New to Sly Flourish? Start Here!
by Mike on 6 April 2015
When the characters reach a town or other large settlement, the pacing of our D&D game changes — and not always in a good direction. Towns are tricky environments to run. They have a wide range of locations, oodles of NPCs, and too many options for things to do.
"You enter the village of Redtower. What do you want to do?" can be a game-killing introduction.
How do we ensure when the characters reach a town it's as interesting as the rest of our game? Here are three ways:
What makes this town unique or interesting? What feature grabs the characters' attention when they enter the town? What fantastic feature does the town surround? Try to add at least one of these notable features and probably no more than three — enough to define the town in the eyes of the characters and your players.
Here are ten notable features:
You can find more fantastic features, and generate your own, using the "Random Monuments" table on page 12 of the Lazy DM's Workbook or the "Core Adventure Generators" tables on page 6 of the Lazy DM's Companion.
When the characters enter the town, it works best if they get involved in something right away. We can do this by launching into a situation right when they come into town. Such situations should help define the town and offer interesting choices the characters can make. Here are ten example situations the characters may wander into in the town:
Come up with your own list of potential encounters as the characters first travel into the town. You needn't have one every time they return but something to set the stage always helps. The "Framing Events" table in chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master's Guide is a great go-to, as are the "Random Town Events" table on page 15 of the Lazy DM's Workbook and the "Settlement Events" on page 37 of the Lazy DM's Companion.
When the characters come to town, they might have twelve to twenty options or more. Do they go to the inn? Visit the blacksmith? Talk to the local mining guild? The decisions can be paralyzing. Instead of building a huge town and offering the whole thing to the characters we can start with the characters and build around them. What sorts of locations would they be interested in. Here are ten examples:
These are based on classes but you can do the same thing with races. Perhaps the mushroomfolk character finds a local compost heap where others of their kind hang out, enjoy the meal, and share rumors. Perhaps the clockwork character is interested in the local Temple of Rava — diety of the clockwork folk.
When you're preparing to introduce your town, write down the locations you think will be of direct interest to the characters based on their class, race, background or interests.
It's hard to think of a town as another location of adventure but that's what we're really trying to do. Instead of leaving a town open-ended, we can focus our town to make it an interesting place to run a session. We do so with the following:
By giving the characters interesting things to see, interesting places to go, and interesting things to do a town can be as exciting as any other location they visit in their games.
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