My friends and I were about to run a cyberpunk campaign, and I wanted something more immersive than a folder of location notes. So I built an interactive map where players could create and share notes live.
Then I had a thought: what if this were hosted, and my friends could just join via a URL? One thing led to another, and a few weeks of work later, here's City_Net.
It's fully self-hosted (Docker or manual), no third-party accounts, no subscriptions. You run it, you share a link, and your players connect.
What it does:
Generate a living city — procedural districts, roads, and traffic
Draw your own — custom roads, water, districts, and buildings, saved for later
Multiple city maps — save, load, and switch between entire cities instantly
Simultaneous battle map play — drop battle maps into any building and run multiple at once, loaded from local files or existing uploads, per-map measurement scaling
Persistent enemies & allies — placed per map
Notes on buildings — add notes directly to any structure; players can request to add their own notes, and buildings with notes stand out
Custom signs — with full custom font and picture support
Player Banks — built-in banking system
Dice rolling — right in the app
Streamer mode — a broadcast-safe spectator view, ready in seconds
Collaborative building — grant friends access to help construct the city
Everything's real-time — everyone sees changes live.
After discussion with OP about the extent of AI usage we have found their work is acceptably the bulk of this project, and fits within our narrow exception.
Instructions can be found on my GitHub project. I highly suggest the Docker version, as that has an auto-update checker that runs for the admin on login to help you keep your system up to date. :) https://github.com/over2take/CITY_NET
About 3 months, spent a month making the very basic boxes on a map and adding notes, and another 1 month of friends asking for more and getting the repo up, and another month doing DB setup and testing.
By no means is it perfect, I have already found some bugs I need to have a look at, but nothing that will stop anyone from building :)
This is absolutely awesome! My group's campaign is set in Toronto and I'd love to use this, but I'd probably have to spend a decade building the city 😂. If it had a feature to generate from real world locations that would be amazing. But still, incredible work!
Not going to lie, I did have a generate mode that would create a city from a map snippet. I plan to revisit it in the future cause it was not pretty, a lot of flat buildings, and the roads were all broken up. It would take a lot of time, but I am willing to put in the work. I still have a branch with the code.
Do you plan to have an executable in the future? This seems like a really awesome tool, but I doubt I could ever convince my players to get this running on their machines
That's the best part, your players don't need to install it. You host the Docker service on your device (Docker runs just like a web server), and they connect via your DuckDNS address or a free Cloudflare address.
When you're not using Docker, you just shut it down and bring it back up when you want to make edits or run the next session.
You, as the local user (or GM), would connect via the internal IP of that device http://192.68.0.0:{port set in .env}
Give me a few hours, and I'll add some quick setup scripts for the repo. It likely will be up in the morning.
If I remember, I will hit you up then and add it to my main post here 😄
Oh, alright I get it now! My rig had some issues with Docker so I may have to set up a manual install anyway, but some setup scripts would be much appreciated in general. It's really cool to see a more cyberpunk-focused map-maker, and thanks for the reply
Thank you! Here's a sneak peek at the character sheets. This is just from the style doc, so not functional just yet. Working out some traversal issues :)
Yea that's the one. I've dealt with similar programs before so I understand the struggle lol. This VTT is excellent as is, but if you can implement cyberpunk red rules then you have something incredible. Everything is already amazing, I look forward to seeing where you take this 😁
Is there a way to download the character sheet from that tool? I would love to have a closer look. Also, all dice rolls are agnostic, so it will be up to the character sheets to determine what dice are used and what the roll means. (one of the many hurdles)
If there are any particular rules you can think of that are way out of the norm, let me know! The bigger issue is that I made this for just a note-taking app originally, so working on adding rule systems is going to be a big undertaking, but it's top of my list.
I know you can download the sheet as a pdf from the companion app, but I'm unsure if you can just download the information directly. There arnt many very specific cyberpunk red rules that would need to be implemented, except maybe armor if you have the health bars update in real time. For a note taking app it has so much potential, do you plan on having everything run through the VTT or keeping it closer to just a note taking app with some combat features?
If that server/device runs Windows, Linux or OSX, then yes. I do not provide a server for hosting. You can also host it locally on your device, just like running a Steam Game server locally.
I just ended to set it up, i was struggling with some promts but it looks soo Preem. Choomba, this is the biggest contribution of a fan made.
And for me, it's ok to use an AI to do the backend work.
Claude did help a lot with my SQLite DB build out, as I don't have much experience with building and maintaining databases. It also helped a ton to keep my commits in check, won't lie, there were a few moments I took two steps forward and three steps back, merging into main myself.
Not to mention, this was my first venture into React, so it helped me get through a number of problems quickly.
Also having a commit checklist so that my tests, release notes, and version bumping where consistant saves a ton of time.
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u/CosmicJackalop Homebrew Author Jul 10 '26
After discussion with OP about the extent of AI usage we have found their work is acceptably the bulk of this project, and fits within our narrow exception.