It takes a village (or twenty)

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I’ve been stocking a forest map with dungeon modules, many of which contain their own villages. In games I’ve run before, typically each village has a nearby dungeon and one to three supernatural problems for the party to engage with (or ignore) and then the characters mosey on down the trail. The difficulty is that many (but not all) fantasy villages are imitations of copies of Hommlet.

I have the notion that the more locations you include in the campaign, the harder it is to get the party to care about them. They become disposable because there’s a comparable village with the same inn, blacksmith, and general store around the next turn in the road. I’ve read in some OSR settings these points of light are intentionally minimal and serve merely as a spot to unload treasure for XP and restock supplies. In this way more villages can be a benefit from a gameplay perspective. However, I prefer my villages as memorable and distinctive places with interesting inhabitants.

Which type of village do you prefer? And are there any trade offs I am not anticipating if I take a single village and make it the focal point of a campaign?

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If you can make the village feel a little creepy, at least at some points, that’s fun. Bree gets a little creepy at night. The villages in Midsomer Murders get creepy at night. It’s better that they not be a killing field at night, just creepy enough to feel like there’s something to investigate and something to be wary of. And if they seem cheery and pleasant by day, all the better; contrast is good.

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I love your suggestion for making the villages eerie and finding ways to make the players visiting them feel like outsiders. Currently my go to creepy village is from Nightmare over Ragged Hollow. I like how the central problems there gradually worsen over time.

Recently I started watching Midsomer Murders for the first time and I quite love it though I am still early in the show. While the show’s format necessitates an influx of new villages, I think that would get overwhelming in a campaign. Currently, its a nice treat when the principal characters return to the locations of previous episodes.

I think right now my main conundrum is figuring out how many villages I can realistically support. I go back and forth when planning my games. Some times I want to be focused and exclusive. Other times I see maps that inspire me to try and be more ambitious. Sometimes they aren’t even from RPG products like this excellent old Robin Hood one.

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Another way you could keep your villages simple and ‘bright’ but still make the players care about them is to give each one a unique trait. Some of these the players will come to value and some they won’t, but whichever, when you say that Candlewick where they make the good torches is threatened the players know it will impact them somehow.

An example D12 list:

1: Excess farmhands – Unusually brawny hirelings can carry 40% more

2: Hearty food – rations bought here way half as much.

3: Hot Springs – resting here regains 1 extra hp per day

4: Retired scholar – A specific ancient tongue can be translated here.

  1. Secluded sage – Any poison can be treated here

6: Traders road – 5% better price on loot here

7: resident burgher – 20% better price on a particular class of loot (e.g. paintings)

  1. Convenient industry-- a particular kind of adventuring consumable is cheaper here (e.g. arrows, rope)

  2. Friendly barkeep – carousing here costs half the usual amount.

  3. Crossroads – rumours here are twice as likely to be accurate.

  4. Martial culture – Hirelings here are unusually brave

  5. Local fort – trophies from a class of enemy can be cashed in here (e.g. bandit ears, goblin teeth, etc)

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I think it really depends on the type of game, but I always think about the way that towns are distinct in Dragon Quest. Specifically in DQ11 there’s a town where everyone speaks in haikus, and it makes me think that the way to make a town really stand out is to give it something memorable like that to compensate for the fact that most towns are going to be fairly standardized across the board. In your example you talk about having multiple towns within a forest and I think it could be cool to play into the landscape and try to differentiate on that basis. Maybe one town is literally in a big tree, maybe one is built around a small lake in the forest, maybe one is built around a strange relic like a magic fountain. All of this would obviously work best with the towns that have less going on in them per the module. But I think if you can elicit the player response of “was that the town in the tree or the one with the magic hot spring” you’re probably halfway there.

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hah! we must have been typing these out at the same time. Good list!

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a lot of this depends on the flavor of the campaign. people that are more into resource management/domain play/hex crawling kinda stuff, you can make your villages a little more dry. if they are too wet, they slow the more important, higher level campaign goals down.

personally, I do more first person immersion kind of campaigns; so i’ll work with that style above, each village has at least one NOTABLE THING. (note: for hexcrawly campaigns, my rule is 50% of villages have any NOTABLE THINGS).

here is a WIP hex crawl village generator that I made a while ago. planning on turning it into a “20 interesting villages” kinda zine in the future to fit my current play style preferences.

it has a (wait I can figure this out exactly!) 73% complete d100 table of notable things and an 83% complete d100 table of villager encounters associated with professions.

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Eel, this a treasure trove, yo. Whatchu doing hiding this little document.

Though I’ll say, as a ‘generator’, those 7..3 odd notable things are mostly adventure hooks; would require a bit of investment at the slightest interest on PC part.

That’s a critique of form, not idea: I would steal all of these if I had the time. I just wonder tho, as we inspect the idea of ‘village’ as it shores alongside ‘adventure site’ or whatever, whether there isn’t a way to backdrop the place a bit more. Sure: we want a village to be somethiing other than thatch roofs and a blacksmith (or thatch roofs and a field of scarecrows), but the darling, difficult thing to accomplish (to me?) is how to background supportive societies so that PCs feel .. surrounded? but also still ‘on track’.

I don’t mean that to suggest a village can’t be an adventure site, but I think, at least if I’m reading this thread right, and maybe reading my own pulse right, that we crave the capacity to create ‘secondary’ locations that can remain secondary while still having luster.

I think of the flat vs round character of storywriting: if every scene, every villager, every every, is encountered as a potential protagonist (which in the real world, they are), then the deciding mind (see: PC) is struck feeling slightly overwhelmed at all of the possibility.

Maybe that’s what we want. But certainly in the best games I’ve played in, it’s been the sense that I know what to look past to see what I need to see that makes me feel capable, and a protagonist myself.

I say this out of a deep need for good, flat villages myself.

And I say this too out of a desire to turn your Village Generator into a thing that exists somewhere other than Google Drive. Some real magic ideas and language in there.

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with on this this…

and indeed, pondering how to turn this document into a THING, and pretty much keep it in line with the original thought, is to turn it into 20 passive (boring) and 20 active (notable) villages kinda zine length. (I am currently soured on generator tables, and more interested in microfictions)

for the hex crawl, my theory was that 1/2 of everything should be flat, and half round. “an even chance of a notable thing”. pretty much for the exact reasons you stated-- feedback from playtests of my stuff, time and time again, comes back as basically “there is so much going on, that I just started sitting back and watching instead of engaging”. trying to find the magic formula to fix that.

the sitting there half doesn’t have to be “boring” so much as passive. in the case of villages, I would say, have them differentiated by resources, and then a lil local color.

and then for the active ones, the trick would be that the notable thing is IGNORABLE, something that the PCs can walk on by.

anyway, thanks for helping me clarify my thoughts!

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Happy to help with the design if you’d like. Here’s a couple of shots of my work. Dudn’t have to be for pay if you aren’t going for pay. Always enjoy a fun project so long as the timeline isn’t get this done now.

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yea! I am in the middle of A BIG THING, but later this summer my proverbial plate should be unfull. loop back?

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Let’s do it. When all the spaghetti’s gone.

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I’m totally stealing that expression

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I prefer to have a distinctive village the players stick around, at least for a while. A couple trade offs are the players may want to do things that don’t fit in the town or don’t make sense for something to be there like a high end jeweler. If your campaign goes on for a while, the characters will outgrow the little settlement so you’ll have to create a new place so there is a little more work involved if you want every homebase location to be distinctive. Random generators can help.

The biggest one is helpful friendly NPCs that have some quirky trait and problems the players can help them with. When my players come back to town having dealt some local bandits, a monster who ate some kids, or solved some other issue; the NPCs in town will throw a party, give the PCs free rooms at the inn, give them the key to the city, do favors, provide info and hooks for lucrative adventure locations, etc. Anything I can do to get the players to develop a relationship with the locals I’ve found to be helpful in getting them to care about the village or town.

Once I’ve done that, it can be a useful tool for hooks and clues to adventuring sites. Players will tend to trust NPCs that have been friendly for a while. The town or it’s NPCs can be a hook when a monster or villain becomes a problem and the players don’t want to lose what they see as a resource for their between adventuring gear up and healing.

I also put some NPCs with their own secrets and schemes the in town. I scatter clues in town or in adventuring locations nearby.

I published a village for sandbox settings that have all these characteristics. Links to the DtRPG page are on my blog if you are interested.

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