What do you need to make a town or city for your RPG campaign? A place for your PCs to hang their hats and rest their weary feet? Stores and taverns for them to unload their loot and pick up new quests? How about an economy and some way the town makes money? Who runs it and how do they keep the peace? Who tries to intervene when the party gets up to PC shenanigans?
What about surprises? Is that beggar actually a shapeshifted silver dragon? Is there a secret wizard school operating out of a simple library? Are kobold tinkerers secretly keeping everything running in steam tunnels and sewers beneath the street?
We have warned you not to get caught up in building towns and cities before, but this time a listener asked what needs to be in them when you have to do it. Thorin, Tony and Dave came up with 19 tips to help you do it in pretty much any RPG.
2:00 A listener question: What do you need to have in your town or city when you build your own?
3:00 Town Tip 1: DM Tony’s big warning: Don’t overwhelm your players with dozens of quests and NPC backstory details at once
6:00 Town Tip 2: Understand how towns and cities are different
8:00 Town Tip 3: Are your players going to look in every house and steal every treasure box, or are they more story-focused? That determines how much detail to put in
9:00 Town Tips 4-7: The 4 things every town needs based on DM Thorin’s City of Greyhawk campaign
- How does the town survive economically? (Farming? Local mines? Trading hub?)
- Who runs it and how do they police it? (Who tries to arrest the PCs when they cause trouble?)
- Shops, lodging, services and taverns (Who do the players interact with?)
- Secrets and surprises (A good town has layers, like an Ogre.)
15:00 Town Tip 8: Kitbashing! How DM Dave turned Against the Cult of the Reptile Gods into Slavers Bay
17:00 Town Tip 9: There needs to be attachment to the town, or the PCs won’t care what happens in it (or, just throw a lot of money at them)
19:00 Town Tip 10: Don’t be afraid to embellish a location to make it more interesting or fantastical
23:00 Town Tip 11: Not every important location needs to appear in the first few adventures — 10 Forward doesn’t appear in Star Trek TNG until the second season
25:00 Town Tip 12: If you make your own town, you get to put in the things that you want to play with
27:00 Town Tip 13: Know what needs to be in your town to set it up for the first adventure
30:00 Town Tip 14: Don’t hand them 100 quest hooks when they come into town (although, a beggar selling a map to the secrets of the city could be fun)
31:00 Town Tip 15: The town that begins your campaign start the whole story, and that’s more important than a town they’re passing through in the middle of the campaign
32:00 Town Tip 16: Let the players have a hand in building out the town by expanding on the things they show investment in (and how DM Tony’s player became the caretaker of a bunch of kobolds)
37:00 Town Tip 17: A town is a collection of the people in it
38:00 Town Tip 18: Don’t make the town so interconnected that the players have no room to work
39:00 Town Tip 19: How tough do you make the guards? It depends
45:00 Final thoughts
