Quote from: Naburimannu on July 24, 2022, 04:32:00 PM
Where I'm coming from: I have in the past been paid to write computer code to generate imaginary urban road networks for my job, so this is a thing I take a little bit seriously. Perhaps too seriously, per SHARK.

*shrugs* Or perhaps not seriously enough? The system is intended for generating villages, per the subject line. It's not intended for urban settings at all. To me, that's a distinction worth taking seriously.

Greetings!

Yes, well, I think that villages are an important part of the campaign world. Villages, after all, are ultimately the foundation upon which civilization is built. All those great urban cities need animals, food, and raw resources--all of which comes chiefly from villages. Agricultural, fishing villages, ranching villages, pastoral villages, mining villages, logging villages, orchard villages--many different types of villages, all providing the enormous level of resources from which anything is built.

Erase villages, and there is no "civilization". Having scattered outposts struggling desperately while circling the drain--while at first glance sounding exciting and dramatic--in my view actually *narrows* the campaign options, and affects the overall flavour of the campaign. There are enormous degrees of things that the Player characters absolutely depend upon--all provided by and through the framework and foundations of civilization. Advanced tools, armour, weapons, coin-based economy, even social rank and knighthood, wizards, temples and priests, the ubiquitous "Tavern"--pretty much anything and everything beyond a stone age level of existence.

Thus, I think having well-detailed and fleshed out villages are a very important component of a campaign. Villages also contribute NPC's, resources, events, drama, and more, to the larger towns and cities of the campaign. Sometimes in subtle and weird ways, but gradually feeds like a vast creek system, flowing into what becomes a mighty river, possessing identity, force, and direction.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I need to take a look at Perceforest for Mythras again. I know there's a village (vill) management and improvement system in the supplement, but I can't recall if it allows for building from the ground up.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on August 06, 2022, 07:20:37 PM
I need to take a look at Perceforest for Mythras again. I know there's a village (vill) management and improvement system in the supplement, but I can't recall if it allows for building from the ground up.

Greetings!

Interesting, Armchair Gamer! I would love to see some of your notes and observations about such rules!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Well, this makes me aware that I do things...differently.

I tend to make singular locations which serve as many purposes as possible for the game. The real world considerations come as answers to what campaign needs I'm answering. Usually, I'm trying to make an environment where you simultaneously get PC/ NPC roleplay, an informal dungeon-crawling experience, and to convey the tone or aesthetic of the campaign in an impactful way. Then I pitch the campaign to players based on this location.

For an example, I'll pull up the module I've been back-burnering for my homebrew system (which is present day/ near future SF biohorror with a whole lot of inspiration from Parasite Eve).

The location is nominally a rebuilt Chattanooga, Tennessee Aquarium.   (We'll get to why the US South specifically in a minute.) But it has things like a three-level food court, several gift shops and independent vendors, and connects to locations like a Cold War-era bomb shelter which has been repurposed into a biolab, and to Downtown Chattanooga. And of course it has things like a parking deck.

The reason it's in the South is because Greater Appalachia has an absurdly high gun ownership rate, so you can give the PCs more than enough guns and ammo by killing off NPCs. There will be a few carrying concealed handguns on their person and a whole lot of cars with deer rifles in them, so by setting the game in this specific area, you can bypass the need for a dedicated weapons vendor for the first third of the campaign, and all the other needs (food, water, NPCs to interact with, medical and veterinary supplies, monsters to kill, a space to explore) are all self-contained within the Aquarium itself.

It's like the SF equivalent to Ravenloft in that everything is self-contained. In some ways, it's notably worse than Ravenloft because of how claustrophobic it can be. Ravenloft is a huge city. This aquarium? The class of 4th graders who barricaded themselves into the VIP dining lounge, the CIA spy trying to find a MacGuffin thumb drive, the mutant supersoldier villain who is now siding with a space alien who claims she can cure his PTSD and his girlfriend's incurable cancer, and the now-amphibious electric eel miniboss encounter are all separated by only a few hundred yards, so one effect spilling over and affecting another is pretty easy. It may only require a boss fight to wind up knocking down some drywall. Players may have to consciously think about moving or driving events from one location within the Aquarium to another.

Is this always a practical approach to village building? No, not especially. But I do recommend starting with the aesthetic you are going for (I'm going for a flooding aquarium filled with NPCs and de-extincted mutant animals), and then try to make the campaign location as tight as possible.

My primary reason for going to the level of detail of villages where I map them out has nothing to do with theory, shoulds or shouldn'ts, what's "good" or "bad" for the overall campaign. Has nothing to do with "preference" or "play style." It's pretty simple. Exploring a new village can itself be an adventure or part of an adventure. Not drawing a map of the village is a lot like not drawing the map of a dungeon. The very best example of this I've seen is in Gary Gygax's "Living the Legend" module, in which exploration of the village is spelled out fairly clearly as a huge chunk of the adventure. And once you've seen how that players out there, if you missed it the first time around, it gives new perspective on how to run Village of Hommlet. And it explains why so much of Keep on the Borderlands is detailing the keep itself.

My secondary reason is because the division of labor of a village is not nearly what it is in a city or even a town. That means a lot of the items PCs will be most interested in buying will not be readily available. This gives PCs a motive to want to travel to larger cities. At the same time, realistically, there's always going to be a market in second-hand goods. So when adventurers return with salvaged armor and weapons that they wish to liquidate, that puts items that would generally not be available in a village economy available on the market for other adventuring parties to purchase. It's almost as if as the party levels up, the community can also "level up" in a sense with them.

And my tertiary reason is because I kind of enjoy tracking the various economies and markets of the game world. It provides valuable background material. And it puts me in a position to easily determine what the wider consequences to the region are from PC actions. This in turn helps perpetuate the campaign and launch new adventures with minimal effort. If the PCs route a gang of highwaymen, it might mean an increase in the number of wandering merchants to the area. Or it could mean a new gang moves in to fill the vacuum. Or perhaps two rival gangs try to stake a claim and a turf war breaks out. In the case where traveling merchants become more common, this can mean rarer and more exotic items become available to the PCs for purchase at random. But it might also mean increased competition for the PCs favorite weapon smith, which might create new problems for PCs to deal with.

Not directly relevant, I know, but I've had a lot of utility from Watabou's stuff over at Itch:

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