Help me make my towns memorable

Last session my players arrived in there "hometown" for the first time in-game. I wasn't as prepared as I could have been, so I glossed over many details, such as a description of the town. I jumped straight into, what do you want to do here? Basically, they wanted to buy some equipment and talk to a few NPCs. When they bought equipment, I just told them to deduct their gold and tell me what they wanted. For the NPCs, I went straight to havng the PCs talking to them, not really describing what they looked like.

Anything I can do, besides the obvious "prepare more" ?

Always come up with something that you can hang the description of the town on later.

It can be a building - 'A narrow bridge arches over the main street, linking the town hall and the church of pelor, on the center of the span is mounted an enormous clock.'

It can be more visceral 'Bodies hang from the town gate, each bearing a sign labeled with the crime the corpse was convicted of.'

Or commercial 'The scent of fish covers thge town, wagonloads of salted herring pass you by as you enter the gates.'

Just make sure it something that both you and your players will remember later, then work on it when you get time after the game.

The Auld Grump

Use the DMG, Luke!

This is something that the Dungeon Master's Guide can help you with. There is a chapter on assisting in exactly what you are trying to do. From determine the population makeup of a town, to a personality generation chart for the NPCs. Use the charts in the book to define your town, and you will probably be inspired to come up with more interesting flavor bits based on the information that you have generated.

My suggestion is to come up with a distinctive feature or two for the town. Whether it's some cultural element, such as wherever you go in the town the host of the place offers you a glass of the wine that they made themselves. Or places of mystery. Such as a perfectly cylinder colossal tower exists a couple of hundred feet away from the edge of town. It has always been there, it seems to be completly solid stone (but not stone from around here,) and no one knows anything about it. One odd feature is that no plants grow around it for 20 feet, and animals avoid it.

Think of real world elements of towns that you've visited and remember. I remember the restaurant I ate at that had its own working windmill from its pre-restaurant days still attached. I remember being mothered at a small motel by the manager. So long as you don't go overboard with this -- i.e. no "fat boy" statues outside of a restaurant or similar cutesy touches -- they'll never know where the inspiration came from.

"The 7 Sentence NPC" from an old issue of "Dragon" (and in the CD-ROM, I believe) is also your friend here.

Before next time, though, sit down and make a list of what the adventurers will almost certainly need. Trainers, a temple, smith, relatives (if it's their hometown by dint of blood) are your starting point. The rest will come over time. I wouldn't bust my hump worrying statting it out as per the DMG yet, although adventurers being adventurers, you might think about who's in charge and what sort of law enforcement exists.

Good luck. I love creating towns.

I like to have something happening when the PCs arrive in a town. It doesn't have to be anything big, but just something that the whole town is talking about. Maybe some well known adventurers are passing through, perhaps a new temple is being constructed, or maybe the local lord is getting married, anything works really. This way, the characters can get to know something about the town, and it feels more alive. When the PCs notice that not many people are talking, many people are wearing black, and such they might start to inquire and discover that an important religious leader has recently died. Don't tie it to the story or adventure, make it a background detail to give a sense of "things happening."

Then make things like this happen again every once in a while. Maybe in a few sessions the town will be abuzz with rumors that the baroness is pregnant with an heir, people gossiping about whether its going to be a boy or a girl. This can show that life doesn't revolve around the PCs and that life goes on around them.

Anothing thing is to make a place not what it appears at first to be. An old temple might be converted into an orphanage or the old barraks might be a library. When the PCs visit this place, they're faced with a building they would normally skip over. The fighter visiting the barraks looking for work, for example, might be faced with rows of books, and the NPC who is in charge there is very talkative and pulls the player in.

I like quirky eccentric NPCs. NPCs who do their own thing and play off the PCs in unexpected ways. One memorible NPC I had was a halfing who could never get anyone's name right, had a gambling problem, and was always asking for money - but he was such a nice guy that they always gave him a bit of gold. The PCs never sought him out; he sought them out! Perhaps the stable boy hasn't ever seen a "real" wizard and follows the PC wizard around or maybe he gets a crush on the elvan ranger in the party, following her and then stammering when she asks him what he's doing. After the PCs have grown accustomed to them, maybe later you can use one of them as a plot hook.

Make the town good at something. It can be anything from tapestries to weapons manufacturing to the local hot springs. It could be a gathering place for mercenaries or the greatest brewer of halfing butter-beer on the coast. Maybe a few wizards have set up shop and adventurers come to have their magical equipment enhanced or there's a scribe school where the most elequent handwriting is taught. Give them anything that the people of the town can do or have that noone else does.

Give the town a secret. It doesn't have to be a big dark secret. But, all small towns have the things that the locals know but don't discuss with outsiders. And big cities can hide many things from wererats in the sewers to powers behind the throne. The PCs don't have to stumble onto these things immediately, but they can creep up over time. It's good to know these things early so that you don't end up with inconsistancy later, even if things look inconsistant on the surface at first.

There are many ways to make a town seem more real and important to the PCs. These are but a few of them.

NPC and landmarks - you do not have to describe everything, bakers, guards, people on the street are all standard stuff but think about the 'area' of town, poor, rick, well-to-do, merchant, middle-class, all have a look and air about them, decribe that and then what the people look like. Landmarks, the statue of Buddy is just down from the market place, the white tower is by the docks, Rick's Cafe is not all that far from the main gate. In this way you do not have to have a detailed map or streets.

Now let your players do some work for you, let them build the places they go. Wizards book shop, magic shops, the wiz guild, fighters will be a weapon smith, armor, cleric a temple or shrine. Who do the players know, use henchmen here to decide friendships.

AEG's Toolbox is a wonderful thing.

Try Tablesmith

One of the problems I find with towns is that they shouldn't be all one person's creation. Try tablesmith, it has a random town generator that is really good. If a town doesn't peak my interest I run it a couple of times and just steal bits and pieces.


S

Sometimes all it takes to make a town memorable is an interesting event or NPC. Barring that, throw some unusual law or condition at the players, something that makes them have to think out of the box.
My players are in a major city right now, where local laws forbid wearing armor or carrying any weapon that is both wider than a finger and longer than the distance from wrist to elbow. This limits them to daggers and knives. Missile weapons are also forbidden.
It is amusing to watch them forget:
"I draw my sword"
"What sword?"
"My...oh. I draw my dagger."

Build on what you started with.

Sprawl, mindles, unplanned, monochromatic sprawl. Every darned building built with the same technique, streets at odd angles, narrow streets. Make a completely umemorable town!

OR

Figure out why someone built a town there. Decide fi that is still the reason. An old lumber camp CAN becme a big town. Or one could rest at the edge of a tapped mine. The other direction has the towns main industry going on and marking it.

A busy dock(s), metals trading, ale and whores, whatever.

And size. A town of 1200 isn't gonna have a St. Louis Arch. Or maybe ti does, that is memorable in itself.

Surroundings. Do the mountians loom over the city? Is it on a precipice? Beside a river or with one running through it? Endless plain?

Finally, who is in charge? Lawful Good Clerics run a much different town than Chaotic Neutral Fighters.

Reason, size, scene, boss. This makes the rest really easy.

I find it easiest to come up with a one sentence description of what makes the town different than every other, then reinforcing this idea whenever I can.