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Ever run into a series of articles, videos, or whatnot that makes you go Stop the Presses? It happened to me. Fortunately, I decided that, when I started this Inspiration Series, I’m not going to stick to just books.
I’ve discovered Master the Dungeon (https://tinyurl.com/mryuama8) over at YouTube, a group of D&D-flavored content creators who designed some very interesting videos on worldbuilding. Already, this is relevant to my interest, but then they have videos that were related to what I’m currently on: Creating, or would I say finishing (you’ve dropped the ball, TSR Hobbies and Wizards of the Coast,) the village of Oakhurst. Which was little more than eight paragraphs of descriptive text; in both the original version of The Sunless Citadel and its remake in Tales from the Yawning Portal. Something I wish to rectify by fleshing out the village into something I can work with in my take of the module, The Sunken Fortress.
To recap, Oakhurst is a sleepy woodland village at the foothills of the mountain range roughly southwest of Chronicla. It is the closest civilization to the main dungeon in the module. I wish to place it on the edge of a forest, with woodland on one side and farmland on the other. The party would go into the woods, deep enough to reach the foothills of the nearby mountains, which will be where the Sunken Fortress proper is located. Where that fortress is will be is randomly generated thanks to an Event Deck.
According to the appallingly minuscule material in the official module, the six locations are:
The Village Hall, which is where Mayor Vurmor Leng works from. (It is too late to change the name here? I’ll go for Victor Leng, it’s easier to pronounce.)
The General Store, which lead me to these video series.
A Shrine, which will include a home base, as I’ll show later.
A Jail, usually used as a drunk tank. Workplace of Constable Felosai and her city guard.
A Blacksmith—which will be appreciated later.
And the Ol’ Boar Inn, which will also come in play in this article and the series of videos used.
I plan to take the Shrine and have that place, instead of the Ol’ Boar Inn, have a safehouse, where the party can have a safe place to rest. I’ll always have that in my campaigns, at least one safe spot. But more on that later.
I didn’t have to go to the first video listed here to know that the General Store wouldn’t be where they’d find everything in the Adventuring Gear table (Page 148 of the Player’s Handbook.) They might find something by the nearby larger city of Vallask, but getting there and back will take a full day.
With that already in mind, let’s move on to the first set of videos that caught my eye. I won’t be listing all of them, but I do intend on seeing as many that interest me and I’ll be keeping notes.
Item: Creating a Better General Store in D&D
This video states that “A general store in D&D is not really for adventurers. While in-game they function as the place where players get most of their miscellaneous gear, general stores are not making most of their profits from a few wandering, would-be heroes. General Stores exist for the local people in the town they’re in.”
The video linked above shows that a general store in a D&D village won’t be what we’re used to in real life, where we have Wal-Marts and Targets. You might need to see some vintage movies where such a store existed in the 40s and 50s, or in westerns to get a hint as to what a store in D&D would be like.
Also, these stores will stock what the villagers would need rather than visiting adventurers, so their inventory will be limited. While they will carry mundane items such as rope, rations, various small tools, things to fill a healer’s kit, and various other small items, you should not expect them to have weapons, armor, magic items, and the like. Especially in a place like Oakhurst where they get more hunters and farmers than fighters and mages. You might find some hunting equipment in this general store, and maybe a bunch of arrows, but other items can be better found either from the Blacksmith or in Vallask.
Since I’m expecting that some adventurers would need something that might be unreasonable to get from such a small store in such as a small village, I needed to set up an alternative for The Sunken Fortress that can supply the adventuring party with what they might need. You might have seen the inspiration behind them in real life if you pass by a church or community outreach center: A Blessing Box.
A Blessing Box is a cabinet set outside, with sturdier front doors and its own roof to protect it from the elements. The people who make it and set it up would fill this cabinet with canned and dry goods, some books, small toiletries and soaps, and various other things that someone less fortunate than you—or I hope that’s the case—can take without the indignity of having to go to a food bank. The basic idea is that you take out what you need and put in its place something you don’t, but someone else might.
By the Shrine near the safe house, I’ll set up one of those Blessing Boxes for the adventurers that has a good list of mundane items. All they must do is respect the code that comes from them: Take what you need and leave what you can. If the party keeps to the code, the villagers might add something more into the Blessing Box.
Back to Oakhurst’s general store. In this store, as in other stores in villages this small, it’s possible that it would sell things other villagers make things for their own coin. Instead of opening their own shop, these crafters would take them to the General Store, which sells them for a cut. This store in question would either include a butcher and a baker so that the villagers would have a one-stop place for more perishable goods such as bread, meats, dairy, and other goods.
That is something I wanted to factor in when I create a map of the store, or for that matter every establishment in the village. I truly intend to flesh out Oakhurst with a map of all the buildings, more detailed maps for places like the General Store, and Villager Characters with their own stat blocks for roleplay possibilities.
Item: Making Better D&D Towns: How to Make D&D Taverns
I was keeping a mind map to collect the notes I make while seeing these videos, but this video almost required a mind map of its own. Thank God for SimpleMind Pro. (A very versatile Mindmaping software with a cheap one-time price tag and an easy learning curve. If you make mind maps a lot as I do, you’ll find something like this very useful. Yeah, I’d wish they were a sponsor…I wish I had a sponsor.)
This video opened my eyes to how much a village like Oakhurst would center around The Ol’ Boar Inn. It’s the place where most of the villagers go to eat, chat, and be near a light to read, or heat to get warm. Some villagers, especially young villagers, would be hired here, and the tavern would be the biggest employer to a village, especially one small enough to only warrant one. And it’s where the adventurers will get most of the interactions with the villagers, where they get clues over their quests, find opportunities for loot runs and marketing deals, and everything else that requires networking, and so on.
I’ve already had it planned in Sunken Fortress that the party is to see the village early and often. They might go to the tavern first and then someone here would point to the Temple to get to the safehouse. I also want to have the adventurers go back and forth to the village for more intel, even borrowing a page from the Diablo series and employing Scroll of Town Portals (this is part contrivance in Swifttail and part finger toward Blizzard’s monetization practices. Yeah, I’m stealing from Blizzard, but what would you call Diablo Immortal?) And with the long to-do list that this video made for me in the building of Oakhurst—which will include characters that work and live elsewhere in the village—It’ll be certain that the Ol’ Boar Inn will be a place the party would want to get back to again and again.
I do have some of my own personal tweaks thrown in. I’ve already, thanks to the previous movie, have additional businesses connected to the general store. The Butcher, Baker, and Dairy Farmer. They will find themselves doing business in the Tavern as well since they’ll be supplying it with much-needed perishable goods. I don’t see it having a floor for houses, since Oakhurst is so small (at the most, I’d say that it has no more than 400 people in-village, probably less.) and they don’t get many visitors to save for family members who would end up bunking with them. I don’t think that the Ol’ Boar Inn would even have a side house for housing. At the most, I only see a close enough to be the safe campsite for visitors if there weren’t a safehouse previously set up.
Already, I’m thinking that the General Store and the Ol’ Boar Inn would occupy their own block in the village, with the Temple and the Safehouse nearby. But then again, these villages would be designed in medieval European style where all the buildings are bunched together, and everything would be within walking distance.
That brings me back to this video from Questing Beast which I go back to from time to time. It’s part of why I don’t use most default village maps (which some exceptions, such as with Barovia/Chronicla) from the Wizards of the Coast modules. Especially the ones that were constructed to resemble more of a modern suburb than what you’d find in medieval times. I start with a generator, and then work it over in Illustrator and branch on from there. In fact…
Item: How to use D&D Town Generators
Master the Dungeon uses some of the same generators I use, but they have several others which I might be into. In fact, Master the Dungeon has gathered a link list to several other random generators which I might just bookmark and use later.
I already use a good number of these generators, such as Watabou’s Generator. I also used Azgaar’s Fantasy Man Generator for the continent of Refugina. While most people would leave the results of the generator stock (and I might have one such rando set aside just in case,) I seldom leave a specific generated map or tavern or villager the way it was generated. I often take the result of the above generators and take the graphic to Adobe Illustrator and hack at it, combining buildings and moving things around to make them perfect (or at the least less imperfect.) I’ll also use DonJon a lot for plenty of rando’ing. (‘Rando’ing.’ Is that a word? Something meant for ‘using a lot of Random Generators?’ Can I make it happen or would it be like using ‘Fetch?’ Oh well.) There could also be an Excel sheet (or a Google Sheet) made by someone that would make a menu or price sheet (one is listed in the mentioned video,) or a generator that goes the extra step, creating not just villagers but their stat blocks as well. This is useful for me because creating all those stat blocks can be a chore!
As I mentioned elsewhere, I can really go overboard in worldbuilding. It’s my crack. But sometimes I need something to get the ball rolling. Often the most daunting and intimidating thing about creation is the blank page, not knowing where to start. Having something randomly thrown in there would be a good way to kick start things and create a vibrant and enjoyable anything, including the thing I’m writing this article about.
Item: Making D&D Towns Feel Alive
The goal, of course, is to make the village less like numbers on paper, but more like a living breathing being, like a real small town that the players might run into on the road. A place that could actually exist if a world like Penumaria was real. And the key to that is to make a town like Oakhurst be a town that had a life long before the big damn heroes show up and will (hopefully) have a life long after they’ve gone to the next campaign.
The village should have some amount of bustle when the party arrives, especially during the day. When they enter the tavern or inn, there should be people in there, and people would almost know each other by name. If they enter any establishment, they should meet someone doing the job here, someone on the counter selling their wares, or if all else fails, say that someone’s cleaning. And be sure to do just enough research on said business so you can describe it; if they enter the candlestick maker, they should get some description of someone making candles. Just enough to put you on mount Dunning-Kruger would do: You don’t have to be an expert on something, you just have to describe how it’s done in two paragraphs.
Ditto with the architecture. Most players won’t know anything about Tudor, Modern, Victorian, Brutalist, or any other style, just go for what they look like with the material used. “The buildings had stone bases with a door inside with stairs that lead to the wooden floors above.” That’s all you’ll need to get the point across.
More to Come
There’s a lot more to Master the Dungeon’s videos. Some more on villages, some on combat, and there’s a lot of them on dungeons and traps. I’ll be watching more of them and taking notes as I go, but these four videos are the ones that will help me the most since I’m working on Oakhurst at this time.
I have a working draft for the next Tablelake Arisen story so I can put it through the editing stage and get it put up here. I just need a little more material for the next Amber of the Woods.
Same with the first part of Sunken Fortress. I just need to write down the Session Zero bits, which will have two versions: One for normal adventurers and one for Castle Chronicla Servants.
My parents just adopted a puppy and a kitty a couple of weeks back, and since they still both work, they needed someone to petsit every other day. That’s slowing me down a bit, but that’s only for a couple of weeks or at most a month. I can get back up to speed afterward.
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