Quote from: Age of Fable;255844This question is sort of a roundabout way of asking "which city is the most horrible" really isn't it?

Hardly, more like "which is the least boring".  Of course, I'm an adventurer by nature, and live in a city many people here might consider exotic (Montevideo) so I guess its a very particular kind of point of view.

RPGPundit

Marrakesh should be on any such list.

Quote from: Balbinus;255845It is a bit.  Jackalope does have a fair suggestion with Dubai, both on the original question and as restated by you.

I don't really think of Dubai as horrible.  It's like Las Vegas + Cario.  It's just an interesting city of extreme contrasts.

If we're looking for exotic and horrible, I'd have to go with Calcutta.  Eer since I read Poppy Z. Brite's City of Nerves -- about a zombie plague in Calcutta that no one notices -- I've wanted to run a dark horror game set in Calcutta.  The idea of a city so awful that a corpse could wander down a street and not seem out of place is just neat.

Aral looks pretty eery, not sure if it has enough population for the OP though, unless the original population was much higher.

Harbin in northeast China, on the banks of the meandering Songhua river. Known as the Ice City, the Oriental St. Petersburg or Oriental Paris and the 10th largest city in China. Population 4 million plus.

Manchu, Han Chinese, White Russians & Cossacks, Russian & German Jews, Japanese, Polish, Greek and more influences. Ice & snow sculptures. Has modern facilities (including a subway) and hosts winter sports and quite the mix of architecture so that a Chinese temple had to built to repair the feng shui damaged by the Russian churches!

Started as a Russian railroad village in 1897 extending the Trans-Siberian railroad, then an international metropolis with settlers and companies from over 30 nations. Grigory Semyonov likely passed through there after being defeated in the Russian Civil War. Part of Japan's attempt to take over China, intrigued over and conquered (briefly) by the USSR, collecting point for emigrants. Suffered from a rumored / denied benzene plant leak / explosions in 2005.

Sounds like a James Bond town or for a modern day mystical / martial arts / secret world spot.

More pictures & info at:
travel guide entry for Harbin
Wikipedia Commons' entry

What is that city in Greece with all the stairs and interconnected whitewashed buildings.  That would be a good chase city too.

I submit Kyoto. It has an amazing old-meets new atmosphere and is full of hidden nooks and crannies. Perfect for mysterious CoC type stuff.

As for Bangkok, GDW produced a supplement about Thailand for Twilight 2000 / Merc: 2000 called Bangkok: Cesspool of the Orient. Available on PDF. It's a later GDW supplement, so there's good NPC drawings, lots of maps, and a focus on corruption and combat. Most of the material is for TW2K, so it's a bit GRIMDARK.

Quote from: The_Shadow;255923I submit Kyoto. It has an amazing old-meets new atmosphere and is full of hidden nooks and crannies. Perfect for mysterious CoC type stuff.

I would go with this -- I got a definite feeling that there was the tourist-y, "accessible" Kyoto and then there was another side to the city where there was a *lot* going on, that you had to be an insider (and Japanese) to access.

For modern-day RPGs I like places that seem liminal -- right at the border between common and totally bizarre, so places built for tourists (Las Vegas, Orlando) have a lot of that contrast between the clean, well-lighted places and the off-the-charts weirdness one can imagine going on. Amsterdam, while not built for tourists, had the same kind of feel to me.

I also find places that are seasonal (Panama City, FL) weird and exotic, having a kind of undead-half-life as it were.

I'm not sure any of these qualify as exotic in the sense of this thread though.

Cheers,
-E.

If the city need be exotic but present-day, then my choice would have to be calibrated to the players of the game; to residents of Singapore, it's not exotic at all. So I'd have to find a type of city that's the least familiar to my players.

Choices like Aralsk are good ones, because it's highly unlikely my players will have been anywhere similar; cities like Chernobyl and Centralia are good choices for similar reasons, although most of my players have seen my pictures of Centralia already, and thus wouldn't be particularly stricken with the novelty of the place.

Quote from: Jackalope;255904I don't really think of Dubai as horrible.  It's like Las Vegas + Cario.  It's just an interesting city of extreme contrasts.

Perhaps you don't, but I do.  It's reliance on what amounts to slavery makes it pretty nasty from where I sit.

Good posts though, and Calcutta is also a good suggestion.

Quote from: RPGPundit;255860Hardly, more like "which is the least boring".  Of course, I'm an adventurer by nature, and live in a city many people here might consider exotic (Montevideo) so I guess its a very particular kind of point of view.

RPGPundit

Almost everyone in this thread has travelled some I think Pundy, and if we're going for least boring we start throwing cities like London, New York, Rome or Madrid into the mix which I wouldn't normally term exotic.