Simply put I love Mars - and have just got Zone Walkers to that effect. Even with the Core and Sunward I would love a "inner-workings" of one of the Martian cities, from what they might look like, who lives there, what they do and general advice about games set there.

Don't forget the occasional hab on the far side of a Pandora gate.

I wouldn't mind one or two major city books - shadow run has Seattle, and that has served my group well. But a book about how to create cities would be a nice change. Don't think I've seen that approach before.

Thule Gesellschaft wrote:

I think a couple of examples (one large like Extropia and a few small?) and then the tools to help build your own would be very useful.

Tools to help build your own would be neat - I've always enjoyed similar tools in other game systems. I know Panopticon touched on this, but there's plenty of room for expansion.

Yeah, the "How to make a city for this game" has been made before, right now the new Vampire game from White Wolf have one of those (with an example city), and I heavily suggest its reading for games with heavy political or conspirational contents (and by conspirational I don't mean Firewall-based, but games where the different factions within the city and their relationships between each other are very central).

ORCACommander wrote:

there are quite a few city building guides on the market. sure most of them are based on medieval high fantasy but all your really have to do is rewrite the fluff

Yeah but no. A medieval city hardly goes into a 3D grid (aside from dungeons and the like, undermountain being a prime example...), and it's sustantially different. sousvillance meens Panopticon would be heavily needed as support material, but things I would definitely want here are: 1.- Faction Demographics per "sector" (Solar, Mercury, Luna, Habitats in LLA, Mars cities, Mars Orbit, Mars desert, Titan, Extropia, etc...). The numbers or % are not really needed (but they could be useful), just entries to tell you appropiate modifiers to things like black/gray/red market interactions, inflation, modifiers to find the right people with your rep, etc... Sadly, one page would be needed per category and it would be very information heavy, but being able to print that page (or two) with all the data needed for the game could be great. An empty version for us to make/modify (for our own games, or to modify the original city over time) would be necessary too. 2.- Heavy players. Usually, this will mean names, description, and rep, without the need for a character sheet. Essentially, important people and one or two "faces" per faction and/or reputation. 3.- Logistics. I know, I'm like a crack addict to the word. But let's be realistic: unless Firewall (that is, the GM) gives everything, a group of players who just sleeved "there" (wherever that there is) will want/need access to gear, so knowing what is readily avaiable and how hard is to get access to CM and matter blocks is important (Legba's part on this was quite enough to tell "bring your own toys or pay your soul for almost anything", for example). How people in the habitat reacts to "hoarders" or "rifle nuts" would also be important: it is hard not to notice a group of people with military weaponry and heavy armor, but the reaction would be completely different in Legba or a frontier hab than in a venusian city. 4.- Relationship with the different reps and factions, with the different classes on the hab listed. 5.- Sectors. Like depicted in Sunward's biggest martian city, habs are subdivided in sectors. This also allows us to have "modules" to add/remove to habitats (the slums, the red light district, etc...). 6.- In & Out. How to get there, how to get out. Be it cold, prepared, or hot, it's needed to know what morphs are avaiable, if a darknet can be accessed and trusted, etc..., not to mention the "inmigration" process needed and its security measures to avoid false identities. There are many things we need, and the minutiae can be tedious and irrelevant in most cases, but having the most representative habitats in the transhuman space avaiable in one or two pages (please, if it's two, make them so we can see 'em in without flipping XD) and a section with a toolbox to expand that and build our own habitats can be extremely useful, and it opens the gates to have 16-pages or so "primers" on the most important habitats as separate books.

Being an old-school gamer I fondly remember such books as GW's Realm of Chaos, packed with tables for randomly generating ALL THE THINGS. I was actually quite surprised to find nothing similar for habs in EP, and have started work on my own. My thinking is along the lines of non-comprehensive tables for each 'variable' - design (ie O'Neill, torus etc), size, grav, population, demographics, and different facets of aesthetics and environment - which could be rolled on, chosen from or (most importantly) used as inspiration to create your own.