Friday, March 27, 2015

Coming Up: April's A-Z, Towns of Wampus Country

In previous years, Wampus Country hasn't participated in the A-Z madness of April that annually infects some segments of the blogosphere.  A few years back, the Wampus contribution to the ritual was the Arcane Abecediary, although it wasn't a one-letter-per-day exercise, but rather a "dump everything at the end of the month" gambit.

This year, we're going to attempt the full alphabet, daily-posting achievement - ably aided by the ability to pre-write and schedule posts, of course.  By the end of the month, I hope to have presented twenty-six or more towns of Wampus Country, written up in a useful way.

By "town", I mean any inhabited place - we may see some villages, towns, a ranch here and there, a castle, whatever.  No dungeons or ruins count for our purposes this month; and I'm going to try to avoid talking about the larger towns that have already been covered in the past on the blog (Thistlemarch, Frogport, et al).   And by "a useful way", I mean...well, I'm not certain what I mean.  Town write-ups really vary in usefulness.  I can remember seeing a short village write-up in some Forgotten Realms product or another which consisted of a breakdown of population by race (5% halfling) and a short paragraph of description.  Well, that isn't enough.  I only care that the major export is apples if you give me an adventure hook to go with it.  No maps for these.

So that's the goal - to do these short write-ups in a way that provides information that would be a) useful for a DM to riff off of, and b) intriguing for a player (or PC) to hear about.  We want towns that PCs will want to visit!

I'm thinking the layout will look something like this:

Town name
Short description (including location)
What to See - there must be a reason to visit!
Where to Stay
Where to Pray
What to Eat
What to Buy
Who to Meet
Thing to Avoid

Aiming for PC-centric concerns with each of these; sort of mini-answers to some of the Twenty Questions for each locale.





6 comments:

  1. As discussed on G+, I use a template that asks all the things I'd likely want to know in order to fit things into my setting.

    http://www.kjd-imc.org/blog/entity-template-updated-and-explained/

    TL;DR:

    Name
    Titles and Aliases

    Role
    Theme.
    Goals.
    Threats.
    Rewards.

    Relationships
    Allies/positive.
    Enemies/negative.
    Conflicted/neutral.

    Identification
    Description.
    Signature.
    Location.
    Scope.

    Status
    Entanglements.
    Hooks.
    Events.

    Mechanics
    Varies by entity type.

    Story
    Optional, often not included at all.

    "What they're missing" could be under goals ("get more of this!"), threats ("going to get more of this, _no matter what_"), rewards (why you want to go there: "they have lots of sheep, need brick").

    Oddities like the restaurant run by scarecrows probably fits under identification. Seriously, the players might not remember the name of the place, but they'll remember that all their drinks and entrees had straws (... I'll get my coat).

    The template is explained in greater detail at the linked page.

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  2. Looking forward to it!

    Stuart

    Www.lloydofgamebooks.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting. I like your short stat block, it serves as a helpful checklist to make sure that you've covered your bases.
    The comment with the long stat block is also interesting, I'll check it out.

    Follow Me, And Die! - Aquaducts

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