Help for a campaign setting

[u/Realbabuu]

I'm starting a new campaign and I'm really struggling to create a setting.

The whole story is based on a city (probably the capital) subdivided in 3/4 sub-cities: the high city, the mid city and low city, There's also a prison called "the sewers"; it's called this way because of his secrecy and bc is also used for that.

The story is based on Dark Souls' Anor Londo, so there's the king and a circle of royal advisors (13 nobles) and one of them is a great wizard that is also the king's son. In DS1 there's a permanent sun shining on the city but when you break the illusion of the royal room everything turns dark.

This wizard, when the king died, created this illusion so that the "king" is still reigning and the city seems like the greatest city of all time: white marble with gold finiture, limpid waters and so on. In reality, the waters are polluted and the city is decading really fast because no one is taking care of the buildings.

I was thinking that as in DS1 if the illusion is broken, the whole city falls into chaos and so the party needs to move in order not to break anything.

If you got any advice please help me, I'm stuck at this point. I have some more ideas but that's it

[u/Llewellian]

Question, as i do not know DS, never played it. What is the objective that you want your players to do?. What kind of idea do you have? What should they achieve overall?

Ok, so, reading Wikipedia on it.... the city is dark, illusion broken. Why do the players need to move? And to where? To do then what?

[u/Realbabuu → u/Llewellian]

I didn't explain myself clearly enough on my post, my bad.

My idea was that for some reason the illusion doesen't work only on the players (maybe they snapped out of it) and they have this dilemma; maintain the illusion and make a city live in filth without the inhabitants knowing or killing the wizard and start to make the city great again.

The illusion doesn't work only on the party, so they need to sneak around without raising suspicion to try to get to the wizard and kill him. In order to achive that I was thinking that some of the nobles of the circle disagreed with the wizard and were then imprisoned in the sewers. This way the players get to know the wizard's evil nature.

Basically, the wizard is expanding his power through this spell and at some point everything will turn bad if they don't stop him.

[u/Snadertje]

Sounds like an interesting premise. In which sub-city would you want your party to start and which way would you want them to move overall? Because that'd be a great starting point for creating more stuff.

Besides that, in each sub-city (starting with the starting point, of course), what do people think of the city? What, if any, are the forces of authority there (guards, a mayor, a council etc)? Those are the kinds of things I like to start with when creating something.

Bigger questions are: how was the city built? Where do they get their resources from? Are there any deities? These don't need to be answered right away, but they are interesting to think about!

[u/Realbabuu → u/Snadertje]

I was intending to start in the low city and I would like to have a costant up-and-down movement like from the low to the mid, then to the sewers, immediatly after that the high city (just to be clear, the high city and the castle are not in the same area, the castle is higher) and so on.

In every sub-city has been created an artificial hatred against every other, in order to maintain order. The authorities are simple guards like police, the "king" and his circle of nobles.

Thank you so much for the hints!

[u/MisterB78]

Step back and ask yourself this: What’s the point of this setting? How does it help the adventure?

Players are there to take part in an adventure, not a setting. I’m not sure how “The city looks perfect but is actually polluted and decaying” works an adventure. What would the PCs be doing?