Making D&D Towns Feel Alive

A random encounter table for townies. Can be variable with town districts or day/night if you like. One city-wide event table for what the big talk of the town this week is.

I will say the vagueness skill is a good skill to have even if you're a well prepared DM because it's impossible to prepare for everything the players will want to do. You can think of everything that sounds reasonable for them to explore and then suddenly they tell you a location in town they want to visit that's out of left field.
"I wanna visit the city graveyard or morgue"
"Uh... really?"
"Yeah my father died in an unknown location so I wanna see if any of the graves have his name"
"Um... okay..."

I've been going through you're videos, and I have to say, there are some of my favorite videos because they are quick and to the point. I mean this in the most positive way possible. I know when I click on one of your videos I'm going to learn something useful, that stays on the topic of what the title is.

I have a plot hook that involves the guards wanting to arrest and question a particular character on sight (due to a case of mistaken identity). I considered having this happen during a shift change. So that instead of just two or three guards, there happens to be twice that at the exact moment. Sure it sounds scripted (because it is), but I'm hoping I can play it off as impeccable timing. Should also deter the murder hobos from going "well, we got this!"

What are people doing? They are cleaning. What is a merchant doing. Ou, she is cleaning. What is candle maker doing? She is making candles. Really?! Then I... No, of course not, she is cleaning 😂

This genuinely helps me, I'm running my first dnd session as a DM, and I somehow made my players interested in like the three main NPC's that inhabit the town, which honestly is extremely lucky on my part because without them my town is basically them standing around doing noting, sure the tavern Keeper cleans alot, but the others guys are just static, so tha k you for making this, it's simipw but I never thought about it like this, Thanks!

Definitely have a list of culturally appropriate names for male and female characters in your world for reference when you need in a hurry, but you should also share that list with your players when rolling characters so they also fit into your world.

Since all of my players also have Game Master Experiance, I can be lazy. When one player asks for a specific detail abd I have no name or description for it: I just point to another player and relay the question to him. This way I engage more than one player at a time, outsorce the thinking, and give the players the agency to contribute to worldbuilding.

I absolutely love your channel. The videos are so informative, and yet simple and to the point, making them easy to follow and easy to retain the information. Keep on keeping on!

Your videos are excellent refreshers even though I wish I could go into a paragraph of how luxurious a noble's manor is and how badly I want my players to egg his house because he's the guy who insisted on a tax increase to fund his crippling obsessions' with gem encrusted goblets.

"You see ..."
(1) A dozen soldiers sitting on the ground, some sleeping, while the teamsters try to reattach a wagon wheel on their transport.
(2) An old man hit a child, and no one in town seems to notice or care.
(3) An old woman in a fur coat, struggling with carrying two heavy suitcases.

¡YES! Subs english NICE. Ty.

I've found that Red Dead Redemption 2 makes for some surprisingly effective DnD inspiration. Especially with how each town has their own personality.

I love the simple but detailed art style of this video

Thanks for this!

Great information, thank you !

While a player's knowledge and characters knowlege might line up, characters shouldn't know something that they wouldn't know, story wise. That would be metagaming.

For NPC names for my SciFi game i put together a list of names from "Behind the name" , specifically the list of popular names, and specifically specifically the names when listed in order of names that changed rank the most from the previous year.

These are some really great tips! I've been struggling to help make the world or the town really feel alive, rather than a bunch of little set pieces or stages for the characters to move from one to the next. Thanks so much for making this, I fully intend to utilize the tips here next weekend! :)

Too many games the characters while in the tavern get in a fight, what ever reason, and the players go straight into slicing and blowing up townsfolk! Wtf. How do you fix this without just sending tons of guards and jail time or punishment.

I am not a geologist. My players kept asking me about the minerals used in the masonry… it was very awkward…

i have a large list of names i’ve generated ahead of time (they all have little checkboxes so i can mark the ones i’ve already used). it really helps to SAY the name out loud before you use it, just to see if it sounds funny. if you don’t, you might end up making the players laugh every time they interact with the NPC.

i need this( i'm new at BEING the DM)

(sry if my english is too crispy ^^) i love combining staleness with uneasiness. Bring a group into a town where you describe how empty everything is, and how dead the peoples eyes look to them,noone interacting and you will have in no time a group that wants to dismantle the village to find the secret, but also burn it down because there has to be a curse or some other form of evil.

i had a group investigating such a town for way longer than i thought they would be interested in it. It took them some time to realise they were just annoying some peaceful but very ascetic cultist villagers with a vow to never ever talk to an outsider

The Absence of information can be equally appealing as a mass of information as it simply forces you to interact with the remaining things in different way than you did before. My people dismanteled a specific farmhouse before realising the truth and to this day i dont get excactly why they did it, but they swear it made sense to them back then

The art of conversation does play a big role for me.

But also, I learned little interactions and microexpressions from literally talking everyday—this has helped me improv and even design the interactions with the party.

Good video, currently running an Urban campaign in a harbour city. They're always seeing Tellin the fisher hauling that nights catch to market, till they didn't...... New quest, find Tellin.

could also double down on the NPC doing the wrong thing and make it a plot clue.

For really committed DMs I highly recommend spending some weekends at historical museums. The most recent I've been to was a glass museum with a glass blowing demonstration. I learned a ton about how glass was made in the early 1700s and those kind of details can really help flesh stuff out.

Yeah, but that sounds like I have to invest a LOT of money in NPC models and animations.

I do something a bit different I do a lot of public DMing at Cons at the D&D experience and Adventure league at game shops. So I tend to use one shot NPCs as a way to get quieter players more invested in the game by letting them describe the NPC and then I run it as that on Improve. The bar maid is old and tired of the lifestyle but it is a job OR this a halfling who balances the drink tray on her hat OR their is no made and the Man behind the counter is using message to take orders, Prestidigitation to transmute the drinks and mage hand to deliver the drinks.

I would love a video on scaling, from space maps or road maps etc don’t really help me visualize how big a town or city could be, in todays day there’s no visual marker where a city ends and country side begins and it’s hard to tell how many towns and how far apart they should be, I want a busy breathing world but I don’t want it overfilled.

Your videos have incredible info, and I would honestly binge them all immediately and then rewatch my favorites, but I just can’t. Solely because you only use the exact same song on loop in every video

You sound just like the lady from PBS Eons and it throws me off so bad, man.

I mean, it's a good thing, but it's weird, maaaan.

Other options to cleaning may be sleeping, reading a book or daydreaming. Not everyone is that busy or hard-working :D

“You have come to our town on our monthly cleaning day traveller. What do you need”

Also, looking up random things that your players come up with can also get you to google things that are definitely going to get you on some list somewhere. So far I’ve had to research making gun powder from scratch, how to dispose of a body chemically/non-chemically, explosive potential of at least 4 different items, and (of course) how poisons and toxins effect the nervous systems of biological creatures.

I’m on at least one organization’s list at this point.

What is the music in the background

"They can feel flat, un-inviting, and lifeless."

Vallaki, Krezk, and the village of Barovia: "That's...why I'm here."

You know what would be cool? Making a town that is really that "NPC's are just idle", but putting emphasis enough to make the players think about what the hell is happening, intentionally making it creepy and awkward, so that they have a mystery to solve, in this case: "why the hell do all of those guys seem like they've been brainwashed?"

Always make it feel like you’re interrupting something.

My towns are gonna be so freaking clean now

That's for doing these videos. They help with creativity so much

Unpopular opinion, but I really like starting adventures in a tavern

My players saved a kingdom and then traveled for about 3 to 4 years... So when they came back, they asked to go to their favorite tavern that they used to go at the start of the campaign... I described how when they got in the place where the tavern was supposed to be there was, instead, an alchemist ingredients shop.

Why you ask? Well, the tavern keeper died of natural causes 1 year after they started traveling, and his family (only 2 sons, both 20 years old) now is trying a new life as shop keepers in other parts of the kingdom.

They recognised the players from being the "old man's favorite clients" and offered them discounts, since the gold that the players spended with the tavern helped them to open the shops that they have now.

Everyone felt like they made difference in the lives of the NPCs and were all super sorry for not being at the old man's funeral... It was so wholesome...

(Edit)
Some words they shared:
"He was a good man and the best at beer brewing" - Half Orc Barbarian
"The uncle that i never had" - Symic Hybrid Rogue
"He helped me making money when i had nowhere to go" - Sea Elf Bard
"He always liked when i casted spells for him to see... It was just cantrips most of the time, but he thought i would be the best wizard to come..." - Elf Wizard

The fun thing is that all that they said was roleplayed, nothing was in their backstory, so i felt like a great DM at the time.

"As you poke your head in the door, you are immediately hit with the scent of beeswax. To your left, you see an old elf pouring what you can only assume is the source of that lovely scent into pewter molds, threads that will serve as wicks suspended on a metal rod draped over the top of each. They range in size from barely bigger than the matchstick that would light them, to candles bigger than your own, sizable barbarian thumb, and almost as long as your forearm. 'With ya in a moment, let me finish the pourings, would'ja?' The elf barely gives the slightest nod he's even noticed you. The rest of the shop is mahogany floors and shelves, lined with candles. tallow, paraffin, and beeswax, every shape, size, and colour you could imagine. Hopefully the chandler can read the list Hekore sent you with..."

Just an example of the "lived in" nature of the kind of narration I'd give, re: the town, and since you mentioned "how things work" and candlemaking, it just kind of went from there (since I used to dabble in beeswax candlemaking).

Love this series (and the art)! Gonna use all these tips for my next DM session.

I have a quick description on what is going on at different times of the day. As the adventurers return to the city it might be evening, or maybe they woke up before the sun rose.. I’ll have quick descriptions of what they see at each location based on the time of day to give town that life feel that things are going on without them