The 3 Essential Elements of the Perfect D&D Village/Town/City

Heh. How click-baity can I make that title? But, I'm dead serious with this. There are three things that, in my experience, PCs tend to care about in a town, a village or a city, or anywhere they make their homebase. Take care of these three things and you don't need to create a 300 page tome filled with houses that nobody is ever going to visit anyway. 

1. A place for PCs to sell their crap.
2. A place for PCs to buy things to help them get more crap.
3. A place for PCs to get information/quests to get more crap.

I've never gone wrong with this as a way of just whipping up a "civilized location" on the spot or getting something ready for game day.

Now, to be sure, as PCs poke around more, and decide they want to settle down, I'll add more stuff. If they want to see a sage, or a wizard, or find out who that suspicious lady with the cats was who told them to go seek out the three little fey that dance in the starlight on the Mid-Summer's night... then I can add those in.

I have a town called Skalfier that has been in play, in some form or fashion, since 2009. Part of my AD&D campaign. I recently moved all my notes on Skalfier to a format that I've settled on over the years. Want to know how many keyed locations there are on the map, for a town that's seen players explore quite a bit?

14.

That's for a small city, of 8000 people. 3 of those locations are for rule #1. 5 are for rule #2 (and include #1 as well.). 7 are for rule #3. Only 1 is something that I'd call "all role playing" - the location of a sculptor so she could create a statue of a beloved NPC in a village that wanted to honor his sacrifice to true love. 

I guess the upshot of this is to always keep your prep focused on what's going to make your table work and move. If you're basing your examples of civilized locations on the modules, that's a bit unfair because they were written to sell, so having a lot of words fills pages and makes the module seem, I don't know, like it's worth your 5 quatloos?  Or maybe they had a word count they just wanted to reach? Regardless, while city modules/supplements are great resources, I don't think they're great examples of what you absolutely need to prep on your own. They were written to sell. You're writing to have stuff to do at your game table.

Generate what's important. Have an idea of how you'll figure out additional NPCs/locations if necessary. Use a random table, have some standard templates that you just use, go back to that $25 book/$5 PDF and steal liberally, I don't know, I'm not your Dad, I can't tell you how to do it. ;) 

PS. Thanks to Alex Schroeder and Peter F for inspiring today's blog post!