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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5598377" data-attributes="member: 26473">I like to think through the demographics because it suggests ideas to me when I get down to the level of creating npcs for an area. If a town is surrounded by steep slopes covered with olive orchards and grazed by goats, then that tells me that the most influential merchants are olive oil exporters or wheat importers. It tells me that cheese and mutton are common foods and bread is expensive, so that bakers are few but important in the community, and that cheap leather goods are plentiful, so leather workers are common and probably not particularly skilled. It tells me that there's a small luxury business producing soap, so the soap maker is likely to be a wealthy, perhaps cultured fellow.Once I know what the important industries are, I have a sense of who the town leaders are likely to be - they come from what passes for the local aristocracy - which deities are venerated - and therefore which temples and priests are significant in local politics - and so on.It also helps with the physical descriptions of the town itself; olive oil is stored in large underground tanks before it is shipped, so that gives me a number of buildings in town housing presses and tanks, which makes for an interesting place to sneak about or stage a fight. Soap is made in large vats and poured into bricks for shipping - another interesting place for a fight to break out. That means I might have one of the olive oil merchants or the soap maker be involved in something nefarious, or at least scheming in local affairs, so that adventurers may decide to seek them out at some point.Then I fantasy it up. Perhaps the soap maker is an alchemist with some low-level magical ability, for example, or maybe the soap makers are an order of monks who support their chapter house with their trade - Shaolin Soap, anyone?It's my personal way of processing information when I think about places in my campaign world.</blockquote>

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