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NPCs will continue until moral improves
🕑 Added 2022-04-02 18:47:20 +0000 UTC
I have been working on NPC's for a couple months now and I still have an almost comical amount to go according to my outline. But slow and steady gets the book done and I'm busting out one or two entries a day at least. I just keep thinking about that part right at the beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth where milo is in the doldrums and everything just blends together. My least favorite parts of game design are basically filling out templates and this part is nothing but that. The end product will be worth it but it's hell on my adhd brain.
But while I work away on that, let me detail out parts of the town in out this month's preview!
Chapter 3: A Tour of the Town
<<insert map of Reedsboro>>
<<map of downtown during a festival>>
How to use this section
This isn’t a complete map of Reedsboro. You’re not going to know what every shop on every corner is. Or who lives in every house. This map is most notably missing possibly the most important locations, places like the homes of the characters in your game, or even the base you use as a community. (Though an example base maybe be found in the back end of this chapter)
What it does offer are footholds and possibilities. Below are a list of locations, ideas, and people to make the process of starting to tell a story of your own a little bit easier. As well as hopefully filling it with moments that make your town feel more full and alive. You’re free to treat any or all of this as canon as you would like. I can point out possibilities, and offer up ideas, but ultimately, I am unable to tell you what exactly is right for your table.
The list below is broken down into 4 separate sections; Neighborhoods, Amenities, Landmarks, and Nearby. Neighborhoods are a large scale overview of residential areas. Amenities are all the things people use in their day to day lives that might address basic needs or quality of life. Landmarks are points of interest. And Nearby are things not located in town, but close and worth mention.
Each entry is broken down into five separate sections
Key: Where on the map you can locate this. The Physical location of this place.
Name: What this place is properly called, though the locals might have names of their own.
Description: A short blurb describing the place in question. These are short blurbs designed to be read aloud at the table. Or at least jumpstart your own.
Locals: Examples of the sort of characters or NPC’s (non-player characters) you could expect to find in a location. This list is by no means expansive or complete, just suggestions. Everyone has to get groceries after all, even if you don’t see their name on the list. Characters with stats will have a page listed for them next to their name.
Plot Seeds: Suggestions for the kinds of stories that could involve this place or the people found in it. Most of what you will find would be most at home in a Neighborhood Protectors or Strange Times in Strange Towns campaign and might even be at first glance rather mundane. This is intentional. These are meant to be cores of stories you build for yourself. The idea of trying to help house a homeless population caused by the lack of affordable housing might sound boring at first and not play into the usual self-focused power fantasy of superhero games. But there is nothing to say that someone on the city council is using mind control to get their way, or that someone is using the properties meant for their app-based B&B hustle as a front for a lab for building an evil death ray. A good hook should be something you could see telling a story about as a table. May sure to respect everyone’s boundaries and limits and don’t feel bound by what is here. Make up your own or combine stories for maximum effect.
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Neighborhoods
There is no real middle class in Reedsboro. Not in any real meaningful way. Half the town is built to cater to folks with money and the houses they leave empty for 9 to 11 months out of the year. Somewhere between beach house money and “well off enough for a porch” money a whole flights of stairs are missing thanks to a purposefully constructed economy of have and have nots. And in a smaller town like Reedsboro everyone knows who is which.
Key: 1
Name: Crestview
Description:
High up on a hill overlooking Reedsboro lays the neighborhood of Crestview, a gated community of cream-colored McMansions frankensteined together and straining against the boundaries of their designated lots. Messes of collumns, arches, and mismatched roofs with more garages than sense that always left enough of the tall cedars that cover Reedsboro so that they never have to look a neighbor they don’t want to. These were the home of the rich. Tiny tyrants that had power over others. Politicians, businessmen, real estate developers, and doctors. It’s hard to shake the feeling that each of those windows isn’t an eyeball staring at you.
Locals:
- Itchy Leeds (The Mayor, keeps a secret collection of fanciful hats)
- Tabitha Popkins (Real estate Mogul, addicted to coffee and petty theft)
- The Rich Popular Kids
Plot Seeds:
-Some minor tech start up guy is about to make the jump from rich to really rich with his latest product and the ultra rich secret society the Black Goat Lodge is interested and ready to test this person to see if he’s a right fit.
-There is a house where all that enter it gradually become impossibly small.
-Service workers like gardeners, maid service, and babysitters from outside the neighborhood keep going missing.
Key: 2
Name: Historic District
Description: Old colonials line the narrow streets that made more sense before they were paved and made for horses. 2-story structures with white trimming and panels the color ol’ timey candy. Some had porches, others had widow walks overlooking the sea. Shutters and white-picket fences on every house. Beautiful houses with personalities and stories of their own, and frozen in time. All in convenient walking distance of downtown.
Locals:
-Roberta Bennett (hobby gardener and busy body gossip, has the biggest secret in town)
-Bonny Orson (head of the neighborhood watch, always watching)
-house flippers
Plot Seeds:
-A long running TV show comes in to renovate a house, only to find a skeleton in the walls.
-A pair of newlyweds are newly moved into a house, but are facing harassment from the Home Owners Association. It take as lot of money to live in a house like this between the numerous repairs and updates an old house requires and navigating red tape, but it’s being unevenly applied and leveraged against certain folk who “don’t fit our idea for the neighborhood”.
-A pirate’s treasure map is found in an attic.
Key: 3
Name: The Shore
Description: Tall beach houses sit along the shore and on top of stilts like a flock of boxy cranes, overlooking the reedy dunes and crashing surf. Rental properties, Breeze BnB, and time shares made up a majority of the buildings with the private properties spaced out enough to carve out it’s own chunk of the beach and with enough of a gate to let you know you weren’t welcome. Most of the year they sit empty hey outside of squatters, divorcees, and troublemaker teens looking for something to do. Neck high fences secured with 4 digit codes and doorbell cams weren’t much of a deterrent it turns out.
Locals:
-Patricia Karn (D-list actor and famed sitcom mom, wants to be left alone in a hateful way)
-Nicolas Flint (romance novelist, funnels money into local conservative politics, basically a less interesting Tyler Perry for beachy white folk)
-Vacationers
Plot Seeds:
-The houses have started walking on their stilt legs through town.
-A lot of these houses are encroaching on the territories of endangered shore birds and capitalizing on what would otherwise be public spaces. Now another housing project is going to be made so a rich man can launder money and much of the areas is already taken up with what could have been affordable housing. What are you going to do?
-A house party on the beach, but something is strange and these faces aren’t quite right.
Key: 4
Name: Cedar Point
Description: No one in Cedar Point is really comfortably middle class, it’s all facade and posture when just about everyone you see is a paycheck or disaster away from being out of the house. It’s just well off enough for a porch. Vinyl panels in boring colors and storm shuttered windows. Groups of muscovy ducks pick their way though hilly lawns with grass and fire ant hills.
Locals:
-Truth Bell (postal worker, good neighbor)
-Luke Denny (amateur stock car racer and mechanic)
-A dad
Plot Seeds:
-After getting packages from Congo.com people seem different, sterile, and addicted to capitalist consumption. What does The Pale Man and The Cult of Rot have planned? What to the people with cardboard boxes for heads with the smiley face logo of Congo.com mean?
-You witness a young geno get kicked out of their house after a fight. What do you do?
-Hate group Brotherhood of Humanitas has starting leaving fliers and evangelizing in the neighborhood. How do you push back?
Key: 5
Name: The Grove
Description: Collectively known as “The Grove”, this is where everyone else lives. The working poor who work to serve visitors or have to travel a good hour one way to work then an hour back. One one side of the red clay dirt road is a series of pale blue duplex’s walled in enough cheap lumber to suggest a lawn. The other side a series of mismatched trailers. Plants grow tall and manicured in the lots.
Locals:
- The Brothers Gutierrez (Aspiring pro-wrestlers)
- Buck Henley (Gas Station Attendant and Miniatures Painter)
- Kids on Bikes
Plot Seeds:
- A mysterious entity is feeding off these anxiety and depression of those in the neighborhood, growing stronger.
- The neighborhood has a summer cookout and you’ve been invited. You better bring a dish.
- A drag race has been being used as a cover for something much more illegal, a mysterious racer with a new model Edison car seems to have the answers.
