D&D General what's your favorite starting town?

[Mannahnin]

Restenford from L1, The Secret of Bone Hill.

A great town with cool NPCs, multiple inns, and a little mini-dungeon in it, and a tight small wilderness area map around it, with multiple plausible locations for site-based adventures and a couple of dungeons. Like Bone Hill itself- super easy to swap in most any dungeon you want. I've been using Dyson's Delve for the old school game I've been running in this setting for the last eight months.

Gods rest good old Len Lakofka, Leomund himself, for giving us this excellent little gem.

The only thing that would really make it better would be if he had ever given us a general wilderness map of the whole island. I'd pay good money for that right now, to expand my current game.

 

[el-remmen]

Another vote for Saltmarsh. I modified my own map of it for my own campaign (based on someone else's customized map I found online).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Waterdeep and Hommlet. Waterdeep offers such a vast tapestry of lore and adventure hooks. The Village of Hommlet is perhaps my platonic ideal of a 1e adventure and locale. It's tightly-focused, but still has mysteries that a DM can expand on.

 

[pukunui]

Red Larch from Princes of the Apocalypse. I’ve used the “Trouble in Red Larch” starting adventure to kickstart several campaigns now. I love it!

 

[toucanbuzz]

Sasserine from Savage Tides (Dungeon Magazine).

Venetian-style port perched on the edge of civilization, bringing in all sorts of trade and travelers from exotic places like the Isle of Dread, with numerous ruins to be explored and complex politics. Came with good maps, districts, flavorful NPCs, yet oddly placed because the campaign was about quickly leaving the area and taking to the sea.

 

[toucanbuzz]

[double post error]

 

[Scott Christian]

I like the fact that I see some use small and others use large towns as starting points. The main adventures I've written deal more with areas, and sometimes the towns are smaller (think village) to large cities. But I do love a great city layout with the main attractions in written form. That's how I generally start the process.

 

[R_J_K75]

I like the fact that I see some use small and others use large towns as starting points. The main adventures I've written deal more with areas, and sometimes the towns are smaller (think village) to large cities. But I do love a great city layout with the main attractions in written form. That's how I generally start the process.

I think the majority of DMs like to start small and expand out unless they are extremely familiar with a larger city or area and their players are as well. I know that I've started campaigns in Waterdeep with newer groups of players and even then I started in a small section of the city and gradually introduced more as we went along so that games didn't feel like one big info dump on the players and beat them over the head.

 

[David Howery]

one of the more obscure starting towns is Dagger Rock, from Dungeon #4, "Trouble at Grog's". It's nicely fleshed out, with some well described and interesting NPCs, a local mystery to solve, and a hidden treasure that no one knows about.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I think using a big city as a start works nice because you can focus on neighbourhoods and expand outwards. The politics of small gangs vying for power, crooked guards, local politics. Even if there are powerful NPCs in the city, they aren't likely to have time to deal with or notice the squabbles of the people in poorer or smaller neighbourhoods. Mix that with the occasional venture out to a nearby mine/ruin/place of note.

Then as they level up and gain money, allies and enemies, their influence can broaden out to more important parts of the city and more important people: the mayor, the head of the city council, the head of the city guard, the local Lord or Prince etc...

Really, you can run a whole campaign in a big city.