The opening
The characters join a sunset tour at Troy after a scholar reports a doorway beneath the public path. Their guide introduces himself as Priam and dismisses the wooden horse as a later story. When the site closes, streets from several ruined cities appear across the same hill.
Priam leads the party through each layer without hesitation. Soldiers in different armor call him king. A wooden souvenir bought by another visitor grows heavier with every gate they pass, and names appear inside it that were carved centuries after the famous war.
What the party is trying to do
Return to the present layer of Troy and stop the buried cities from beginning their wars again.
A route through the campaign
- Cross a market where each doorway opens into a different century of the city.
- Negotiate with gate captains who remember different enemies and different reasons for the siege.
- Open the wooden horse and find records proving it was built long after the earliest destruction.
- Discover that Priam has been steering every layer toward the same lower gate.
- Reach the first city's council chamber as Priam claims all nine Troys and calls their armies to him.
Possible endings
- Defeat Priam and let each buried city return to its own time.
- Reveal the founding revolt and unite the layers against the immortal dynasty.
- Choose one Troy to remain, carrying the histories of the other eight back to the surface.
History and invention
The archaeological mound at Hisarlik preserves a long sequence of settlements and evidence of contact among Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkans. Homer's Iliad gave the Trojan War its lasting literary form. The simultaneous cities and invented origin of the wooden stratagem are fantasy.
Content notes: siege warfare, civil conflict, displacement.
The job in Nine Cities at War is to return to the present layer of troy and stop the buried cities from beginning their wars again. There is a nasty moral problem inside that objective.
Session zero for Nine Cities at War: ask everyone what their character would never trade for safety. Then bring those answers back near the ending.
The 8 to 12 sessions length feels right for Nine Cities at War. Enough room to build suspicion without losing the thread.
I ran something adjacent to Nine Cities at War, but the party trusted the wrong faction almost immediately. I would keep that possibility open here too.
I would open Nine Cities at War right in Troy at the Dardanelles and let the party find the first clue before anyone explains it.
I can already hear my group arguing over whether to defeat priam and let each buried city return to its own time.
Nine Cities at War feels playable rather than merely clever. I know what the party is doing, what can go wrong, and where I can improvise.
I would move the reveal in Nine Cities at War one session earlier and let the players spend longer deciding what to do with it.
The choice to reveal the founding revolt and unite the layers against the immortal dynasty would absolutely split my table. Perfect.
The part where the party must cross a market where each doorway opens into a different century of the city gave me the whole first session.
I would give the first clue in Nine Cities at War to the least scholarly character. It keeps the mystery from becoming one person reading while everyone waits.
My players would turn the first choice in Nine Cities at War into a three hour argument. I mean that as praise.
This would work nicely as a DND campaign for players who enjoy investigation but still want a clear objective. Nine Cities at War gives them both.
The siege mystery mood in Nine Cities at War is exactly what my group likes.
My version of Nine Cities at War would lean harder into who owns the past.