Top Tip for Creating Towns/Cities/NPCs || D&D with Dael Kingsmill

should I start again maybe I should sit again I'm gonna start again hello humans welcome to a D&D video have a look through my stuff and figured out one more thing that might be helpful to you that I wanted to tell you through all the people who are new here this is my old filming spot welcome this is gonna be shiny in the background I'm sorry don't worry about it it's actually it's a big sheet of perspex that I use for T&D it's so for example check mature mr. squeaky this is why I started standing in videos so these are a couple of pieces of battle maps that I drew for the last session that we had but you know sometimes in the middle of the battle you want to be able to draw all over things in this case because the building was sunken and it was meant to be like a part of the problem that it's really darker they can't see anything what I actually did I hope I took some photos I I did I took some photos because we have Skype people so I can check those up on screen I actually laid out the map underneath the perspex and then colored over the top with black whiteboard markers and then as they moved around or lit things I could clear off the bits of the whiteboard marker so they could see the room and it was miraculous it was a lot of fun actually so that's my big sheet of perspex of what it's for and this is my newly advent calendar potentially familiar to people who follow me on Instagram so anyway what we're gonna be talking about today is my system for generating towns and cities and NPCs for them I know some of you have asked questions about this it's something that could be really tricky if you don't know how to go about it so let's take a look we're gonna start with this last time this is the swamp fishing village the small town that I've mentioned a thousand times in these videos that my play is started in what is necessary I think for both creating your society and for creating your NPCs is something I learned in ancient history in high school it honestly it got me through all of my exams like a breeze but you have to be ready to giggle because it is called the sperm principle so sperm basically it stands for social political economic religious and military and the idea is that that covers all the most important spheres of a society and the areas that interact and coexist in order to create a society and form how it works and I have found it just super incredibly useful for designing any kind of a town or city or society I guess for my D&D game so you can see here if I turn on my top layers here what I've got in glass tide is so when I began I knew that there would have to be a tavern for the players to stay in so that's a great social hub I knew I wanted there to be some kind of an interaction with the Town Hall so that gives us a political location and then finally economic is something that's really easy to work out even if you don't go into thinking that it's going to be super important to the adventure it's still a good thing to work out to make your location believable so for glass tide this was super obvious in terms of we know that they've run a ferry service and that's very important to the town's economy and that they are a fishing village because it's much easier to fish in the swamp than it is to like grow a wheat farm or whatever so that gives us three of the five sperm areas so we can begin building our town so we can start with over here we've got the boat sheds that services yeah the economic sector we have Taman which services the social sector and down here we have the town hall which as it's part in the politics of glass tile that starts to break up the town into different districts here we've got the fishing precinct is its own area of the town so we know that all the buildings that are in the fish Precinct are going to be more sort of trade buildings things like that down here we have the public quarter which houses the Town Hall as well as the market and the church once again a starting point was Pathfinder so the temple here is a temple to air still which gives us out religious doesn't it yes it does we know that our social element is going to be the tavern of a fisherman's wake and so we kind of want that to be a midpoint between where people work and where people live now when we're thinking about where people live this gives us more distinct sort of suburbs I guess within the town even when it's it's wall down you can kind of break it up so here thinking in terms of class disparity because that does kind of exist everywhere no matter how small a town is we have here our residential parts of town the lower is eventually upper residential I did a cheeky little reference to Old Kingdom Egypt here because Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt are actually it's kind of flipped as to how we would normally think of it Lower Egypt is to the north Upper Egypt is to the south and it's because it's based on the height of the land and I felt like that would make sense for his mom and that would make sense for how they would divide up the space so people who can afford the bigger houses on the high high bit of land but less you know sinking into the mud that is the upper residential that's where the wealthier people go people who can't afford those houses as much they're stuck in the low res eventual which is basically mud rather than an actual island in the swamp yeah one thing military you have to think of a little more abstractly in this case the town is so small they of course don't have a military they don't even really have a police force but they do have is a hunt captain who kind of acts as the closest thing they have to like a constable and actually that's a pretty good transition into how to give yourself NPCs to populate your town with now we all know that we only really need a handful of NPCs to cover the whole population of a town and I personally like to split this up based on those spawn principles again so for example social here at the fisherman's wake we have the bartender Adrian Shane who owns the tavern and we have Tamara and s who is the waitress they both work at the tavern people talk to them we'll talk around them they're a great social Centrepointe political my political representative for the town is judge willing bright huh he's kind of the Merrill figure he's not technically actually the man but he is he kind of takes that position economic let me think look now I need to pull out my handy dandy DMS binder it's a good thing it's so organized wink so we go Oh Hamill Hamill bar fit Hamill Burford is the ferry runner in the town so he's the probably the biggest representative of the economic sector really just we have bliss by rafin she is a priestess of era still who works at the temple and of course military we have a pseudo police chief Alesia one stool so then we've got a really simple way of breaking up your town thinking about the different buildings that you're going to need and sort of splitting up different regions of the city or town or societies based on that and giving yourself NPCs based on that as well this firm principle man it's super useful so let's take a look at a bigger example this is Bryn Alden this is the the next city that my play is going to go to by the way my players aren't allowed to watch this video either I'm sorry it's full of spoilers Daniel you have to stop the video now I'm sorry I know it's hard so right here we've got the city sort of as is none of its labeled you can see much more defined roads and things like that because when it comes to bigger cities that's when you get a little more detailed sort of human practicality there's this really great guide somewhere online hopefully I've saved it and can leave a link in the description below I think that's done by the guy who does the maps for Game of Thrones actually but he does a really cool description of how to sort of lay out a city honestly it's the most useful thing I've seen so I'll try to find it for you so I was thinking about this town Brynn Alden what do I know about the town I know that it is a very old city that originally was kind built on the tallest hill in this hill country and people there originally worshiped this kind of now out date of God olden who was it got a percent so the first thing I know is that they're built on a hill great I know that they're worshipping alban so i wanted there to be a temple to the sun at the very top of the hill now if i'm thinking about who's running this place even before i decide what kind of a political system this city is gonna be run under what i do know is that the people who are running it I don't want to also be at the top of the hill where they get the great fancy person views so here we go and our sort of political stuff going on up here economically I kind of wanted this city to be like a cultural hub so I wanted almost like the Grand Bazaar kind of a market to exist somewhere in the city that's what we've got over here I also wanted it to have to attract a lot of artists and sort of you know poets and actors and people like that so we've got kind of a theater down here we've got the artists bar as always a players bar militarily I thought it would be interesting to create a city where it used to have quite a significant military presence but over time they've kind of stagnated got lazy it's a little bit more decadent a little bit more hedonistic so maybe they still have sort of a soldier God presence in the city but it's really not not as actually militaristic as it used to be but it does have a city gun because it is a big city and they did use to have this military presence so then when it comes to actually building the city populating it with buildings what I like to do is just think practically you've got to think about if you come into this city big city with a big round pool around it and you want to get to the market that's why you're here it's a cultural hub all the people come here to trade their way well the sign is we know where the market is built because the market wants to be in the midpoint between the people who have the money the rich people who are up the hill and the people who are actually the masses then we recognise that people are lazy so partly gonna get formed over time as people walk them you know so that's how we end up with these a little curvy bits because people are taking shortcuts you know you end up with this weird little kind of courtyard here because people don't want to walk all the way up and then turn right they want to cut that corner while there's no building there that's how you end up with some buildings with really weird shapes that's how you end up with strange little corners like if anyone has ever been to Sydney man or man it's all funny little alleyways so that's kind of a thing that happens over time as the city is being built so that's that then okay let's stop thinking properly about our districts again so here we go so let's start up here we've got Aldens summit and just below that but still up the hill aways you get old ins rise which is where I imagine all the wealthy people live their bought their nice little like villas on the side of the hill with an excellent view immediately below that we get the bazaar plaza that's kind of a major economic center for this city left here we have the judicial quarter that's sort of the area that is you know most guards we have the bellows this is the very industrial sector of the town this is where you know you have your blacksmiths you have your people you know you can't rights people who are doing you know trade work really sort of heavy hand work so that's another economic sector down here we have artist alley and the green this is a town where the stories are told by art and so all the artists live down here and they you know put on plays about things that have happened and they write poetry about things that happen so you've got this sort of intermingling of art and society there the green being more where those artists tend to live and out of Sally being where they work and finally the Downs which is again looking at that sort of economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor the Downs being the place where water runs down the hill and things get muddy and things get gross and that's where all the poor people live so again social political economic religious military and now I haven't actually populated this city with any confirmed NPCs yet so let's see what we could do let's come it's really easy to throw in a social NPC who is someone who runs a bar or does something similar so we're gonna have a woman who runs a bar in the let's put her in between the bellows and the judicial quarter so she kind of hears all the stuff that the workers and the soldiers are talking about let's also give ourselves one of the artists because that'll be interesting how about a halfling who runs a theater company that sounds cool and what it also does is it splits up some social influence across different parts of the city so depending on where they go they might meet a different one political the party at this point are a very low level so they're probably not going to meet many political influences but we can probably throw around the name of the Senate member who doesn't really want things to change because he's in a position of power and he likes being languid and not spending his time on things so there's a political power economic let's give ourselves a store owner from the bazaar maybe someone who's a little bit useless like he sells armor which is something they probably want to go looking for arms and armor but all of its just ornate and sort of decorative it's just ceremonial and not actually gonna be useful to them religious I would like a boots on the ground he'll a person who hangs around in the Downs helping the downtrodden and I would like maybe a huffy priestly type who's probably her superior who is kind of annoyed that people are just coming to visit the temple to have a look at the sights rather than actually as part of worship and military how about we give ourselves captain of the guard we have to be the captain with God someone who's really hassled and tired and just hates trying to get all the soldiers to do their jobs there we go we've got a bunch of embassies to go and once I give them names and mannerisms and all sorts they will fit right into the city and make sense you see what I'm saying I that makes sense and you can like apply it hopefully I've described things in a way that is at least somewhat useful to you this is how I approach all the towns and cities that I make in my game and I just find it incredibly useful if I can't work out how to populate the city in particular with NPCs sperm principals all the way social political economic religious military you got it and you'll remember it cuz it's funny a bunch of wolfgang episodes just went up some more I'm gonna be coming up with this next moon blue moon it's a silly show about werewolves if you haven't checked it out yet please do it's not a particularly risky investment all the episodes are less than five minutes so you can watch the first one and if you really don't want to watch anymore that's it you don't have to but I really think that you might enjoy it and it would mean the world to me if you check that out blink blink please fluttering my eyelashes so anyway that's that for now popping that do believe that's it I'm done email this to your grandma I'll see you some other time it's much harder to stand out to weave [Music] I'm gonna kill my neighbor

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 150,810

Rating: 4.9694657 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek & Sundry, Geek & Sundry Vlogs, Geek and Sundry, Geek and Sundry Vlogs, Geek, nerd, australian, australia, vlogger, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dael, Kingsmill, Dale, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, story time, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, critical role, npc, npcs, city, town, map, make, create, generate, populate, sperm

Id: sJd6g--Ok_A

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Varis78]

This was a super helpful bit of advice for world building! Thanks! :D

[u/RedditJeff]

I'm new here, and man I'm all about S.P.E.R.M. This was a pretty helpful video, can't wait to use it in my game!

For people who don't have art skills, I really love this generator for city maps. I can then label buildings/sections

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator