Best locations for low level adventuring?

[Pheonix0114]

My favorite campaign as a player started with us traveling with a caravan as simple travelers going between the two largest cities of the land. We entered a small town as weird things started happening, and then had to investigate why undead were all of the sudden threatening this town while its more experienced inhabitants actually defended the inhabitants.

All the while we were getting used to our new abilities and working as a team: The party was made of a former Bar-brawler (4e Grappling Fighter Build), a newly ordained priest whose desperate prayers were answered with holy magic (Cleric), and a young gnome who without realizing it picked up a cursed object at the start that made a deal to give her the strength to survive when things got real (warlock).

 

[Celebrim]

I'm fond of a hub system, where the characters are nominally based in a largish city, and begin their career by being called to investigate or solve problems in the smaller surrounding towns and villages. Gradually the characters will begin to build up an understanding of the geography and of the politics of the region, and the NPC's in their home area can be reoccuring and evolving relationships. For a more urban game, make the home base a fairly large city of 10,000-40,000 and make the smaller urban areas manufacturing centers of 1,000-4,000 people. For a more rural game, make the hub a town of 1,000-4,000 and make the smaller urban areas villages of 80-200. The advantage of the former is that you can eventually bring high drama and politics into the game, as it will be natural for the PC's to eventually come to the attention of whoever is powerful in the region at your world's power scale. The advantage of the later is that the PC's start out as home town heroes almost from day one, you have less work to put in to fill out the area, the PC's will know almost everyone, and quite soon can be power brokers in their own right. (For a world with very low power scales, I've always considered it would be interesting to start such a game not with the PC's being hired by the town as mercenaries, but with the PC's being the town council!)

The advantage of the hub system compared to a linear game is first that it won't feel as linear, as they'll return to increasing familiar areas during interludes (perhaps with an evolving understanding). It's similar in some ways to the recently popular trick of making the 1st level introductory dungeon also the high level dungeon on a secret lower level later in the campaign. Another advantage is that it feels much less artificial than having a 1st level area, a 4th level area, a 8th level area, and so forth where all the challenges just happen to line up. With a hub approach, all the challenges of the campaign can in theory be within a 40-100 mile radius of the starting area with no feeling of artificial separation. So you can play that trick of the introductory level also being the high level area in reverse as well, with early modules having the characters go into the edge of areas that are clearly over their heads (a wasteland surrounding a dragon's lair, for example) and latter have the need to actually face the dragon. You don't have to have everything as neatly segregated and siloed as 'World of Warcraft', and one of my favorite tricks is having an area that the players visit several times without me treating it as a dungeon or the players considering it a dungeon turn into a dungeon as the players understanding and relationship with NPCs evolves. Or vica versa, you can have a dungeon on your map from the beginning turn into a town or safe haven (although that's a pretty old trick as well).

Another thing I like about the hub system is that it lets me mix and match my own material with published material that has been massaged to fit the setting I'm building. This acts as a multiplier for my prep time, letting me get several hours of material for each hour I spend on world building. So you can leave from the main hub to secondary hubs like 'The Village of Hommlet' or 'The Keep on the Borderlands' and it just works.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I'm fond of a hub system, where the characters are nominally based in a largish city, and begin their career by being called to investigate or solve problems in the smaller surrounding towns and villages. Gradually the characters will begin to build up an understanding of the geography and of the politics of the region, and the NPC's in their home area can be reoccuring and evolving relationships.

I do this a lot, including my current low-level campaign. I have a thing for merchant cities--they give you a simple rationalisation for why there are a variety of races and classes and cultures etc. hanging around.

 

[Melba Toast]

I favour starting out in a small, isolated village.

As an old skool DM, I begin with the assumption that 1st level characters are amateurish, naive & immature. The small village represents the limits of their worldly knowledge and the extend of their comfort zone.

From a storytelling perspective, it follows the path laid out in The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell. At the outset of the game the characters have reached a stage in their personal development where they must venture out beyond the safe and familiar world and into the unknown world. They must learn and grow, fail and succeed, make friends and enemies.

From a game management perspective, it gives the DM time to flesh out the world and the players time to familiarize themselves with the world in small chunks. The DM need only flesh out a smattering of characters and places in the small village and populate the nearby environs.

On the other hand, starting the PCs out in a city, where they are loose to do and acquire virtually anything they could imagine, means having to prepare multitudes of characters, places, laws & politics, organisations, plots, subplots, religions, histories. The players will be so busy trying to figure out up from down that they won't have time to develop their characters. As well, parties are more likely to splinter off in different directions to facilitate multiple objectives. They can change their objectives on a single thought. Actions have larger repercussions. As in reality, the pace of life is intensified in cities.

It's better to make 'the big city' an exciting and exotic destination for the party, a place that lures them in and scares them away.

I admit that starting out in a small village risks being cliché, but I find DMs are more concerned with 'originality' than their players are. Players like to start out in familiar situations because it provides clarity. They can let their characters emerge.

Anyway, that's just me.

 

[Bleys Icefalcon]

"Indy! If you still want the Ark, it's being loaded on a truck, bound for Cairo"

"Truck? What Truck"

City adventures are the bomb, but be careful, it's logistically difficult to control the encounters without the players sensing a little DM fudging. Specifically, there's sooo many parameters to keep track of. Clearly not everyone in the town are going to have anything to do with whatever it is the PCs are doing, and all of the movers and shaker: the various levels and facets of government - corrupt and not, the various guilds and their goals and designs, other adventuring companies, wealthy nobles, merchants, slavers, etc. Charismatic NPCs, not-so charismatic NPCs, and of course people aren't just going to mind their own business while our PCs gut some poor unlucky rogue, someone's going to run for the guard. I love city adventures, but they almost always get messy, as my DM style is to put out some info and see where they go with it.

Foghat the Gnoll worked as a longshoreman (and a thug/thief) in the city of Specularum at the docks along the Great River Meryl. He led a gang of like-minded toughs he called the Crew. He was always careful to keep his head wrapping on, as Gnolls were none to welcome in most of the World of Greyhawk's human cities. It was interesting when he and his companions encountered a City Inspector who suspected there was something more to our Gnoll and demanded he removed the wrappings. This resulted in the death of said inspector and his guards and a running battle to get to a safe house. None of this was planned; one of the players who's was playing Tuft, a Gnome Thief smarted off to the Inspector, making him pay a bit closer attention to them...