More GMing and Campaign Help

[Raekai]

I posted on here not too long ago about help for starting up my campaign. The advice was great and I took it all into account. However, shortly after setting this up, I've run into the biggest roadblock ever. Civilization.

I'm setting up two campaigns and I've got a couple of weeks to sort things out for the first one and months for the second one. The first one, I'm actually GMing. The second one, I'm building most of to be used by my GM for my personal dream campaign along with a few other friends. I'm taking a lot from D&D Eberron just because I like the setting so much. Creativity isn't an issue for me. I still just don't know how to go about controlling millions of lives.

For now, I'm worried about the first campaign. I figure once I get that down, building the second one won't be nearly as hard. This is the continent it will be on. This is the main city of said continent. Something about that city map makes me so overwhelmed and claustrophobic. To all of you GMs out there, how do I go about handling so many people? Should I create templates and just make clones of people and find names? Should I cut out demographics for each race? Should I just spend time fleshing out tons of people? Should I just go with a general sense of things and not worry too much? I feel like I'm making this so much harder than it needs to be. Something else I've been considering is keeping NPCs ready and filling in little bits like location when characters meet them and just make the location where they met them. I guess the overwhelming thing is SO MANY names and personalities. How do I keep track of all this stuff?

This is the continent map for the bigger campaign. I really, really want it to be here, but I need to know how to handle all of this. Please forgive how frantic and stupid I must sound, but as a new GM, this is a little overwhelming. I just need a guide to flavoring. The people, the sites. How do I know what's important. The thing I'm worried about the most is the dreaded question: "Wait, wasn't that over there last time?"

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Raekai

Should I just go with a general sense of things and not worry too much?

If you're feeling overwhelmed, I'd go with this. I know some GMs who want and need very, very deep detail. There's nothing wrong with that as a style of GMing, but realistically, a lot of the detail you might come up with (precise numbers for land area or demographics, detailed histories, etc.) won't be directly accessible or even relevant to the PCs or anybody else in the campaign. For example, the fact that only 10% of the population of the Duchy of Earl is swamp elves won't matter terribly much if most of the campaign takes place in the swamps, where most of the people are elves. Besides, if you start painting in broad strokes, that gives you large areas you can fill in with details as required.

If you'd care to take a look at how GURPS handles cities as adventuring locations, you might check out Abydos or Renaissance Florence as worked examples or City Stats for a concise way of describing cities in rules terms. Just looking over the tables of contents (freely available in the downloadable samples) should give you some idea of categories you can use to structure your thinking.

[Rhoanna]

My advice would be don't worry too much about specific NPCs (except for ones that you know are plot-important), or even specific demographics. Instead, define the general traits of people they'll run into in the city (or elsewhere). What are the common races, ethnicities, nationalities, occupations, religions, social classes, etc. What are the attitudes of these groups towards each other (particularly towards any groups the PCs are part of). These don't need to be specific numbers, but something along the lines of "The city is about half dwarfs, a quarter human, and a quarter various minorities. The dwarves dislike the goblins, who work primarily lower-class occupations. The largest industries are woolworking and iron mining, and the principal deities are..."

Once you have that, it's easier to come up with specific NPCs on the fly. You can pick their various traits based on the norms for the location (or not following them, if desired), and pick skill levels based on their proficiency: e.g. 12-14 in their occupation, higher if exceptional, lower for hobbies & other skills, defaults for everything else. Basic Set p. 172 and LT3 p. 49 can help for defining typical skill levels. What I then do (which is a bit of work, but I find it useful enough), for any NPC that might possibly recur, is add them to my running list of everyone in the world, along with a brief sentence on who they are and how they interacted with the party. That way if the PCs again want a blacksmith in the village of Shroppsburg, I can just look up who it was last time.

If you're bad at coming up with names (like I am), it's definitely worthwhile to have a list of names, or a program to generate them. Don't worry about reusing names for minor characters either.

The only NPCs I would bother stating out are several types of goons for combat, whether city guards, highway bandits, orcs, whatever. This can be the abbreviated character sheet, with just the combat-relevant stats. I mostly find this useful because combat has a lot more rolls against more stats, and there's a lot more riding on it.

[Raekai]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

If you'd care to take a look at how GURPS handles cities as adventuring locations, you might check out Abydos or Renaissance Florence as worked examples or City Stats for a concise way of describing cities in rules terms. Just looking over the tables of contents (freely available in the downloadable samples) should give you some idea of categories you can use to structure your thinking.

Just the table of contents in Abydos has already helped a ton. Thank you so much for your other advice. I think the best think for me to do is just to be very loose. If characters think an NPC is important or want to fight the NPC, I'll have a stock of half-baked NPC cards ready. I'll set up important characters like kings, guild masters, guard leaders. I'll also set up general characters like guards, wizards (with a few different spell lists), thugs, and what not. I'll also keep templates handy.

If anyone else has anything to add, I'd love to hear it!

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Raekai

Just the table of contents in Abydos has already helped a ton. Thank you so much for your other advice. I think the best think for me to do is just to be very loose. If characters think an NPC is important or want to fight the NPC, I'll have a stock of half-baked NPC cards ready. I'll set up important characters like kings, guild masters, guard leaders. I'll also set up general characters like guards, wizards (with a few different spell lists), thugs, and what not. I'll also keep templates handy.

If anyone else has anything to add, I'd love to hear it!

Yeah I build my own worlds rather then use a stock setting so handled this a lot.
The advice you have been given i solid and I like City Stats becasue it lets me broad brush a city with useful numbers for figuring spur of the moment things (like search rules, finding that NPC or hidden guild hall) but fill in stuff as I get to it.
For NPCs most professions will have a base set of abilities and skills.
So templates work really well here and then you just add flavor.
You can even build templates for professions ot Roles the adventures will encounter and then make up a set of Lenses which are kind of mini templates designed to be added to a foundation.
So I have a Town Guard template with a set of Corrupt, Upright, Lazy, Retired and Uptight lenses that are a few quirks, disads and maybe skills or such.
I then just put the two together and I have a NPC that is pretty fleshed out.
Mix and match those things and you can build interactive encounters all day any time you need one.

[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by Rhoanna

Don't worry about reusing names for minor characters either.

I did that by accident a while ago in my campaign. The party had the name of a merchant contact in a port city they visited. They asked this merchant to recruit them a couple of dependable young men for a certain job, and I used the same given name for one of the young men as I had for the merchant.

"Hm," said one of my players. "I wonder if the elder one is the younger one's godfather."

And so I decided that he was. Let the players help design the gameworld, especially when they don't know they're doing it.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

And so I decided that he was. Let the players help design the gameworld, especially when they don't know they're doing it.

This.
A lot of times the PCs prompted new ideas or steered the campaign background and setting in a way I had not planned.
The trick here is to make it all consistent and then like a good background things will appear as people expect even if you haven't gotten around to it yet.
Also off the cuff remarks by players often leads to great ideas later.
Even more fun when the players feel like such a part of the world.

[Cheomesh]

Indeed. Player-steered worlds let them have more fun.

I am also a detail-sweater. I've found the more I sweat the details, the less I can actually find a real use for them. It simply ends up being too much.

M.

[Raekai]

Originally Posted by Cheomesh

Indeed. Player-steered worlds let them have more fun.

I am also a detail-sweater. I've found the more I sweat the details, the less I can actually find a real use for them. It simply ends up being too much.

M.

I figured it would work like that. I imagine myself perfectly carving out a ton of NPCs and then later only ever using like... Four. Haha.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Raekai

The thing I'm worried about the most is the dreaded question: "Wait, wasn't that over there last time?"

Ahhhhh, the Ent-wife. Good times. Good times.

Look, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Some of my best anecdotes come from mistakes, those made by others, those made by myself. We all screw up, but unless you're a jerk about it, players will generally come back for more. It's how we learn. I'm sure everyone here has a story about how they royally screwed up a game.

Personally, if you're feeling overwhelmed, you should make your focus smaller and tighter, until you can feel like you can handle it. Call it a "practice" session. Cherry Blossom Rain started as a practice session for Martial Arts. It has since bloomed into a campaign. G-verse started as me screwing around with Ultra-Tech. I've since run it for 3 different campaigns, and a friend ran it for a campaign of his own. Big things have small beginnings.

For now, I'm worried about the first campaign. I figure once I get that down, building the second one won't be nearly as hard. This is the continent it will be on. This is the main city of said continent. Something about that city map makes me so overwhelmed and claustrophobic. To all of you GMs out there, how do I go about handling so many people? Should I create templates and just make clones of people and find names? Should I cut out demographics for each race? Should I just spend time fleshing out tons of people? Should I just go with a general sense of things and not worry too much? I feel like I'm making this so much harder than it needs to be. Something else I've been considering is keeping NPCs ready and filling in little bits like location when characters meet them and just make the location where they met them. I guess the overwhelming thing is SO MANY names and personalities. How do I keep track of all this stuff?

Did I ever tell you about Slaughter City (This is just the mortal NPCs). It was a vampire game I ran. It didn't run long, but I still thought it was quite a success and the lessons I learned helped campaigns I've run since (particularly a rather complex and deeply satisfying LARP I ran).

Before I go further, I want to note that I'm a very experienced GM with 20 years of experience under my belt. What's easy for me might not be easy for you, so I encourage you to try to simplify rather than complicate like this, but if you're determined to follow this route, then I'll continue.

You can't track all those NPCs because you're only human. You're equipped to deal with about 150 people, and no more. Beyond that, things become crowds. So you can't possibly try to simulate an entire city. You need to give the illusion of running a city, and you need to understand both your limitations, and those of your players (even if you could simulate 1000 NPCs, there's zero chance the PCs will interact with all of them, or remember a tenth of them).

First, trim the number of NPCs you're running. Slaughter City was about 100 NPCs. I've gotten quite a bit of mileage out of just having about 25. I'd call 150 the upper limit unless you're running something generational, and even then I wouldn't go with 150 every time. Not only does it take a lot of work, but it strains your ability to remember.

Next, trim what you have to remember down. It's hard to remember 50 faces, it's easy to remember 10 organizations or families. I always create "containers" or "splats" for my NPCs and bundle them under that. If you wanted me to recite all the NPCs from Slaughter City, even years after creating them, I could probably do it, not because I can easily recall 100 NPCs, but because I know there are only 10 families and 5 (the standard) Vampire Clans, in the setting. I remember those families, and then in each family, there are five characters. This is a fairly common mnemonic technique and, I believe, the basis for memory palaces.

I generally cross these splats with another layer of splats. In Slaughter City, the 10 families are crossed with ~10 organizations: The police, the criminal underworld, the well-to-do high society types, the poverty-stricken who look out for one another, the city government, the local college, and so on. This doesn't necessarily help memory (though it can) but helps creating NPCs.

So, let's try to create 50 NPCs, shall we? Assuming the fantasy genre, we begin with 10 factions and organizations. We have

• The King's Court
• A Knightly Order
• The Church
• The Occult World
• The Criminal Underworld
• The Guilds
• The Border Nobles
• Commoners
• Other Adventurers
• An evil cult of doom.

We're probably a little top heavy, but it'll do. We can file additional characters under commoners, if we need to.

For families, it helps to think in terms of themes. For slaughter city, I used virtue and vice. We could use the D&D alignment system, if we want something simple, or just come up with themes of our own:

• Chivalry
• Mysteries of a bygone era
• The Blood of a True King
• Advancing technology and the end of an era
• Hope in the face of adversity
• Ruthless ambition
• The constant hunger in a fantasy game for more gear and money
• Faith in God
• Elves
• Homeless Wanderers (but not murder hobos)

Then we just need to start attaching names and one-sentence descriptions

• House Steinberg, a noble family of chivalrous knights
• House Grey, an old noble family hiding dark secrets
• House Harwick, a young noble family with a ruthless ideology and high ambitions
• The Fairchild family, a peasant family with royal blood and noble spirit
• The Smith family, a family of clockwork makers and inventors
• The Dunning family, a refugee family who have barely survived a recent war.
• The Hill family, a particularly devout family
• The Guilder family, a wealthy family who are not yet noble.
• The Ribbon Kin, a group of wandering "gypsies"
• The Elven Barrow, a district of elves that people tend to think of as kindred

Now we just need to think of family dynamics (are they close knit or distant? Father, Mother, Husband, Wife, Brother, Sister, Son, Daughter, Cousin, Aunt, Uncle, Distant Kin) and put them into the various factions. Perhaps we have a ruthless and powerful Harwick Patriarch who is, of course, in the King's Court, his eldest son (a bastard) who has ties to the assassins of the criminal world, a second son who is legitimate (and the heir, thus resented by the bastard son) who is part of the knightly order, a stubborn daughter who has no intention of being used as a pawn by the father and is thus has become an Adventurer by Night, wearing a mask as she becomes a skilled Rogue, and finally an uncle, the patriarch's brother and a member of the church, either using his brother's assets to advance his position, or despises Harwick ruthlessness as is his brother's greatest foe.

Take those NPCs and give them three relationships, at least one in the family and one outside of the family. You'll have to create some of those connections later, but creating those connections will help flesh out other families. The Bastard NEEDS to be in love with a noble from another family, perhaps a Steinberg princess or a Grey princess (so he can uncover her dark secret). The Adventurer Girl needs a traveling companion, another adventurer, but from what family? Perhaps a Fairchild warrior who doesn't realize he's the true heir to the throne, and so on.

In filling out the families and organizations, in just filling in the empty bits, you'll create your 50 NPCs in no time flat, and you'll be able to easily remember them too, and you'll create a tangled web of relationships and stories that practically ask to be told. I find it takes a lot of work in advance, but makes running the actual game a cinch.