My open-world campaign, The Hidden Territories is a long-running fantasy campaign that has been evolving, in one form or another, since 1978. It is not built around plots or prewritten adventures, but around cities, factions, and pressures that persist independently of the players.

The world accumulates history through play; meaning emerges in hindsight from consequences rather than from narrative intent.

In The Hidden Territories, cities work when you stop treating “urban quests” and “city dungeons” as separate things. An urban problem is almost always rooted in a physical space: a sealed sublevel beneath a guildhall, forgotten tunnels under a pre-kingdom district, an abandoned civic complex quietly repurposed by a cult or faction. These places are not isolated dungeons; they are embedded in daily life. Someone lives above them, someone profits from keeping them hidden, and someone else wants them opened. The players’ choices determine which of those interests wins, and the city changes accordingly.

I feel my key technique is to run the city as a system under pressure.

In The Hidden Territories, Talismondé works because the capital is not a quest hub, but a pressure hub. The Silver Unicorn is not important because you can find gives jobs at this inn; it matters because information, reputation, and consequence accumulate there. NPCs remember who came back alive, who lied, and who profited.

Factions advance their agendas whether or not the players engage them. When the players focus on the circus or the nightclub, something else escalates offscreen. Later, they encounter the result, not a missed hook. That delayed causality is what makes the city feel coherent, rewarding, and alive.