas as someone amazingly lucky,Paris is charming and can control minds.
Also,New York is Insomniac.

i love this idea.

What about city's powers?
I can see Vegas as someone amazingly lucky,Paris is charming and can control minds.
Also,New York is Insomniac(City that never sleeps).

> Warsaw uses an actual war-chainsaw

Why the fuck is Gotham a demon bat?

On topic
>Austin Texas
The hippie-dippy liberal heart of Texas. A combination of modern "progressive" values and Deep South & Western tradition.

Gotham is one of the worst cities to live in in DC universe,second only to Hub City.

Gotham is full of crazy people and criminals,always was.

pic related is New Orleans?

What did Kowloon Walled City look like and why are the other cities still scared to talk about it?

>Its qian Ya from SR:HK

shit

So as religions get big enough their deities actually come to being, rising in power as they gain followers?

OP here, thanks for the most popular thread I have ever made. Lurkers Contribute! Non-American content welcome! Tell us about your cities!
Wut? Religion doesn't really come into it.
> pic is how I imagine Edinburgh

>Huntsville Alabama
>Home of the US Army Aviation and Missile Command
>Motherfucking Wernher von Braun worked here on all sorts of rocket stuff including development of the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests.
>The whole fucking city lives and breathes aerospace engineering and missile research
HAHAHA.

Don't worry mam, ROCKET MAN is here to save the day!

>Religion doesn't really come into it.
Well the explaining factor behind it all is people being latent psychics, and collectively making real things they believe in, urban legends given as an example.

But they don't believe in personified cities but those exist anyway.

Honestly man, Deities needing belief has been done in thousand other settings and what I'm going for here is something else entirely
This dude gets it

The more I think about it the more I like the contrast between somone like Mexico City being a super powerful being who fights off kaiju sized monsters as compared to the personification of some sleepyl PEI town who regularly has to beat back the same monster into the water with his stick.

I figured it was supposed to be a Gargoyle

There's a short story like this in a SE Asian comics anthology. Liquid City volume 1 or 2, I forget.

An old man is brought around a metropolitan city by a young lady who shows him all the people and sights and tells him how much she loves the place, and at the end they stop at an official ceremony where a small town is placed under the jurisdiction of the city.

The old man asks if what's coming will hurt, and the two hug each other. After the cursory flash of light, only the lady is left.

I'll try and find it when I get home.

...

OP here
Going to bed
Leaving of with a picture of my personal favorite city
Hope to see this thread in the morning

Mexico's cities would be great as characters for a mafia story.
>Mexico City is an asshole like the Kingpin from Daredevil, insanely corrupt and rich, but coming from a poor background and knows his way through the streets; and it's surrounded by a bunch of hitmen representing the cities in the major metropolitan area
>Monterrey is a rich, snooty dude who might or not be clad in iron armor; and always says how he is better than Mexico City or Guadalajara
>Guadalajara is a gay mariachi permanently drunk on tequila
>Acapulco is a cute socialite doubling as a bloodthirsty cartel bitch (her sisters Vallarta and Mazatlan are almost the same as her)
>Leon is a gunslinging battle priest
>Tijuana is a hooker who does crazy shit with a donkey painted like a zebra, and is white enough to pass as american
>Merida is a sleepy guy always wearing white
>Cancun is a high class stripper

Jack?
Oh right. DC absorbed The Authority.

I was just watching an Extra History cartoon about the guy who basically founded epidemiology and helped end Cholera epidemics.

youtube.com/watch?v=TLpzHHbFrHY

It made me think that this would be a really really interesting historic setting. Because the forces being unleashed in the city by mass death and misery are being balanced by a desperate will to hang on and live. Imagine London during the fire, or the plague. Or Stalingrad, the battle of.

It would be neat is if there's no fixed avatar. Again relating to both John Snow from the animation and Sgt. Yakov Pavlov and his crew supposedly killing more Germans than they lost taking Paris. People can get possessed by the city when there's a desperate enough circumstance, and they're driven with inhuman strength and energy to deal with whatever threat is attacking the city. That could be the basis for player characters, and the genesis of monsters/suicides like you mentioned above.

The other thing that occurs to me is that the smaller cities are more likely to ally and mix than the great cities. You're not just dealing the town or the village, you're fighting the parish or the county. That might help the power scaling a bit. A city has to be a certain size before it really develops a unique identity.

Would Veracruz be the world weary older guy who's seen all kinds of serious serious shit go down?

> Mining company builds town
> a couple hundred workers move there to work
> after several months a young personification is born
> a small girl who knows all the workers by name and tries her very hardest to quash the small monsters attacking the town
> it's hard work as she is small and the workers are beset by worries and troubles
> does it anyway as she loves the town unconditionally
> coal dries up
> all the workers ship out
> little girl dies cold and alone with no one to sustain her
Honestly op I am not super pumped about some of the things this setting implies
> pic unrelated

>Ghost towns are even more literal

Well, that's depressing.

Could you bring them back if a bunch of historical reenactors started living there?

You should read American Gods.

>Why the fuck is Gotham a demon bat?

Think about Detroit, now add a small population of crazy individuals that dress in costumes that committing half of all the crime in in the city all in their own. That's Gotham.

Yeah.
And the cities in Michoacan would be a bunch of pissed off farmers telling people to get the fuck out of their lawn.

Pluss depending on who is paying attention to what continuity Gotham is cursed/a gateway to hell

Imagine how the representations of places like Belchita, Centralia, Prypiat or those drowned towns in China might look.

At some point Rome's personification looked like something like this or any statue of Athena. Now days takes the form of an old tired woman that likes to walk among the ruins of the old city.

...

Paris is black/arabic though.

How can this whitewashing be!

That was supposed to be the plot of Girl's Life, an upcoming Visual Novel/Anime from Type-Moon.

Any significance to sister cities?

It does sound familiar to me, somehow...

Hmm... cities personified? Now /where/ have I heard -that- before...?

Hot lesbian incest action

Well Seattle has coffee related powers, while Portland's revolve around micro-brewed beer instead.

I feel like Seattle would have something to do with Rain as well.

That picture is visually so fucking awesome. And I'm not entirely sure of all the reasons why. Where is it?

>Please feel free to add to the lore or describe your own cities
Halifax would be a beat up sailor with no legs. (Stan Rogers reference)

That would be interesting in itself.

What happens to the personifications after the town / city dies.

Is it as simple as them dying too. Or are the left to wander the world seeking new purpose

Magical Girl Wars was basically that for provinces.

>I can see Vegas as someone amazingly lucky
It's a city build on people losing money.

Tell me Saitama province was represented...

Then something luck related, like bets and chances for everything

What about all those Nowheresville towns in the American midwest? Did a long road trip recently and I'm planning another, and you'd be surprised by how many ten-building towns you see out among the cornfields in the Dustbowl. Do all of those have souls too?

Also, I kinda like the concept of a personification for everything, at varying power levels:
>Houses have their own little guardian spirits, like the Roman lares, mostly guarding against minor spirits of bad luck
>Districts each have their own spirit, and spend most of their time fighting each other
>Towns have spirits, and are on varying terms with their neighbors (two towns who regularly have visitors in either direction will be a lot more friendly than a pair with a Hatfield/McCoy rivalry)
>Big cities like Chicago or New York have city personifications, sure, but they also have lesser gods born from the memories of fame - New York might have Babe Ruth and Nancy Reagan, Springfield might have Abraham Lincoln and maybe even Homer Simpson given the show's popularity

Read Gods of Manhattan, it's pretty good.

Op here
Thread still alive
Holy shit
Thanks Guys
It's Edinburgh

Also, I just realized, we've been talking about the cities a lot. What is it that they fight?
> pic related for Japan

>mfw France has over 36600 cities.
>Half of which have less than 400 people.
>Only around 400 have more than 10000 people.
>Nine "died for France" and have a population of 0.

...

There's an old (1990) game called Nightlife that played with this for New York.

Each of the boroughs (hell, even some of the neighbourhoods) had an avatar spirit that they called City Elementals.

The one from the Theatre District looked like the Phantom of the Opera, the Wall Street one looked like a Business Woman, Harlem was a little black kid with a basketball and a Globetrotters jersey, so on and so on.

Remember the Thing from the 1982 movie?

Portland's not exactly dry and sunny either.

not the worst, but they do get lost more often.

and perhaps they always instinctively know which direction to walk in to get taken to the heart of their domain. it's like knowing which way North is, it doesn't help you unless you know approximately where you are, AND where things are in relation to yourself.

I've suddenly started thinking about the Genius Loci(the things we're discussing) in the areas surrounding Detroit...

aside from all the other reasons so far given, gotham also has a protector, someone whom the people can believe in. the spirit of the city emulates what it's people believe in to draw power from that belief. the belief that The Batman is out there somewhere.

I would have thought Dr Facilier...

thats how it's represented in more than a few media. the Discworld does it (read Small Gods) as does the Dresden Files(read Side Jobs). but these days Gods are given less credence than science, politicians, or celebrities.

youtube.com/watch?v=FCf23ZTFaDM

that theory could feed into things like that article about the myths of Miami street children.

>Deities needing belief has been done in thousand other settings and what I'm going for here is something else entirely
yes, this is Genius Loci. the spirits of places, kin to the gods of the earth who are not so concerned with the day to day worries of any specific places in the world...

When mankind was young, we clustered together in villages, around a fire, to hide from the creatures in the wild and the darkness. We could not see them, for their darkness was of another realm, overlapping our own.

As time went on we built towns, cities, metropolitan sprawls. We forgot about the things we feared, for as more of us gathered, the Genius Loci, or Principalities, appeared to fight them off. No more could the monsters slip out of their Feywild to kill us in our sleep.

This is the story of the Principalities. The spirits we forged who live alongside us to fight the dark. They are unseen by us. They are us. They love us. Hear their tale well, for you have been called to their aid...

I have, and now I've made the connection is even more depressing.

dynamic duos
for a more conflict heavy game you could do Sibling Animosity.

I wouldn't mind watching Dallas and Fort Worth tear themselves apart...fuck those places and their roadway systems

>It's a city build on people losing money.
to the city's inhabitants...most of the losers come in from the outside.

I did some outlining for a homebrew where colleges had these Genius Loci. if a wizard wanted to boost his research capabilities he'd take up residence nearby and start pumping magic into the campus to make it thrive and induce its spirit to help with research, the mascots of the most empowered colleges would come alive and wander campuses. occasionally protecting students, or gifting advice on studies in passing.

the rise of internet universities was an attempt to thwart the mages

>What is it that they fight?
urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bodach
spirits of evil, to give them flavor and identities beyond "evil spirit" you could describe them based on their evils. Drugs, The Abuse of Authority, Violence, Corruption, Subversion, Prostitution(the negative kind like in cities where it's illegal), etc., etc., etc.

that gave me the goosebumps, I like it.

Why is Vatican City wearing a star of David?

Jesus was a jew?

I would Metropolis.

> Be Loci of Cincinnati
> Spend life fighting personifications of gun violence and drug use
> Demonic gunmen and plague looking motherfuckers
> Japanese sister city asks me to cover for her
> sure, why not?
> Akita is pretty cool
> mfw I have to fight evil schoolgirls
> mfw I have to fight tentacle beasts
> mfw every other monster is based on a fucking pun
> mfw Mothra shows up for no adequately explained reason

I love it. Fits in nicely with /x/'s creepypastas:

>There are things that lurk outside the bounds of streetlights. Strange things, monsters of twisted wood and flesh and hate.
>They feed on us, for we are their prey - scuttling weak creatures, bags of blood and bone.
>But they fear fire, and they fear the light, and those are our inheritance as humankind. We wrought iron from cold stone and tamed those monsters that we could, and built a wall around ourselves to shut the nightmares out.
>Our walls grew, wider and wider, until they were no longer walls of stone and dirt and wood but of light and sound and they covered most of the world. The nightmares cowered from these, and fled to the shadows beyond our walls.

>They're still out there.
>Waiting. Hungry.

>Some of them are hungry enough to brave the walls, to duck between the lights and find those of us who wander astray.
>Some of them are bold enough to stand in the light and remind us why we feared them.
>In ancient times, we would elect a champion to defend us, armored in light and hope. But now, we are a race of thinkers, not of warriors; there are no champions among us.

>None save our walls.

If they are created by the psychic energy of the people, I don't think it matters as long as they consider themselves Parisian

>Did you ever have a stuffed toy as a child? You hugged it, cherished it, kissed its well-worn nose and fell asleep with it. But more than that, you hid with it. It was a defense, a way to ensure that the monsters in your closet or under your bed wouldn't get you. It fought ferociously for you because it loved you, and the monsters were always vanquished so you could sleep soundly.

>You abandoned it, of course. You grew too old for childish things, and knew that there were no monsters under your bed.

>You were wrong.

>The monsters are there. They wait for you, outside the pool of light your streetlight casts. And you have no more animal to guard you.

>But you trust, somehow, that everything will be all right. There's always the feeling that someone's watching over you with kindness, keeping the roads clear, defending you from evil, keeping the world spinning along as it's supposed to.
>You put your trust in the city, and what it stands for, just like you put your trust in your stuffed toy.
>Just like the toy, the city loves you.
>And just like the toy...
>It will fight for you.

But do the battles decide the fate of the people, or do the people divide the fate of the battles?

I remember their being a short story in Neil Gaiman's Sandman where some cities "dream" like people do, creating a weird surreal version of the city that you could accidentally enter and get lost in forever. Near the end, a person asks that if this is the city dreaming, what happens when it wakes up?

I like the idea a prior user had about cities possessing people in times of ultimate crisis. Maybe Halifax itself gave Vince Colman the bravery to stay at his post and save hundreds of lives?
That fucking historica minute with Colman scared the fuck out of me as a child. We saw it in class and I genuinely lost sleep over it. Everyone reading this look it up, it's only 60 seconds long

I like the idea that they are very much one and the same. Like if in a battle a monster throws a car into a wall, people see a drunk driver crashing into the car and slamming it into the wall. Or when a monster is brought down a real world criminal is arrested.
It's literally the struggles of the city given form.

Plenty talk about arrondissements first. And then "Paris" overspills in other départements, but same again, départements first.

Both, as a Principality is only as powerful as the hearts of its people, but the failure of the Principality means that the monsters get in and the people get preyed upon. A city being depleted of people loses psychic power, weakening the Principality further.

Of course, a Principality empowering a select few as its agents could also act to defend the boundaries between worlds and hunt down the monsters that make it through. People who are empowered, perhaps, by a full expression of their own psychic self such as through magic, transformation, summoning, or overlaying of the spirit. Each person's spirit has different powers and functions in different ways, as is befitting them.

OP here
Thanks for writing the games opening monologue

Australia is littered in ghost towns that were horse/cattle/traffic/rail stop overs, whole mining and farm communities, fiberglass mining towns, etc.

Australia is now built on the ghosts of these towns.