Fight for Your Turf with Psychic Style in City of Espers

Hello! Today, we’re taking a look at City of Espers, the new TTRPG project from UK designer Nathan Blades and Mappa Mundi publisher Three Sails Studios. We’ve previously talked to TSS about Gallow’s Corner, their game about peasant revolt. Now the studio is looking to the future, with a world full of psychics, urban warfare and ballroom-inspired style fights.

TTRPG Insider got to talk to Blades and TSS owner George Bickers about the game, its influence and more.

A new game combines psychic powers, urban warfare, and queer culture to create what it calls an urban-action experience at your local table.

City of Espers is a “psychic-powered urban action RPG” designed by UK game designer Nathan Blades and published by Mappa Mundi creator Three Sails Studios. The game imagines a city where psychics are developing special powers and duking it out for turf control against other groups in Zener City. Each gang brings its own distinct aesthetic to the table, whether they’re Western-inspired cowboys or senshin-inspired heroes. Players will seek to beat back guilds, build their own turf, and help their house of psychics rise to the top.

The book itself has a strong comic book vibe to it that jumps off the page. Zener City presents a world where players will likely have to use their powers to defend their turf, but where death isn’t always the end. Blades compared it to shonen media, where characters regularly clashed with each other but rarely ended in death. It’s a world where you may fight a rival house for a time, only to then partner with them against a larger threat to your turf at a later point.

The aesthetics were inspired by Jet Set Radio, Grand Theft Auto and The Warriors as well as superhero media like Teen Titans, Blades told TTRPG Insider.

However, one of the less expected influences for the game was ballroom culture, a reference to an underground LGBT subculture from New York where Black and Latino queer individuals would organize into houses and compete through stylistic expression. Those influences are best communicated through the use of “houses” as a gang framework. It creates a basis for the themes of found family that Blades hoped the game would reflect.

“So much of what ballroom is is having a group of your friends who are all dancers, who are all musicalities, who are all costume designers, really working together to go and design bomb outfits and work on choreography,” Blades explained. “And then step to a venue where there are other people doing the exact same thing and battling them, but without actually having to throw hands, without needing to know any martial arts, without bloodshed.”

That inspiration is part of what drew TSS’ George Bickers to publish the project. Bickers, who had studied ball culture in university, immediately recognized the inspiration while playtesting it at a local UK tabletop dev meetup. The subject became an immediate source of common interest between the pair, and eventually helped lead to the pair collaborating.

Cards and Controlling Luck

Unlike most TTRPGs, City of Espers is built on a card-based system.

Players will hold cards in their hand and play them at appropriate moments to influence gameplay. It’s a similar mechanic to what other game designers have used, such as in IDW Games’ Godzilla roleplaying game.

While a deck offers a level of randomness in the right hands, it has a limit to what can appear based on what’s drawn. If there are only 52 cards in a standard deck, then that means there are only 4 out of 52 chances to draw a 2, or an ace. It also helps players to wield their powers, which can vary from fire to telekinesis to any other form of psychic ability imagined in fiction.

The use of cards offers players the ability to have more control over their luck than dice might offer. Blades told TTRPG Insider that they chose to use cards because “it means outcomes could be predicted,” since observant players could track which cards are still in play and which are not. “Depending on how long the play session goes, you will eventually see every card in the deck and get to make sensible guesses about what’s left,” they added. At the same time, it sometimes means players get stuck with bad cards and have to deal with what happens next.

However, the game also plays with a tactical approach, where cards are dealt across a grid.

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Three Sails Studios and The Risk of Finished Projects Before Crowdfunding

One aspect of City of Espers’ launch that set it apart from other TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns was TSS’ decision to have the game fully developed before the crowdfunding campaign began. While most creators will only have a portion of a text ready by the Kickstarter campaign, TSS makes sure that all of its products are finished by the launch of the crowdfunding. This allows the company to fulfill faster than other campaigns and ensures backers get PDFs right after a campaign’s end.

It’s an approach that’s rare among publishers, since it places a risk of economic loss for TSS if the campaign struggles to hit its goals. If the campaign fails to hit all of its goals, then TSS could lose tens of thousands of dollars on a book that nobody wants.

It’s a risk that Bickers says he’s okay with. He prefers that to raising the money in a traditional campaign, only to realize they need more to finish the book due to unexpected expenses (such as tariffs or shifting shipping rates).

Bickers’ priority at the end of the campaign is creating a good game, paying the artists what they deserve and offering other creators a platform to help create the projects they’re excited.

City of Espers is now available to back on Backerkit. The campaign ends on September 29.

What are your thoughts? Send any scoops, tips or press releases to [email protected].