Mundane Village Life in Cidri

[Skarg]

In my 50-map TFT game world, I generally started at a high level of detail, by making a terrain map like the Dran map, and just some notes about what the major locations and situations were. That's generally enough to start with and lets you know basically what's in that region and have it spatially consistent. Then if/when any more detail becomes needed or interesting, I'd add that, whether prepping in advance or just making notes of what I conjured up during play.

As time when on and the world developed, my (and my players') intuitive understanding of the world increased, things started to feel real and come alive, and I started to want more details. But most of the enormous world only needed to be developed to the level of having a map for it with place/nation names and a rough idea of what was there with a few notes. However when play got interesting in certain specific locations, I'd detail that, making zoomed in sketches or maps showing more detail of what was in each regional map hex, as needed for play. The desire for more detail gradually increased as we all got more interested and familiar with the game. Originally it was plenty to just roll for random encounters that meant a battle on a Wizard map. Later the players & NPCs would sometimes do larger-scale tactics that involved the local terrain.

But I still find it mostly enough to just have a map like the Dran map, with the addition of knowing which of the hexes have rural populations & agriculture in them, and which don't. It'd be a huge project to map out every trail & hamlet, most of which would never be seen after years of play. (Though, a computer could do it with procedural generation... and I've actually been playing with programming a hex map editor & generator. It's been pretty fun putting my old maps into it.)

[Jim Kane]

Okay, see here is where our methods are slightly dissimilar: You start with a high level of detail *before* the PCs enter the area and fill-in the finer details yourself; whereas we use a hexcrawl system, wherein we only set the very basic situation in advance, but leave the finer details of important features to be set by rolling on various tables *as* the PCs enter and search each hex.

As an example, with the short list I provided in the OP, if your party were standing on a hill, as they look around, they might see (rolling on a "far seeing" chart) what appears to be (fill in the blank) in this case: "a small village, far off in the distance."

If the PCs decide to head in that direction and investigate the village, after making the trek (roll for encounters), the GM rolls 1d6, and would describes the common feature of a:

1 = Farming Village
2 = Ranching Village
3 = Fishing Village
4 = Hunting Village
5 = Mining Village
6 = Logging Village

Based on the roll above.

There are specific sub-tables which then outline the details of the surrounding topography, terrain, population, race, social level, government type, flora and fauna, etc, supplies and resources available, and ideally, consistent that particular village type; but with enough variance due to randomization, that each village (or Crossroads Inn, or City, etc) is somewhat different than the last.

Remember that line in GrailQuest: #2. Another quiet medieval village. Ho-hum! Go north to the inn (2 days to 123), west to another village (3 days to 46), or south to yet another inn (3 days to 26).?

All the sub-tables of details help to avoid having all our villages, taverns, etc, be featureless carbon-copies of each other; and takes a *ton* of creative pressure off the GM, so no one ever had to develop brain damage from the pressure of having to cook up a bunch of details the players may not even see or interact with.

So the real trick is then taking all those details from the sub-tables and weaving the information they produce (via rolling) into an interesting encounter at this specific village... or some times, not so interesting.

JK

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by Jim Kane

If the PCs decide to head in that direction and investigate the village, after making the trek (roll for encounters), the GM rolls 1d6, and would describes the common feature of a:

1 = Farming Village
2 = Ranching Village
3 = Fishing Village
4 = Hunting Village
5 = Mining Village
6 = Logging Village

Based on the roll above.

There are specific sub-tables which then outline the details of the surrounding topography, terrain, population, race, social level, government type, flora and fauna, etc, supplies and resources available, and ideally, consistent that particular village type; but with enough variance due to randomization, that each village (or Crossroads Inn, or City, etc) is somewhat different than the last.

All the sub-tables of details help to avoid having all our villages, taverns, etc, be featureless carbon-copies of each other; and takes a *ton* of creative pressure off the GM, so no one ever had to develop brain damage from the pressure of having to cook up a bunch of details the players may not even see or interact with.

So the real trick is then taking all those details from the sub-tables and weaving the information they produce (via rolling) into an interesting encounter at this specific village... or some times, not so interesting.

JK

A scroll through the internet will provide all sorts of free villages.

In my youth, none were better than Midkemia Press. Here is a link to their free villages, stocked with characters.

http://www.midkemia.com/ Then click Free Stuff.

[Terquem]

Here's a bit of useless information. We spent 10 days in Ireland for our 30th wedding anniversary. We walked from Newgrange to Drogheda (we missed our bus because we got carried away exploring the site)

We passed through three small villages as we walked. It took us just under three hours. The villages were unique. We walked on the shoulder of the paved road (dry grass covered ground). It is just about exactly 12 km, 7.4 miles.

[The Wyzard]

Originally Posted by Skarg

In my 50-map TFT game world,

Pardon my ignorance, but what does this expression mean? Is a "map" a standard unit of geographical area in ITL or something?

...

I think that most villages are going to be economically similar, because the point of farming is to feed the people, and in near-subsistence economies that is the business that most of the people must be in. (My personal preference in fantasy worlds I design myself is to presume that genetically- or magically- engineered crops are much more efficient and easier to raise than our historical equivalents, and so farmers' lives are less struggles of toil and desperation than might otherwise be assumed. Also the ratio of farmers to everyone else allows for much more of "everyone else.")

That doesn't mean they can't have many other differences in terms of culture, geography, contact with distinct local subcultures, etc. A farming town that is on a major river will necessarily be different from one next to a forest, with significant trade contact with the hunter-gatherer tribes within.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by The Wyzard

Pardon my ignorance, but what does this expression mean? Is a "map" a standard unit of geographical area in ITL or something?

Oh, it was to me and the friend who also built his campaign using the same format shown in ITL - a 35 x 51 hex map like the Duchy of Dran map, with the same sorts of terrain features and 12.5km hex scale.

[The Wyzard]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Oh, it was to me and the friend who also built his campaign using the same format shown in ITL - a 35 x 51 hex map like the Duchy of Dran map, with the same sorts of terrain features and 12.5km hex scale.

Thank you for the clarification. So, somewhere around 2-3k miles across. That's a pretty respectable campaign world!

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by The Wyzard

Thank you for the clarification. So, somewhere around 2-3k miles across. That's a pretty respectable campaign world!

My friend's was similar in size. We didn't let players see the actual maps, as one of the things we found particularly interesting was travel and discovering the world and to do that, having to explore and acquire maps (separate maps of parts of the world made by the GM to represent actual maps in-game, which would have incomplete and imperfect information, and sometimes clues and/or damage).

Even with lots of travel and explorations, ships and some gates and magic carpets, a fair amount of the worlds weren't reached (even by having seen a map of them) by players... we both liked to have mapped at least some distance farther than anyone had gone, so there could be some effects and talk of distant lands that we actually had given some thought to and knew something about what they were like.

[Agemegos]

It seems to me that the idea and advantage of making Cidri so huge was and is that it ought to contain multitudes. Yes, it should contain an expanse of continent with a seasonal temperate climate, occupied by peasants growing wheat in open fields. But it should also contain a vast equatorial basin forested with mixed-species orchard, a subcontinent tilled for monsoonal rice agriculture, a jeweled tropical island terraced to the skies for tropical wet rice, a vast plain annually flooded by far-off rains and dissected by bunds into a thousand square miles of fish-farms, a sea spangled with atolls where one class grows taro in pools and another goes to sea for fish, a great river basin growing the three sisters, a terraced mountain empire supporting multitudes on potatoes, great plains where nomads follow herds of semi-domesticated herbivores, icy provinces occupied by hardy hunters and fisherfolk following startling adaptations to a life without soil. And through the wonder of gates, PCs should have a chance to see that all.

Please don't concentrate all your efforts on the most mundane and conventional part of Cidri.

[ColinK]

Originally Posted by JohnPaulB

A village could be religious retreat or holy site
A trading post village along a King's Highway
A village that centers around collecting hard to find items like truffles or Piranhakeet eggs.
A village that sprang up salvaging Mnoren technology buried underground.
A village of lepers
A ghost town that is a houses vampires and their kin

Piranhakeet EGGS? Now THAT is the stuff of nightmares. Thanks for the idea.