What details do you NEED?

[scourger]

For me, a little setting onformation goes along way. What I really use is adventures. A setting without adventures is nearly useless to me, unless I can convert modules from another source (if so, why would I need the other setting?).

 

[cybertalus]

Is it important to anybody for a setting locale to have all the buildings detailed, and all NPCs listed? I think of the old Volo's guide to Waterdeep.

If you were publishing something like Waterdeep and it was the entirety, or even the majority, of your setting that sort of thing might be important to include in the main setting book. Otherwise it's a level of detail best left for a supplement. And by the way, even the Volo's Guides didn't detail all of the buildings and NPCs. They just hit the high, and sometimes low, points of a given town.

 

[Nathal]

Okay, based on your responses so far I've come up with a template I'll use to detail my campaign locales. Let me know if you like what I've cobbled together based on your feedback:

PLACE NAME (accompanied by a detailed map)

History (how was city started, and what events of historic importance were there?)
Population and Economy basis (imports and exports, and rough population numbers)
Distinguishing features and noteworthy places
Chief Religious influence
Important NPCs or legendary monsters
Local authorities (from constables to armies)
Typical means of transportation
Adventurers equipment shops
Places to sell loot
Guilds or training halls
adventure hooks/politics

A good template to start with?

 

[S'mon]

A question for Dungeon Masters:

What information in a campaign setting is essential to your games? How important are imports, exports, population numbers (including demi-human percentages), and other demographic information?

Do any of you feel that the typical campaign setting presents information that goes unused most of the time?

I'm creating a small regional setting and trying to decide how to seperate the wheat from the chaff. What are the first things you look for when picking up a region of a setting to run adventures in?

D&D is not a trading game (though I have the old Minrothad & Darokin Gazetteers I've never used their trading rules), so detailed rules on the amounts of imports and exports available, profit margins and such are rarely necessary. OTOH when presenting an area to players it's _very_ useful to have some idea of how a settlement functions economically, ie whether it's an agricultural wheat-exporting area, a mining town, a boom town built on wealth extracted from the local dungeon, a trading centre, et al. Knowing what's economically important to the town or kingdom helps a lot in making it seem alive. Also I use a simplified version of the Rules Cyclopedia domain management system, in particular the 'resource income' table - ie if an area has valuable mineral resources it produces more taxes, handy for PC dominion rulers to know.
Population - I like to see details on populations because you can derive lots of other info from this single figure, like taxes, maximum army size, whether the area feels 'settled' or wilderness, etc. However most games designers are very very bad at getting this right, most commonly giving population figures far too low (under 1 per square mile not uncommon), so maybe just saying "this area is lightly/sparsely/un-populated" would be better if you can't be bothered checking real-world figures (for reference, in medieval europe 10/sq mile would be very sparsely populated borderlands-to-wilderness like parts of the Scottish highlands, 100/sq mile densely populated farmland like much of France, 1/sq mile effectively unpopulated - for western Europe Norwegian arctic mountains like Jotunheim, maybe, or empty desert).

 

[S'mon]

Demi-human percentages - these are very specific to the campaign style & gameworld, eg demi-humans are much rarer IMC than 3e standard so I never use the official/published figures. I'd say that if it's _important to the setting_ that 15% of the population are dwarves, make this clear, but if it's a typical generic fantasy city you needn't bother, it adds nothing of value. Nor do most of the figures in Monte's 3e town-generator.

 

[hong]

1) Who the PCs should be fighting
2) Why they should be fighting them
3) What happens if they don't fight them
4) Who and what is available to help them

 

[Nathal]

Does anybody like the list of locale features I compiled based on your suggestions? Please give me some feedback on that?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

It's probably not very useful as feedback, but I like it!

 

[DethStryke]

Okay, based on your responses so far I've come up with a template I'll use to detail my campaign locales. Let me know if you like what I've cobbled together based on your feedback:

PLACE NAME (accompanied by a detailed map)

History (how was city started, and what events of historic importance were there?)
Population and Economy basis (imports and exports, and rough population numbers)
Distinguishing features and noteworthy places
Chief Religious influence
Important NPCs or legendary monsters
Local authorities (from constables to armies)
Typical means of transportation
Adventurers equipment shops
Places to sell loot
Guilds or training halls
adventure hooks/politics

A good template to start with?

Important NPCs, equipment shops, local authorities, and other people in the world are all NPCs that I make index cards for and pull when I need them. When I start out, I make up a quick blurb to have pre-generated starting points for various people/professions that the players may run in to. That way, if I need a blacksmith for a particular town, I can simply pull from my pool of NPCs and plop them down. That gives a randomness that represents real life quite nicely, imo. How many people do you know that went through college and got a job that was the farthest thing removed from their major/degree?

The key is making the NPC card vague enough to be useable anywhere but specific enough to make it feel like a well rounded person. It is a bit front heavy, but the use of the generators that are available everywhere make it easier for personalities, names, quirks, etc.

My particular way of coordinating them is to make a database of the NPCs in Excel which I "mail merge" in MSWord and print on the index cards directly. That way I can make edits easily and write notes on the index card during play.

 

[Nathal]

Important NPCs, equipment shops, local authorities, and other people in the world are all NPCs that I make index cards for and pull when I need them...the key is making the NPC card vague enough to be useable anywhere but specific enough to make it feel like a well rounded person.

I suppose what you're saying is that my setting locale template looks fine, but you'd caution me to create NPC "blurbs", thumbails of personalities, and not bother to "stat" them. I agree with that because I like such information to be somewhat system independant. Let the DM decide on power levels and equipment. I look at it differently for an adventure module.