I sure do talk a lot about the needs of "simulation," huh? Truly the least interesting approach to design. But my defense of simulationism is a topic for another day. Instead, I want to make sure we enter into this grand conclusion agreed on something more important: simulation isn't worth much without gameability. It doesn't matter if you've created a settlement that's accurate to some standard of "realism" if it isn't also fit for play. That is the theme of this final part of our long series.
To be honest, Part 5 wasn't exactly revolutionary. There's more than enough advice and resources out there to help you stock your settlements with detail.
To me, the far greater obstacle is getting your prep into action. It's all too easy to spend lots of time creating great material, only to watch it go unused during the session for reasons you don't quite understand. This is my attempt to systematically attack that problem and understand how to avoid it.
From prep to table
Let's revisit a point I made in Part 2. One of the reasons I think so many people are attached to crawling is because it gives you an easy trigger for introducing content: move a space, roll an encounter. Now the GM knows they have the green light to deliver their description of that space, plus a description of the NPCs encountered, and can take it easy for the next 20-40 minutes while the players engage with that.
I claimed that these guardrails, while convenient, are simply inappropriate for the environment in question. They clash with reasonable expectations of how you would actually be interacting with this space. Towns aren't dungeons.
But we still need guardrails of some kind. The central problem here is managing the flow of information.
The same reason why settlements aren't very dungeon-like is also what makes this so tricky in this first place. See, it's not that settlements have more information than dungeons or wilderness. It's just more dense. In a dungeon or hexcrawl, you can tease out the info one room or hex at a time, slowly accumulating as the players explore. In those environments, the players control the pace at which new information flows, and can feasibly write down notes for themselves as needed.
But in a settlement, there's a boatload of information that should be available right off the bat and most of it is immediately relevant. It's all "adjacent" at all times. It's like if you took the amount of content that's in a large-sized dungeon and put all of it into one room instead of spread across many. Then you have your players stand in that one medium-sized room surrounded by a ton of potentially interesting elements and try to both explain all of it to them adequately without overexplaining it, and hope they engage with it well.
Thus, we need to think critically about the best ways to deliver information to the players. What makes sense with the environment, is not too much for the players to handle, yet still gives them enough to make informed decisions? As I see it, the two recurring variables are the types of information and the amounts of information.
Gameability first
Credit: "Cities of Mystery," by Larry Elmore
In my experience, one of the reasons why prepped material might fail to end up being used at the table is because it wasn't the kind of thing that would naturally come up. Do you just make places and people that you hope the players find interesting? Then what? You just hope the the players will aimlessly crawl from street to street and stumble into them? You may have concocted an NPC that you think is just the grooviest guy, but you never considered how or why the players would have reason to run into this fellow.
My best advice for avoiding this pitfall is to remember to think in terms of activities while prepping content. Ask yourself: what kinds of things will the players be doing in town? That tells you what kinds of places and people to bother prepping, and what kinds are a waste of your time. Because we're starting with the activities we expect the players to be doing, the players will naturally bring themselves to your level design, rather than you needing to find a way to somehow place it in front of them.
Thus, instead of the delivery of info being triggered by movement + random roll, it's triggered by the players declaring what activity they're performing.
After that, you need to think about whether that activity is best addressed through a mechanic / procedure / abstraction or if it's the right time to make a major site + NPC that goes on the map. Let's go through some examples.
Rest and recovery is the number 1 activity the PCs will use your settlement for, which means that we need to think about accommodations.
Personally, I'm inclined to mostly abstract this one away. I have a table of different lodging types that vary by the class and character of a district, each one offering a different combination of costs and benefits. For the players to "use" it, they just say, "we're staying at the fancy inn" and I say "cool, pay the big bucks and you get some excellent meals, a warm bath, and comfortable sleep."
However, lodgings are an obvious candidate to instead prep as bespoke locations. "Ye olde inn" is one of the most iconic urban gameplay locations in D&D. Although I will say: while inns are the obvious option, historically it was often more common to stay at the residences of individuals. A friendly farmer, a grouchy stable owner, a lonely monk, a generous petty lord, etc. Think of an NPC who would be willing to take the players in, add their major site to the list.
Alternatively, the lodging itself could be generic and unremarkable (do you really want to make a new unique inn and innkeeper for every last town in your game?), but you plant a different interesting NPC or faction in that lodging site as a fellow guest. You want one of the main personalities for this town to be a grizzled old fighter, but instead of giving him his own house and then figuring out a reason for the players to visit him, you could just have him stay in a room at the same inn as the players.
Commerce is the other biggest activity. The original purpose of settlements, the reason why they exist at all, is to serve as a hub for commercial activity. The trick here is that 1) shopping isn't adventurous and is better suited for downtime, and that 2) trying to make it worthy of adventure, i.e. roleplaying out the entire shopping experience, is fucking awful. So despite my famous love of mixing economics and game design, don't expect to squeeze too much gameplay out of this topic if you're trying to play a D&D-like game.
Instead, I really believe that this one should be 99% abstracted, without any specific individual shops appearing on your map. Shopping is best done without the GM's involvement, for the most part. Unless a player has questions or is interested in something unusual, they can shop on their own by consulting the equipment list and informing you of their purchases when they're finished. You can simply assume they’re shopping at a range of sites found on the generic locations list we talked about in Part 5.
However, I'll concede instead that it can be okay to include the occasional specialist shop as a highlight of a settlement. Go ahead and say "this town has a famous alchemy shop run by a kooky old wizard" and then have some fun prepping a few weird potions for sale. You get an exception now and then. Just please don't force your players to roleplay out every last purchase of rations, candles, armor, and horse feed.
Getting work is probably the third biggest activity. Whether it's from rumors or patrons, the spark of most quests starts in town.
Abstracting this one is pretty easy: rumors and job boards, my friend. If you're running any modules, those usually come included, so you can just seed them straight into the town notes and bingo bongo there's your biscuit. I prefer to automate rumor delivery instead of waiting for my players to ask me for them. Specifically, the trigger is "whenever you rest in a settlement, you hear one free rumor during your stay."
But like with lodging options, this one is also easy and fun to tie into your bespoke major sites + NPCs. Quest hooks are an easy thing to attach to an individual character or faction in your notes for them. Just so long as, again, the players already have a reason why they might be incentivized to visit that major site to begin with. Before you can get the players saying "wow, this clock cleaner says he knows the location of some buried treasure, and he wants our help," you first gotta get the players saying, "oooo this town has a clocktower we should check out."
The flip side of NPCs / locations that give you a quest hook is, well, NPCs / locations that are the target of a quest hook. If you're looking to run some urban adventures, then the rumor or job board or pleading NPC or whatever has to point to somewhere within the city walls. Here's the easiest example in the world: two major sites, each a faction HQ. The factions are rivals. Go to one, they hire you to steal from the other. Ta-da! You've prepped useful material to fuel urban gameplay and bring the settlement to life as more than just a downtime haven.
Carousing is a great candidate for an activity that can be abstracted away into a mechanic. If the players say, "let's get drunk and play dice" then you can make or find a carousing table and just use that.
But it's also possible that your players will say, "let's go to the elven vineyard and get drunk," meaning they may be expecting a more bespoke experience rather than just a dice roll on a random table. In this case, I refer you now to Barkeep on the Borderlands and the many additional pubs created for the Barkeep Jam. Seriously, you don't even need to run the adventure. Just steal a couple pubs and drop 'em into your settlement.
Recruiting followers is something I would fold into shopping, I think. We don't need to manually roleplay your characters working their way through town, going up to strangers one at a time and asking each one if they want to throw their life away in a dungeon. It's perfectly fine to just set a price for each type of hireling and a time cost for how long it takes to successfully recruit one. Some games have a fancier mechanic for this, and that's cool too. That said, you probably should stock up on a few pre-made NPCs to be used as hirelings. You can't keep handwaving them away once they join the party for real.
Downtime activities, like working, crafting, managing a domain, and so on? To me, that calls for an entire procedure unto itself, something bigger than any individual settlement in your campaign world.
However, I think it's illustrative to now return to His Majesty the Worm. Remember how I said that basically all its urban gameplay material is just some simple downtime scaffolding? Well, while it has a bunch of generic downtime activities you can do in town, it also has a special city action for each type of district you can include in your settlement. For example, if your settlement includes the "Grey Docks" district, then that adds the "get tattoos" action to the list of downtime activities. But if it has the swineherd-heavy "Licehouse" district? That adds the "dispose of bodies" action, since uhhhhh piggies gotta eat.
So yeah, even if I think you can mostly relegate downtime to a procedure rather than tying it to individual NPCs + major sites, I also think you should consider ways of tweaking or adding onto it so it's slightly different in each settlement. Could be cool.
Research isn't something that occurs to all players, but it's a routine activity for the smart ones. I think it's a good idea to try to do additional research before embarking on a quest, because knowledge is power. In this case, I actually have room to incorporate both a generic handwave-y abstraction and a bespoke prepped location / NPC. Check it out.
When a player asks to do research in a settlement, they must declare whether they are simply asking around town or if they have a specific source of knowledge they're drawing from.
Asking around town is always available, and always has a chance of providing some info relevant to the research subject. But general sources only confer general knowledge, so asking around town is the simpler-but-weaker option. We handwave most of the process, assuming that the players can ask plenty of miscellaneous people at the taphouse, town forum, marketplace, etc.
Specific sources are required for more esoteric knowledge. Their information is more narrow in its focus, but if it seems reasonably relevant to the research subject, then it will provide some highly useful info. But while asking around town is abstracted, the players can only name a specific source if you've put one somewhere on the map. A known expert, a renowned sage, a library or archive, etc.
I'll let you decide if you want to bring dice into this, or whatever other costs and tradeoffs and whatnot. But the point is this: give your settlements one or two specific sources of esoteric knowledge, especially regarding the kinds of topics that adventurers might want to research (e.g. dragons, undead, an ancient civilization, etc.).
Warfare is one of those things that doesn't happen in most campaigns, but if it does happen, it's probably one of the primary features of the campaign. You probably already have some sort of wargaming rules in mind for how to handle that situation. You would know better than I what you need prepped for such a thing.
That said, if you ever anticipate the possibility of mass combat breaking out in a settlement, it can't hurt to have an idea of its basic defensive features ahead of time. But don't worry if you're caught with your pants down. A wall, a garrison, and a fort on a hill are all safe assumptions for any generic settlement.
Packaging information
That picture is from the board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. It includes a map, an address directory, newspapers, letters, and more. It's awesome.
But that's a board game, not an RPG. You can't be expected to offer peripherals like that. Certainly not for every settlement the players visit. But I do think it's still instructive for us.
Because of both the availability and density of settlement information before the players, handouts of some kind are promoted from "a nice little way to enhance the experience" to "a practical necessity." I'm not asking you to break out the arts and crafts supplies. Mostly this is just a matter of writing things down.
Don't attempt to conduct shopping verbally. Hand your players a list of items with prices. Don't list off the settlement's major sites verbally. Either write them down and hand over the list, or, better yet, give them a simple map with some labeled dots on it. Also, give them a list of generic locations they can simply assume will always be available in nearly any settlement. Don't list off the factions verbally. Hand your players a chart with a single-sentence description of each one and some arrows indicating their relationships. If you're going to use a job board, then maybe just hand them a job board.
You can also give incomplete versions of these things, where players have to fill in the blanks themselves. Tell them that the map of major sites is incomplete, and they may discover more major sites the longer they stay in town. Give them the chart of factions but make them figure out the relationships themselves.
In any case, record and provide information in a format that optimizes its usability. Some things can still be delivered verbally, or you can just handle them yourself behind the GM screen (wouldn't want to spoil all the surprises in your carousing table, would you?), but some things should be tangible.
Putting it all together
The delivery of information is triggered by players declaring that they're performing a specific activity. When the players rest overnight, that triggers a rumor. When the players ask to go shopping, that triggers you handing over the price list. When the players say they're going to follow this sketchy guy through the alleyways, that triggers you describing the abandoned church that he uses as a hideout, thus adding it to the list of major sites. Some of these deliveries are verbal, some include a handout of some kind (even if it's just a written list).
The most important trigger is just "staying in the settlement." This is the activity that delivers the players their basic lay of the land so they can begin engaging with it. Upon entering a settlement and declaring they they'll be hanging out here for more than 20 minutes, give your players their starting package of information I described in Part 5: the theme, who's in charge, a little bit of common knowledge history, and two major sites + NPCs.
After the players rest there overnight, especially once you've had a session to prep it, that triggers the delivery of your next set of details you've added incrementally. That's right: your prep pretty directly mirrors the PCs' experience coming to learn more about the settlement. When you decided the districts, that lines up with when the PCs learned of their existence. When you add a couple new major sites, that's when the players first heard about them. You can still keep a few secret, waiting to be discovered. But simply continuing to exist in the settlement is itself a trigger for delivering new information.
From there, the procedures you employ for whatever other activities the players get up to will probably help to deliver the rest of your settlement info pretty naturally. They say they want to seek out work, you hand them that job board or maybe your faction chart. They ask to seek shelter, you give them the lodging list. They want to investigate a mystery, then the act of snooping with uncover those major sites you're keeping secret.
There are guardrails to help guide you. They're just being installed by the players instead of you. You get to decide where the walls and doors of the dungeon go, but the "walls and doors" of a settlement are simply the players' whims.
Examples to check out
Most of the bibliography for this series is worth reading. Start with the blog posts, obviously. While much of what I had to say in this series was disagreements and criticisms of the arguments made in those blog posts, they're still worth checking out. For one thing, many of them contain lots of good resources for fleshing out the level design stuff. For another thing, you may find yourself agreeing with them more than me.
There are two settlement adventures I really want to highlight for you. If you want a model to follow, start by copying what you see here.
Gulch is a very good example of a highly-functional settlement. The amount of detail included tells me that you really ought to use it for a settlement that serves as the centerpiece of the whole campaign. It's not a megacity, but it's a perfect home base for adventures in its region.
The types of information and how it's organized is an excellent model to follow. Gulch takes the approach of 1 site = 1 NPC, for the most part. In this case, the sites themselves are usually sparse on detail, while the NPC associated with each one is very well-realized. But the specific choices of which sites and NPCs to flesh out reveal a keen insight in the sorts of things that matter to RPG players, and how to keep them engaged.
Oz is probably my favorite example of a megacity designed for gameability. It's almost all level design, and its approach to level design is pretty well-aligned with my own. It's just taken way further than I would. So much detail, so many random tables, so many factions and NPCs, it's great.
There's a few bits of novel game design. As previously discussed, while I think those are more justified in a megacity campaign, I still don't care for the zoomed-in localcrawl one as much. But it also has a train for faster traveling, which I'm kind of a sucker for.
Notice also that the districts of the city are organized in four groups of 7 or 8. Which is to say, it's functionally just four connected cities, per my formula in Part 5. If you're trying to set up your own megacity campaign, I wouldn't say you need this much detail. It's a lot. But maybe, as you add incremental details to the megacity session by session, it will eventually get close.
Conclusion
I wanted for us to rethink how we generate information, how we package information, how we deliver information, and what triggers that delivery. But that means first breaking down what we had already been thinking previously.
Folding all of those concerns into one super-procedure fails to recognize that procedures are, in my opinion, more properly activity-based rather than environment-based.
Trying to rely on crawling for all of that just doesn't make sense for the kinds of information we're trying to handle here.
Packaging information visually is great, but it's easy to get preoccupied with lushly rendered illustration rather than the actual usability of the map.
If you're doing a megacity, then you have a good excuse to try anything and everything possible to fuel gameplay, since the megacity is the whole game. But if you're doing the more conventional D&D campaign, where the players will visit a variety of smaller settlements that each need enough juice for a handful of sessions, but not much more, then we ought to be more deliberate.
The alternative wisdoms I offer are messy and unrefined, but I hope the rationale behind them is clear. I can only hope that this series might serve as the foundations for a future, better theory of urban gameplay. That said, if I could encapsulate my philosophy on its own terms, it might sound something like this:
Dungeons are typically built for a pretty singular purpose. Settlements aren't, and it'd be weird if they were. Instead, settlements are like a playground: you arrive, can immediately see most of what you have to work with, can pick and choose which parts to play at in the freeform space, and you might discover a secret or two or brush up against some other snot-nosed kid who's also trying to play there that day.
But there's no goal and no ending and no sequence to it. Any "story" you make is a story you and the other kids decide to make up. Any "game" you play is a game you and the other kids decide on. You can play tag or hide-and-go-seek in a grassy field, but playing them on a playground instead is way more fun. Yet playgrounds are never designated as "tag playgrounds" or "hide-and-go-seek playgrounds" built only for that one purpose. They're built to host all kinds of play. They're just a freeform collection of cool things to interact with, and kids naturally get inspired to do all sorts of things with it.
A settlement is not a singular game object. It can host all kinds of play. What kinds of play do you anticipate in your game? That tells you how to prepare your settlement, whether through game design, level design, or the fruitful void without such things.
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