Creating A Campagin Part 3: Shopping!

 Intro

Well, hello there, my lovelies,

Welcome back to the third part of my series, where I discuss how I go about building a new campaign setting. I am essentially arguing that the most important thing when planning your campaign is creating a sense of immersion.  That every time your players come to the table, they feel like your world is alive, and they are excited to be part of it. If they have the buy-in for your game, it will make everything 100 times smoother.

If you want to read the previous posts, you can find them here.

Part 1: Creating Ideas

Part 2: Character Creation

In this post, I will describe two ways of injecting that flavour into your game world via shops and other vendors.

1. Specialist vendors: who sell products unique to that location.

2. Item flavour text: A sentence or two that adds context to a product, and helps players expand their mental model of the game world.

Specialist Vendors

Firstly, let's take a look at specialist vendors, and for that, we need to consider the magnificent Bakewell Tart.

Banging

The Bakewell tart is a classic British treat. This shortcrust dessert stuffed with jam and icing is topped with a glazed cherry, making it an absolute banger. And if you have had the privilege of eating one before, you will no doubt agree with me.

Bakewell tarts were invented in the town of Bakewell, in the Peak District of the North of England. The town is something of a tourist spot nowadays, and it is chock full of bakeries selling Bakewell Tarts, because this is its local speciality, the town’s cultural gift to the world.

They sell giant Bakewells here. I had one to myself, and I regret nothing.

So, when you are making vendors think about what makes that town special, and create a niche vendor to reflect that. Human culture is often expressed in fashion, food, the arts, and technology, so specialist vendors selling something of that sort would work well. If you are stuck, here are some potential specialist vendors.

1. Food and drink

2. Tobbaconist

3. Musical instruments

4. Toy shops

5. Florist

6. Spas and beauty salons

7. Bars, restaurants, and taverns

8. Book sellers

9. Art galleries

10. Curio shops

11. Tailor’s

12. Engineering/tinkers

Pro-Tip:

Always give your shops 10, 12, or 20 items. That way, you can use them as an ad hoc loot table!

Flavour Text

Again, we can return to the Souls games for inspiration here. A short piece of flavour text can add depth to your world with very little effort. It will make the player think about how that item fits into your world, and they map it into their mental model, which in turn makes your world feel more alive.

This is how I would add flavour text to the Bakewell Tart.

Bakewell Tart

Created in the Black Horse Inn in the 1820s. This delicious dessert from the town of Bakewell is guaranteed to give you the energy to hike across the beautiful landscape of the Peak District. 

Counts as 1 ration.

Examples

Pro-Tip

Not every item needs a purpose. Some can be in the shop as filler, or to add flavour. It is just a reflection of what the vendor would usually sell.

I consistently find that one of the best ways to add flavour to the game is to create an alcohol vendor. So many nations on earth have their own unique drink that reflects local culture. The example below is from my Webrail campaign, and each entry comes with a bit of flavour text.

Drinks Merchant
Item	Cost
Memories of Yggdrisil An earthy Cabernet Sauvignon.  Drinkers often report having dreams of a vast tree once consumed.	10
Crystal Icewine Technically cursed.  This rare wine is made from enchanted ice crystals found on frozen fragments. It's known for its crisp, sweet flavour and its ability to briefly lower the drinker’s body temperature.	25
Railside Red A popular and relatively cheap house red.  Notable for its sweet and fruity flavour.	5
Ghosttouched Chardonnay A delicate chardonnay.  The wine is almost exclusively made from grapes that have grown in necromantically infused landscapes.  When drinking it, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.	20
Holy Fuck Vodka Vodka with an extra kick.  Upon taking a shot, the drinker must make a Constitution check.  If they fail, they must say “holy fuck”.	30
Mother’s Ruin Gin A brand of gin that gleefully leans into its infamous reputation.  The label proudly states. “The favourite drink of wayward women”	22
Abyss Spiced Rum Abyss spiced rum is aged in a unique fashion.  Kegs are lowered off the sides of fragments for years at a time.  The process gives the rum an extra kick that is found in no other drink.	50
Driver’s Tipple Whiskey A warm and peaty whiskey.  One swig of this is enough to shock the senses to make you alert.  One bottle is enough to lull you into a dreamless sleep.	50
Axel Grease Moonshine Yes, it is actually made from fermented axle grease.	5

The next example is a vendor who sold meat and tusks. This was from a settlement found in cold regions, and was inhabited by Viking-like folk.

Food and Tusks
Item	Description	Cost
Whale meat	Filing and Fatty. 1 ration.	1cp
Walrus Meat	Tastes like pork. 1 ration.	1cp
Shark Meat	So chewy, you might as well be eating leather. 1 ration.	1cp
Penguin Meat	Very gamey and stringy.  Good source of protein, but wow, penguins are vicious. 1 ration.	1bit
Walrus Tusks	This must have come from a large, robust beast. As Dagger.	2sp
Narwhale Horn	It has the appearance of a unicorn’s horn. Have you been lied to all your life? As spear.	5sp

This last example was for a campaign set in the underground of a post-apocalyptic dwarven kingdom. The vendor is what I considered a typical miner's vendor.

Headroom The Mining Store
Item	Description	Cost
Mining helmets	Complete with a section to hang a candle to see in the Dark!	20
Pickaxe	Made with tempered steel.  Robust!  Can act as a weapon (1D8/1 damage)	10
Rope	Hardy, cut to the desired length.  Use gloves with it, or the coarse surface will give you friction burns.	1 per 10ft
Hardened Crowbars	Sometimes you just need to prise a rock open with a bit of elbow grease and one of these (1D6)	5
Very reasonable explosives	Inflicts 1D6 damage.  5ft blast radius	15
Reasonable explosives	Inflicts 2D6. 5ft blast radius	30
Unreasonable explosives	Inflicts 4D6.  10ft blast radius	60
Irresponsible Explosives	Inflicts 10D6.  30ft Blast radius.	120
Sledgehammer	As a Warhammer.  Used to hammer supports into place to support unstable ceilings	7
Drill Slug Egg	Legally dubious to own.  This drill slug uses its grinding teeth and acidic saliva to burrow its way through the rock.  Dangerous!	1000

I hope that was helpful. Remember, all it takes to make your world more immersive is just a little bit of flavour here and there, which creates a mental image for your players. Over time, their mental image of your game world becomes more expansive, and their engagement increases.

Next time. Artefacts.

Creating a campaign part 1: Developing the setting

Introduction

Alternatively, see this video

Hello there, my lovelies. In this series of posts, I am going outline my process of creating a campaign. From the outset, I believe the most important thing for any campaign is immersion. Once you get your players excited about the setting you created, they will actively engage with the shared world-building and storytelling experience that is a role-playing game.

Just a few points before we continue. The GM ultimately has the most control over the creation of the setting and campaign, but it is only through the players' input that details will deepen, and themes can be discovered in your setting that you didn’t realise were there.

Immersion is a matter of adding details that hint at a much larger world.  You don’t need to fill in every last blank, just hint at it and let the player's imagination do the rest. The Souls games do this admirably. Every item in the world contains a terse piece of flavour text that hints at a person, place or event, and by piecing together these disparate pieces of lore, a greater narrative emerges.

Awww jellyfish

Over this series, we will look at how we can inject world-building into the following:

• Shops and other vendors
• Creating a world map
• Religions
• Arefacts
• Beastiery
• Antagonists
• Secrets

Today, we will be looking at first principles. How to build the foundations of a new setting and how to pitch it to your players to generate engagement and excitement.

High-Concept Ideas

We want to create a setting idea that grabs our players’ attention.  It must generate a powerful mental image in our players’ minds and stimulate their curiosity enough that they have a bunch of questions that they desperately need answered. Across different media, several settings do this really well. Examples include:

The Underdark: A vast cavernous realm full of forgotten places, horrendous abominations, and civilisations that plot against the surface dwellers.

Blame!: All of humanity once lived in a vast city.  Aeons later, it is an empty superstructure. The few surviving humans are hunted to near extinction by a corrupted security system.

Trench Crusade: It is World War I, but this time the combined forces of the Abrahamic religions fight against the hordes of hell.

The Matrix: Life as you know it is a computer simulation; in reality, you are a battery for sentient machines.

Jurassic Park: Scientists bring dinosaurs back from extinction and make a theme park.  It goes horribly wrong.

Each of the above can be described as High-Concept settings.  A high-concept is an idea that can be described concisely, but still engages the potential audience.  The best example of this is Alien, which was originally pitched as “Jaws in space”. So, presenting your setting as a high-concept setting is probably one of the best ways to get your players excited about the upcoming campaign.

Generating High-Concept Ideas

The following method is a distillation of my mental process when developing a new setting. The reality is that regardless of your idea, it will take considerable thinking time to work out the kinks and inconsistencies.

1. Write down several ideas that you think would be cool to have in your setting. They could be films, books, games, a type of environment, a scientific concept, or even just a colour you like.
2. Select 2 to 3 of these ideas.
3. Generate a set of questions to link them together.
4. Write answers to these questions, and an idea will emerge.

Webrail Example

(The most recent campaign I am running.)

Stage 1:

Inspirations are.

• Floating islands in space
• Snowpeircer
• Forests
• Terminator
• Spiders
• Godzilla

Stage 2:

We will select.

• Floating islands in space
• Snowpeircer
• Spiders

Stage 3:

Our questions are.

• People live in city-sized trains.  How do they travel from island to island?
• Spiders? What makes them so important? Are they PC races? Are they antagonists?
• What are these islands floating in? Space? What lies below?

Stage 4:

Let's answer these questions.

• The islands are linked by a rail system built upon a vast, indestructible spider web. Made by gigantic spiders, obviously.
• The spiders built the foundations for the rail system.  Therefore, they are seen as architects, builders, maybe even worshipped as gods?  For once, they are not the bad guys.
• Every island should be its own environment. Separate and unique, like a planet.  Therefore, it makes sense that it is floating in space, or something similar. Dark and empty.

The High Concept

''In the endless and starless abyss, a million fragments of lost worlds are scattered.  They would be isolated and alone if not for the Webrail.  A vast rail network linking them together, created by great godlike spiders. Train-cities travel the Webrail for trade, exploration and conquest.''

This is our basic high concept that we can build out from.  Now we have this core concept, as we delve into other aspects of world-building, this central idea will guide and inform us as we move forward to create something truly immersive.

Next Week, Character creation