This is the third in a series that began with Role Playing For GMs, and then got to Better Cults.

This post is about how to create a lived-in, meaningful world that varies from place to place. At the end you’ll get index cards for two very different towns.

If you’re like me, you have a platonic ideal of a Basic Fantasy Town in your mind. In my home game, that town is actually called Town. The butcher is named Butcher, the blacksmith is named Black Smith, the innkeeper is name Inn Keeper. (I started DMing in middle school, and some dumb jokes stuck.)

I didn’t know this when I made it, but I was basically inheriting the Village of Hommlet by osmosis. Which is really fun and charming for one town! But it gets really old if every town is Town with a different name.

Gary Gygax, who wrote Hommlet, and spawned all of its many grandchildren, was an insurance underwriter, and his towns read like it, detailing with manic precision the itemized contents of each room, such as: five chairs, three pairs of boots, seventeen clay jars (empty) and 14 copper pieces in an unlocked wooden box. What those people care about? How they live their lives? Up to you, GM!

It’s not especially gameable. But unfortunately, a lot of adventures still follow this pattern. They tell you where the inn is and what’s on the menu, where the blacksmith is and what she has for sale, and so on. It’s not what makes a good town.

The primary thing players do in towns is talk to people. Towns are about roleplay and relationships.

A good, gameable town is full of people at cross-purposes, people who want different things.

But as we saw in Role Playing For GMs, wants alone don’t create personality. Beliefs do. And wants, and the conflicts taht arise from those wants, tend to be universal to the human experience. People in one town want much the same thing as people in a town half a world away: security, peace, love, a chance to improve their lot. Beliefs are different. Beliefs vary wildly.

Picking different beliefs for different places and groups is the most gameable way for a GM to create a feeling of place, of culture — to offer the PCs a different set of choices and consequences.

You do this by giving beliefs to Locations. For each major location or region, make a table of beliefs. Some of those beliefs should be complimentary, and some should disagree with each other.

But if they’re all in relationship to common themes, then you’ll very quickly get a coherent sense of place that will generate play.

Here are 10 beliefs that might create the culture of a Halfling Shire. For each NPC, roll once on the table to give you a belief of theirs. Let it color how they interact with the world.

Just as conflicting desires create interesting situations, so too do conflicting beliefs. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins believes that adventures are for nitwits. Frodo believes that one of his Took ancestors took a fairy wife. They have a lot in common, but different beliefs.

The Spear of Horrendous Iron, at time of writing in its last 48 hours on Kickstarter, pains a picture of a town in crisis. They can’t pay their taxes, and tax collection methods in feudal systems are brutal. A group of farmers has had enough, and is planning to radically chance the world. They’ve made a deal with a Giant to

The 2d6 Stingbats Review of the adventure condenses it well:

I wanted the town to be

But I don’t want GMs to have to say that “this is a low-magic setting.” I want them to have NPCs at the tavern who think that A) magic isn’t real, and B) magic is real, but evil.

Here is where I landed on beliefs that reinforce the themes of the town.

It gives the GM tools to seed information about the rest of the adventure into chance encounters with NPCs in the town.

When the players inevitably chat up three randos at the town tavern, the beliefs section instantly provides the GM with a way to navigate that conversation in a richly layered and specific way that reinforces the themes of the adventure.

Let’s roll and see who those randos are:

I rolled 3d10 and got a 5 and two 3’s. Two of these folks have a strong conviction that magic belongs to Druids, and prayer to Gede is the answer to their problems. One of them believes that Gede is real, and has forsaken this town. Perhaps the two will invite the players to worship with them. Perhaps they’re suspicious that the players might be dabbling in dark powers — potentially awkward for the Wizard in the group. Perhaps the one on the other side of the line is open to magical solutions to their problems.

From a simple dice roll, we instantly have a dicey conversation that will fold back in toward the design of the adventure. And if one of the players has a ring with arcane runes on it, suddenly they’re deep in the specific internal politics of this town.

The 2d6 Stingbats review says this about the Spear of Horrendous Iron:

Sounds fun, right!? Go on and back the kickstarter. Pick up your copy.