village

What’s in a Village? (part 2)

Intro

Part one delved into many of the places that might be in a village and a bit on how a village might be placed in relation to larger communities or perhaps castles. This part will explore the people who populate a village.

The Basics – People in the Places

It goes without saying that most of the places you put in your village will need to have people placed in them.  How deep you make them is, of course, totally up to you just like anything else in your campaign. Few things are more frustrating than creating an amazing setting, full of life, people living their daily lives while underneath are plots, rumors and undercurrents for the party to explore only to have them fixate on some insignificant NPC that was just passing through that you never even assigned a name to. In a later post, making your villages reusable will be explored so as to preserve your hard work when this happens.

It goes without saying that most of the places you put in your village will need to have people placed in them.  How deep you make them is, of course, totally up to you just like anything else in your campaign. Few things are more frustrating than creating an amazing setting, full of life, people living their daily lives while underneath are plots, rumors and undercurrents for the party to explore only to have them fixate on some insignificant NPC that was just passing through that you never even assigned a name to. In a later post, making your villages reusable will be explored so as to preserve your hard work when this happens.

As previously discussed, it’s nice to have ‘something’ stick about each village (or town, etc) your party passes through, so try to make at least a couple people or places stand out in some manner or fashion. Think of your family, friends, coworkers, or even strangers you interact with throughout the day. What makes each unique? There are so many things to choose from. Some examples: how they dress, laugh, walk, or talk are different mannerisms someone might have. What about personal appearance? Hair or eye color, hair style, tattoos, missing body parts can all highlight one NPC over the rest. Watching random people can be very inspiring for creating your world’s cast of characters.

When you go to create the people in your places, you want to keep your world’s background and concepts in mind. For example, in earlier centuries in the Real World, people had (much) larger families than they do today. There were a number of reasons for this, but largely due to infant and childhood mortality rates being very high. Sometimes only one in five children would make it to adulthood. Whether or not you consciously have this in your world, you may want to have an idea of average family size for each race just to make it smoother creating later.

As morbid as it might sound, it’s also an opportunity for roleplay encounters. For example, after passing by Grick’s pig farm, you inform your party that they see a screaming and crying boy of about ten years old yelling ‘Ma! Pa! Jynnie got stuck bad!’ as he races down the road. The party hurries to investigate and you find a teen girl on death’s door, huge gashes in her side, being hugged by other kids screaming ‘Please don’t die!’. Your party now has the chance for a simple heroic deed, probably with the simplest cure spell your cleric has.

Getting back to family size, when you create a family-run farm for example, you’ll want to have an appropriate number of kids, more younger than older. You may also want to consider multiple generations under the same roof, or at least on the same property; grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins are all possibilities. “Ye need potatoes? Go round back of the small barn and see old Sarl. Go easy with him, he’s my mom’s brother and ain’t been right after that bugbear smacked him in the head twenty-odd summers back”

It goes without saying that most of the places you put in your village will need to have people placed in them.  How deep you make them is, of course, totally up to you just like anything else in your campaign. Few things are more frustrating than creating an amazing setting, full of life, people living their daily lives while underneath are plots, rumors and undercurrents for the party to explore only to have them fixate on some insignificant NPC that was just passing through that you never even assigned a name to. In a later post, making your villages reusable will be explored so as to preserve your hard work when this happens.

As previously discussed, it’s nice to have ‘something’ stick about each village (or town, etc) your party passes through, so try to make at least a couple people or places stand out in some manner or fashion. Think of your family, friends, coworkers, or even strangers you interact with throughout the day. What makes each unique? There are so many things to choose from. Some examples: how they dress, laugh, walk, or talk are different mannerisms someone might have. What about personal appearance? Hair or eye color, hair style, tattoos, missing body parts can all highlight one NPC over the rest. Watching random people can be very inspiring for creating your world’s cast of characters.

When you go to create the people in your places, you want to keep your world’s background and concepts in mind. For example, in earlier centuries in the Real World, people had (much) larger families than they do today. There were a number of reasons for this, but largely due to infant and childhood mortality rates being very high. Sometimes only one in five children would make it to adulthood. Whether or not you consciously have this in your world, you may want to have an idea of average family size for each race just to make it smoother creating later.

As morbid as it might sound, it’s also an opportunity for roleplay encounters. For example, after passing by Grick’s pig farm, you inform your party that they see a screaming and crying boy of about ten years old yelling ‘Ma! Pa! Jynnie got stuck bad!’ as he races down the road. The party hurries to investigate and you find a teen girl on death’s door, huge gashes in her side, being hugged by other kids screaming ‘Please don’t die!’. Your party now has the chance for a simple heroic deed, probably with the simplest cure spell your cleric has.

Getting back to family size, when you create a family-run farm for example, you’ll want to have an appropriate number of kids, more younger than older. You may also want to consider multiple generations under the same roof, or at least on the same property; grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins are all possibilities. “Ye need potatoes? Go round back of the small barn and see old Sarl. Go easy with him, he’s my mom’s brother and ain’t been right after that bugbear smacked him in the head twenty-odd summers back”

People Outside of the Places

There’s almost always going to be people outside of the ‘usual places’ that you’ve already whipped up for your village. Some of examples of these people are reclusive mages, rangers and druids in the woods, healer on the edge of town who concocts remedies from local plants, woodsmen who hate civilization, maybe even a lady of the evening somewhere.

Like the people around town, each of them will have their own life going on with a roof (probably), a family (perhaps), talents, daily routines, likes, and dislikes so you’ll probably want to fill those in as you’re writing.

Making your Village (or something else) Reusable

Rotate the Map / Directions

One of the easiest things you can do is rotate the village map, which your region map may force you to do anyhow.  If your players are heading northwest towards the Nvelk forest and come through the village,  the main road will likely go something like southeast to northwest.  If your party decides to push right through and not stop for all the roleplay goodness you packed in there, you can place it again near the Ospaa Swamp, where the road is generally west to east.

Flip the map

This is easier if you have your maps in electronic form, but you could just flip to a mirror image of your map. You can flip it either horizontally or vertically. Your road that was going 60 degrees left off the main road is now on the right.  The small river on the top side of the map is now on the bottom, etc.  It may be hard to do a key at the top of your notes for this, so just carefully go through them and change any references to the changes you made.

Placeholder Labels

When you write your notes, instead of putting in a reference to the Eldt River, just put in RIVER.  The same for things like roads, forests, notable landscape items.  Then, when you go to place your village, you can fill the various landmarks near it.

Move Roads or Landmarks

Side roads, notable hills, or similar landmarks can be moved around if needed to alter the look and feel of a village. This really only needs to be done if you mentioned the item while the party was busily ignoring the awesomeness of your creations.

Extra Names/NPCs

When you’re creating your village for the first time, you might consider creating extra names for NPCs. It could be a pool of extra names or extra names for each specific NPC.  Generally, the more individualized or significant NPCs should have a pool of their own so you can choose those with more care. Farmers, their kids, tavern/inn staff members, and other more generic NPCs would be more likely to pull from a pool of extra names.

Where Did I Use This?

If your memory is anything like mine, you may want to consider a page/entry at the beginning of your notes on the place to log different things mentioned below.  Consider it similar to a changelog page in a technical document.  This way, you can better keep track of what you put where and not confuse the players, especially that one who has the ridiculously sharp memory.

Each entry would include at least:

* Where the village was placed.
* What was the village name.
* How the map was oriented.
* What were the placeholder names.
* Where you put the roads/landmarks
* Names of encountered NPCs.

Wrap Up

There’s a whole lot of ideas in here. Some of them will resonate with you and some won’t; it’s the way of things. Like any other game concepts or methodologies, use what you think works best for you and discard the rest. I certainly don’t prepare the same way I did two, ten, or twenty years ago. It’s an always evolving process, and I hope that some of this is useful enough to you to add into yours. Happy Gaming!

What’s in a Village? (part 1)

Intro

Of all of the types of places you have in your world, few will be more numerous than the common village. Communities of roughly four to nine hundred people, they exist near crossroads, water sources, and natural resources. Some will eventually grow into towns and some will dwindle away into a collection of abandoned, overgrown, buildings and others may simply exist for centuries as they are.

One of the hardest things in running a game is to make common things distinct and memorable and have people and places make an impression with the players. Not every place needs to do that, of course, but it’s always nice when you mention a name of a village, you see blank faces, and then someone says ‘Oh yeah, where Baclan lives!’ and everyone’s face lights up with recognition.

The Basics – The Places

In the era in which fantasy games are run, there is no refrigeration, fast transportation of goods or any modern conveniences whatsoever. This is obvious, of course, but what it means is that almost everything perishable for daily life has to be brought to market (if not sold directly from the source), wait to be sold, brought back to the buyer’s place, and used before it spoiled. Generally, this isn’t a concern, but if you’re laying out a region, say around a castle or city, you may want to keep this in mind.

Everyone needs to eat, so there’s a lot of farms. They likely grow a little bit of everything, have a variety of livestock so that they can have their own supply of food and then extra to sell. The proximity of your village to a large town or city may affect just how many farms there are, how big they are, or both. The reason for this is that such towns and cities will need to import most of their food from nearby farmers. Some farmers will specialize in something, whether it’s a certain type of livestock or specific crop, that’s up to you. You don’t have to really make a point about trying to figure everything out but if you want, you can have your party ride past a spacious fenced-in area of sparse forest and see several sizeable hogs fattening themselves up, and then meet Grick, the pig farmer as you pass his barn.

Like food, everyone needs water, so put a well in a few central locations. Many farms will also have their own so if you’re detailing a specific farm then add one in. Unlike in larger communities, the water in a village is probably reasonably clean and safe to drink, especially if the townsfolks have a druid or wizard/sage advising them to have the tanner and other such businesses downstream from the village or on the fringe of the community.

Various shops and laborers will be in a village as well. Weavers/seamstresses, leatherworkers, tanners, ropemakers, smiths, sawmills, cart makers – all may be in a village but each village may not have everything. For some things, your players might hear ‘Nay, ye need to visit Alzid over in Baer’s Crossing east of here. She’s on the far side of town, mind ye’.

There’s going to be at least one tavern, probably two or three depending on how spread out the village is, and likely an inn as well. The inn will likely be along the main road going through town to be easily accessible to travelers passing through. Each of these locations is a possible location for you to put a community board for quests, rumors, etc.  It’s up to you if each of these has their own brewer or not. It’s also possible there is at least one independent brewer in town. In the Real World, many brewers in the medieval period were women (hence the word alewife), so these brewers may be the wife of someone else or a single woman making her own way in your world. Similarly, you can add a distiller or even a vintner to your village. You might also add a cooper to the village to provide containers for the beverages, rain water, nails, etc.

Many villages have a larger building or two in the center of town that can be used for different purposes throughout the year. For instance, a sizeable room could be used for festivals, parties, or village meetings but also for group protection in a weather emergency or goblinoid invasion.  Smaller rooms in the same building could be used by village elders for basic government functions. If the geography allows for basements to be dug out, that could hold emergency food or equipment stores, maybe even a jail cell or two. These types of buildings are also possible locations for a community board.

Also in the center, you may find some fields set aside for mutual grazing, often called ‘commons’, one of the previously mentioned wells should be located here if you add them.

Other miscellaneous buildings that might be found in a village is a granary to store community food, mills (water, wind or both), or shrines to various beings or forces.

Next up: What’s in a Village? The Basics – The people
A look at the people you might consider putting in your village to help it come to life.