When you run a game of basically
any tabletop RPG ever,
there are times when your players
are neither fighting dungeons,
nor exploring dragons.
And yet, this peaceful time that the players,
and their characters,
spend in town between adventures…
That’s when they can get to know,
and eventually grow to love,
this world that they’re supposed to save.
It isn’t where the adventure is,
but it is where much of the
heart of the story is.
So how do we create towns and villages our
players will remember for the next 10 years?
Let’s talk about that for the next 10 minutes.
The first thing your fantasy town is
going to need is probably a good map.
Which is exactly why I asked Inkarnate if
they would like to sponsor this video.
Inkarnate is the online map-making
tool you’ve seen me use in pretty much every single one of my supplements.
It’s very easy to use, and with it you can create anything from world maps, and city maps,
all the way down to dungeon maps and battlemaps.
I’ve been using the Pro version in my home
games pretty much ever since I started GMing and it has allowed me,
a talentless hack,
to make beautiful city maps
like this one or that one.
They have over 20 000 assets,
which really helps with creativity and worldbuilding because every couple minutes,
you stumble upon a cool asset and have a sudden realization like
"Yes, actually, my city does in fact need a giant interdimensional gate, thank you very much."
It also has a really useful “Explore” page where the mapper community posts hundreds of maps
every month for you to clone and edit.
One time I took this map by Nemrod,
changed the background to an icy landscape,
and if you don’t tell my players,
they’ll never know I didn’t come up with it myself.
Now, you can use Inkarnate for free,
but you get so much out of Inkarnate Pro,
especially for just $25 a year,
that in my experience at least,
it’s worth every penny.
If you want to check it out for yourself,
you can use the promo code CRITICALEYE to get access to Inkarnate Pro for 7 days for free.
And right now is the coolest time to try it out,
because you’ll get to take part
in the open beta for Inkarnate 2.0 which is available to all Pro users.
It introduces a bunch of new features to make creating maps even easier,
and a new sci-fi battlemap style,
which is really good timing since, as you
might know, I started working on a sci-fi RPG just a couple months back.
In fact, if you catch my next stream, this Sunday at 3PM CET,
I’ll be using Inkarnate to make a bunch of sci-fi battlemaps for my game.
So come hang out and chat about level design and map making tricks with a
certified Inkarnate nerd.
So now, you have a great-looking map.
Let’s talk about what to put in that map.
Throughout the years, D&D has
had a lot of starting towns.
So let’s go through a couple of them -
see how they present their information,
what they do right, what they do wrong,
and what we can learn from them.
Hommlet was a lot of people’s first RPG village,
and it set the standard for what a D&D town should look like for decades to come.
It was published in 1979, a year when,
and this is true by the way,
Chris Perkins looked like this.
And besides featuring the wizard with the
sharpest jawline the entire multiverse,
Hommlet was basically designed to be the most
generic medieval fantasy village possible.
A lot of the locations in the village itself
include some variation of “there is nothing of interest to adventurers here”,
but you still get the exhaustive list of every potter, leatherworker, farmer
and the number of children they have.
It’s not that Hommlet doesn’t
have a story to tell:
there’s a moathouse just outside of
town and the player character will, maybe, clear the bandits who’ve taken it over.
But just in case the players want to do literally anything other than this… riveting adventure,
the book tries to be prepared for their shenanigans by making sure you, the GM, know
where each and every single villager hides their life savings of 9 gold pieces.
It’s medieval fantasy, with a strong emphasis on “medieval” over “fantasy”.
This is not necessarily bad, mind you.
Using Tolkien’s blueprints about what that sort
of village should look like makes it immediately familiar and understandable.
Hommlet is… not very original, but it’s not designed to be.
So let’s fast forward three and a half decades.
The year is 2014.
Wizards of the Coast just published Phandalin,
the latest in a long series of
generic medieval fantasy villages.
Let’s see how things have evolved.
There’s a couple of big improvements here.
First, we only have information about
the important NPCs in the village.
For everyone else, the book simply tells
you to default to a commoner stat block,
if and when your players inevitably
start burning an orphanage or three.
Second, the book spends much more effort actually
drawing players towards those important NPCs.
The player characters always arrive
in Phandalin late at night,
and the NPC they just saved, old man Sildar, tells
them they should spend the night at the inn.
The players can choose to do one or
two things before they head there,
but then every store closes for the
night, and the only thing left to do is pretty much to follow Sildar’s advice.
Even if Sildar isn’t there or the party decides not to listen to his advice,
the cards are stacked in the inn’s favor due to its location.
The party reaches Phandalin from the North, and the first two buildings they see
are the town’s general store so they can trade loot, and then the inn.
Once they get to the inn, the DM is told to have the patrons of the inn share rumors about
every single one of Phandalin’s important NPCs.
And each of these NPCs is
related to one side quest.
So here, we see a pretty fundamental evolution
in the role the town fulfills within the game.
It is still a very mundane village, and again,
that’s on purpose, and it’s completely fine.
But now instead of pursuing realism as a goal,
Phandalin treats realism as just one tool among many, which helps it fulfill its actual goal,
which is pointing players in the direction of where adventures can be had.
So what’s the next step?
We’ve gone from Hommlet to Phandalin
but what is the next evolution of the RPG town going to look like?
Well, here’s another thing that happened between Hommlet and Phandalin:
video games have become a thing.
So today, we pencil pushers of the tabletop RPG
world don’t have a monopoly on RPG towns anymore.
And because of how much more
popular video games are,
computer RPGs have had to iterate and innovate
at a much faster pace than tabletop RPGs.
So I think if you want a sneak
peak of what tabletop RPG towns might look like in the next 15 years,
a good way to do that is to look at how computer RPG towns have evolved over the past 15 years.
This is Whiterun, from Skyrim.
It is… one of the most generic-looking
fantasy villages of all time.
There’s an outer wall. Wooden houses.
A castle at the top of a hill.
I have seen medieval village in real life
that had more personality than Whiterun.
And yet, if you ask people who’ve played
Skyrim what their favorite city is,
the results look like this.
Whiterun is, by far, the most popular city in Skyrim.
It easily beats towns with a much more unique aesthetic,
like Markarth, Solitude or Winterhold.
So why is that?
If our goal as Game Masters is to make cities our players will care about,
what is that magic sauce that allows Whiterun to dominate the mental real estate of Skyrim players
despite being a “generic” fantasy village?
Well, let’s see what a typical player’s
experience looks like when discovering Whiterun on their first playthrough.
First, you get an encounter just outside the city gates, where the
Companions are fighting a Giant.
If you help them, they’ll congratulate
you for being brave like them,
and ask if you’d like to join their ranks.
So you get one of the biggest side quests literally right out the gate.
Once inside the gates, you see an imperial soldier talking with a blacksmith, and
requesting more weapons for the war effort.
The blacksmith retorts that she’s
already busy, and that the soldier should ask a second blacksmith for help.
This is mostly just exposition, but in just a few short sentences, you’ve learned that
1) Whiterun has two blacksmiths, and that
2) in the civil war plotline, it is siding
with the Empire rather than the rebels.
Then you climb the stairs to
discover the Holy Gildergreen tree,
and next to it you hear Amren and his
wife talk about the family’s heirloom sword which was recently stolen.
If you talk to Amren, he’ll ask for your help to retrieve the sword.
The main difference we see here is that Whiterun is not afraid to
spread its exposition over time.
Instead of strong-arming
you to the local tavern,
shoving a questboard in front of your eyes
and speedrunning through its exposition,
Skyrim gives each plot hook its own
encounter, its own time in the spotlight
so it can present those plot hooks in
the most interesting way possible.
And that’s just your first trip to Whiterun.
But when you return to the city later, you’ll find a completely different set of encounters.
At the city gates, you’ll hear about the Alik’r warriors.
At the Holy Gildergreen tree, you’ll find the local priestess trying to heal the tree.
And this continues throughout the game.
Skyrim makes an effort to continuously come up
with excuses to bring you back to Whiterun,
and it’s usually not just to talk to an NPC
so they can give you your next quest marker:
often, the quest takes place
in Whiterun itself.
When you fight your first dragon,
it’s just outside of Whiterun.
When you join the Companions, they transform you
into a rampaging werewolf and you have to escape the city while everyone has become hostile.
The Thieves’ Guild has you poisoning a honeymead brewery.
The civil war gets you to either defend Whiterun from a siege, or take Whiterun
by force, depending on who you side with.
When it is time to finally confront the final boss
of the game, you use the defenses on Dragonsreach castle to capture and subdue a dragon.
Each of these shows you the city in a different light.
You don’t just grow to love Whiterun because it’s a nice town,
you grow to love Whiterun because the narrative designers of Skyrim made sure you would experience
a lot of fun adventures in and around Whiterun.
Odds are, this city is where you’ll
get your first title of Thane.
Where you'll discover you’re the Dragonborn.
Where you'll get your first unpaid intern.
Where you'll buy your first house.
It’s not just a generic fantasy village anymore.
It has become the place where
you have a lot of fun memories.
It has become YOUR generic fantasy village.
The purpose of the town within the game is
still very much to give players a place to sell their loot, and give you some respite
between adventures, just like Hommlet.
And it also tries to deliver adventure hooks as
efficiently as possible, just like Phandalin.
But where Phandalin thought that being
“efficient” meant giving players your adventure hooks as “quickly” as possible,
Whiterun thinks that being “efficient” means presenting each adventure hook in the most
interesting and appealing way possible.
That’s the real evolution here - you don’t
speedrun through your worldbuilding anymore.
And that’s why Whiterun is more
popular than any other city in Skyrim.
It’s because while Markarth is, aesthetically,
a much more original and creative city,
the game kind of fails to give you, as the
player, any opportunity to grow attached to it.
There’s only a couple side quests
which take you to Markarth,
and usually it’s just to talk
to an NPC and then leave.
The city doesn’t leave a lasting
impression because you just don’t spend as much time in it.
It might sound a bit simple, but this is not just me making stuff
up, there’s actual science behind it.
In psychology, this is called the “mere-exposure
effect”, and there’s been many studies
which have shown that the more times and
the longer you show people a thing,
the more positively they tend
to react to that thing.
For example, if you’ve watched a couple of my
videos, maybe you’ve realized by now that
just like Whiterun, this channel’s focus
is on quality rather than quantity,
and that might just have made you click
that big shiny red subscribe button.
But if this is the first video of mine you’ve ever
watched, you’re probably not going to bother.
Which is fine!
I’ll just get you next time…
Now, Skyrim was a good evolution over Phandalin,
but this game is almost old enough to play itself at this point.
So how have RPG towns evolved since then?
Now, we’ve had a couple great
cities in the past couple years,
like in Baldur’s Gate 3,
Cyberpunk 2077,
Spiderman 2,
and Lies of P…
But all of those are giant cities
and in tabletop RPG terms, we’d call those games “urban campaigns”,
which is a topic I think would need its own, separate video.
If we want to talk about small fantasy towns which act as a down beat between adventures,
I think a much better modern example to look at would be…
The House of Hades.
While Hades is a roguelike,
it’s also an extremely emotional journey for both Zagreus, the protagonist, and for the player.
And a major contributing factor which gives this game’s characters… character,
is the hub Zagreus goes back to every time he fails his mission to escape Hell.
Just like Whiterun, this is a place you will come to know like the back of your hand because of…
how many times you will get to huh… visit it.
But those visits could get
repetitive very quickly.
So Supergiant Games had to master
another aspect of good hub design:
Change.
We already saw a hint of this with Whiterun.
If you participated in Skyrim’s
civil war for example,
you would see rubble cluttering the streets
of Whiterun to remind you of the battle
where your heroics decided
the fate of the city.
Witnessing the city change as a result
of your actions and your decisions is a great way to get players engaged,
but Skyrim kept it pretty minimal.
But in Hades, they had to make
it so every visit is unique.
And to achieve that, they used a
couple interesting techniques.
The most immediately apparent one is that the
House is filled with NPCs who always have fun things to say about whatever Zagreus did last.
But the key is that by accomplishing certain goals during your adventures,
it is possible for new characters to join the House of Hades,
or for the story and relationship with the NPCs you already know, to evolve.
As a result, there’s always something to look forward to when you return.
Which helps ease the frustration of having your teeth kicked in by
Theseus for the 8th time in a row.
So it’s not like Supergiant Games just
plopped a couple NPCs into the hub and then wrote 300 000 lines of dialogue for them.
Instead, they very specifically set it up so what you do outside the House of Hades,
would influence what you see inside the House of Hades,
and vice versa.
So as a GM, when you’re preparing your next
adventure, make sure you ask yourself this:
how can I reflect the different possible outcomes
of this adventure in the party’s home base?
But you can even take it one step
further and instead ask yourself:
What are interesting adventures
I could come up with,
whose outcomes would lead to interesting
changes in the party’s home base?
For example, let’s say your
players are in Phandalin.
One of the side quests your players could
go on, is that the Order of the Gauntlet wants them to clear the Netherese Watchtower
of the zombies which have appeared there.
When the players get there, it turns out the
zombies have been raised by a necromancer.
There’s no ties to Phandalin or to the Lost
Mine that your players are looking for.
The only lasting outcome for this encounter is
that the party might get some magical loot.
So how about instead of
zombies and necromancers,
a strange Netherese magical macguffin
inside of the tower has taken over the minds of an entire garrison of soldiers
from the Order of the Gauntlet.
If the party manages to save them,
these soldiers can come back to Phandalin and increase the town’s defenses.
They might even help the party in their fight against the Redbrands bandits, even if
it’s just by providing a distraction.
Now, the side quest ties back into the main plot.
But more importantly, it has a long lasting, visible effect on the village of Phandalin.
Whenever they come back to town, the players will now get greeted by
some of the soldiers they saved,
just because that’s who’s on guard duty now.
It’s much more personal than just a pile of magic items.
The second technique used to bring change to the House of Hades
is going to sound very foreign to my fellow millennial viewers.
As it turns out,
owning the place where you live,
can be kind of fun.
Zagreus can purchase dozens and dozens of
decorations to customize the House of Hades.
Some of them can give him new abilities,
some of them is purely cosmetic.
But there’s way more here
than Zagreus could afford,
even after a couple trips
back to the House of Hades.
This customization is a huge resource sink,
but that’s a good thing.
By having things that are too expensive
for the player to buy right now,
you create a long term goal.
They’ll want to come back to town later and purchase the cool-looking fountain.
If the adventure is where the players get to make money,
the town is where they should get to spend it.
This concept is… Not new to D&D actually,
it just kind of phased out of popular culture with 5th Edition.
Older editions of the game used to have rules for building bastions, hiring staff, etc.
And we’re getting a version of that back in One D&D?
So, I guess we’ve gone full circle and reinvented the wheel.
We’ve taken a 50 year journey through the world of hub design,
and we’re right back in Hommlet.
Except now, hopefully, you have a
pretty good understanding of the fundamentals of how to design a good town.
And now, you get to make your own Hommlet.
Or Phandalin.
Or Whiterun.
Or House of Hades.
Or... flying butterfly city?
That’s it for today’s video!
Special thanks to my Youtube Members:
chunguscito
HotAndSpicyWeiss
Scribe Workshop with Sean Ferrell
Weisz
Ivan Breytenbach
Blake Richardson
Matt CG
Michael3Mod
By being a Youtube Member,
you get my videos 2 days early,
you get a secret channel on Discord,
and if you stay as a member for 6 months or more,
you’ll get a $20 discount on my Flare Fall RPG.
If you’re still in a worldbuilding mood,
here’s a link to my video about how to build a good world map.
And here’s another video, which Youtube thinks you want to watch.
Until next time, have a good one!
