The Rogue Needs a City: Role-Playing Game Cities and Their Literary Background

The paper examines how literary depictions of the rogue and the city shaped the design of role-playing game cities, tracing a lineage from Spanish picaresque fiction through early tabletop supplements to contemporary digital RPGs. It argues that the picaresque tradition, with its marginal urban settings, dexterous and witty criminal protagonists, and detailed portrayals of cities such as seventeenth-century Madrid and London, was remediated into TRPG products like Thieves' Guild, The Free City of Haven, and Thieves' World. Early designers drew on writers recognized by Gary Gygax in his Appendix N, and this media-mixing approach, the paper contends, underpins the urban spaces found in modern digital RPGs.

The author's central claim is that rogue-oriented city design is a two-way process: spatial environments are built to host roguish activities such as pickpocketing, shoplifting, and scamming, and these activities in turn generate new mechanics, such as percentage-based or skill-based thieving systems, along with the non-player characters, shops, and narrative branches that populate them. The paper also notes that narrative concepts can motivate roguish mechanics rather than the reverse. Drawing on game studies scholarship on spatiality and narrative architecture, the analysis is supported by a close reading of three digital RPGs, Baldur's Gate II, Divinity: Original Sin, and Pillars of Eternity, alongside the TRPG supplement Thieves' World.

The scope is primarily qualitative and textual, situated within literary history, tabletop RPG history, and game studies, with no survey or quantitative sample. Its time frame runs from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish picaresque works to the digital RPGs of the early 2000s and mid-2010s, with a focus on Western fantasy and Anglophone TRPG publishing. The paper positions itself as a foundation for understanding urban design in RPG worlds, particularly those featuring rogue characters.