Urban versus Wilderness Adventures in D&D

I've been running my Ravnica campaign for a few months now. As an entirely urban setting - where every square on the map is dense city - Ravnica has presented its own opportunities as well as challenges.

In terms of opportunities, it's a really unique setting. Usually in a D&D game, "the city" is a relatively safe place where monsters and danger are exceptional. Sure, you might get in trouble with the town guard (whether you deserve it or not) or encounter monsters attacking the city, but generally the whole point of a settlement like that is that it is safer. In Ravnica, with nowhere for the monsters to go, you've got a city where there could be some horrible thing lurking around any corner, and half of them are backed by a guild that gives them license to attack you.

The challenge, as I'm seeing it, however, is that isolation gives the DM a lot more control over players' actions. I've been entranced by the very scant details offered about Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden because it talks about it as an adventure that puts players in an empty wilderness with nothing but freezing temperatures and monsters.

In an urban setting, you can certainly endanger the party, but unless you railroad them a bit, the party will always have the option to do one of a million different things, and you've got to be ready for that.

It's very exciting - I've had sessions in the current chapter of the campaign in which the entirety of what happens is all just stuff the players came up with, as I've hastily altered some random encounters to fit with the sort of combat they might be involved in to fit the scenario.

But I'll confess that the idea of just stranding them in some wilderness does feel kind of appealing, forcing the player characters themselves to be the only friendly faces amidst monsters and wild beasts.

By level 13, the Planeswalkers among the party will start to spark, and then we'll be able to travel to other worlds of the Magic multiverse (I'm very excited for them to go to Innistrad because I'm a closet goth, though I also wonder how well gothic horror works at higher levels). But there are a few things the party will need to do before I let them get that high.

Still, even though we know almost nothing about it and it's not coming out until September (which is like thirty years from now in 2020 time) I've got a crazy notion that I might want to run the adventure once it comes out, in parallel with my current campaign.