Try to predict what your players might ask about and if you need to improvise one later, they might find what they desire in a neighboring village. An alchemist may simply live nearby due to local flora. A general store could be importing tools for lumberers or miners. Feel free to add in oddities but, most importantly, try to integrate them into the town’s ecosystem. A small town is unlikely to have an enchanter, but a general store or hermit alchemist is not out of the question. If your party is likely to spend some time in the area, throw in the basic amenities and resources they might need. We will expand on the interactions in the third section, but it should also influence the town’s physical design. You can download it here.Īs with all things in Dungeons and Dragons, you should keep the meta-narrative in mind. Our Coastal Town has a dock, farms, markets, and houses, as well as nearby shrines. These soldiers will need a barracks or central meeting point. Perhaps gnolls stalk the foothills, creating the need for a militia force. You should likewise consider threats to the town. Lonely towns will conversely need small farms to supplement their primary industry. These might have started as a single inn for weary travelers, with market stalls and eventually trade stores opening and expanding into a small town. Towns on main roads will generally gravitate to trading and will grow rapidly, particularly if they are close to a crossroads. If you have a larger map for your campaign or a good idea of the broader region, consider what else is nearby. Similarly, towns with access to other settlements can trade easily for what they themselves lack, while secluded areas will need to be self-sustaining. Consider the nearby landscape and how that influences construction, as these industries are likely how the town began. Coastal towns have access to both fishing and trade via docks. How does the town sustain itself? A settlement in open plains might favor farming crops and livestock, while a forested area could hunt for food and trade lumber to neighbors. Think about the resources that the location gives people and how a town might have grown from that. For a settlement to fit, its design should reflect its environment. One of your first questions when planning a small town should be asking what its purpose is in terms of your world. And don’t worry, you don’t need a degree in city planning to make towns that feel real. Its layout and purpose should make sense. There are a number of ways to construct a village but the focus should always be on making it feel organic and real. This changes for towns related to or containing important characters, but we will get to that further down. Your small towns will most often begin with designing the town itself. We hope it can aid DMs of all experience levels in crafting worlds that feel immersive and alive. The purpose is not to give the one, definitive method, but rather to help in managing what can seem like a daunting number of details. We will cover several different steps in creating both the town’s layout and its population, with examples from our own campaigns. The purpose of this article is to give you some inspiration and jumping-off points for filling your world map with smaller communities. Whether they act as your campaign’s entry point or are just a stop along the road, each should be memorable for players while being easy to run on repeated visits. For this, we have a basic guide on ways to go about generating, populating, and running small towns. On top of that, the prospect of crafting each town as distinct from its neighbors can be daunting for even experienced DMs. The art of creating small towns and settlements in a campaign’s world is often overlooked in favor of grandiose stories. Each settlement is unlike the last, and brimming with new faces to meet. More established parties also find themselves passing through or returning to villages, either for shelter or work. It is from these towns that adventurers often arise, seeking their glory and fortunes in the wider world. Each one bears its own story and locals to tell it, from the rebellion settlement to the congregation of acolytes at a temple’s steps. Small towns and villages dot the countryside.
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