My brain is wanting to combine efforts on Lore24 and Town Generator 2.0, so I want to think about Grafarvad, the home-base of Eilifur.
From a game design point of view, I want a kind of points-of-light campaign, where it is difficult to leave town before Tier 2 or so. To that end, Grafarvad needs to have agricultural support from some surrounding villages — these will be beset by chaos and in regular need of adventurers. One goal of future posts will be to expand some of these with some hexes and random encounter tables.
Any place the PCs want to start, I think they’ll be there until level 5 or so, which I’d put at around 10–15 sessions. There’s an outside chance that they’ll want Grafarvad to be their hometown, but they might choose more familiar areas from our previous game, so I don’t want to put a ton of effort into this one.
So at a high level, I want three things, any one of which tell me “Oh yeah, I’m in Grafarvad” and “This place is fun and interesting.”
- A planned construction: the main streets are patterned after the River Styx, with districts named after the various realms, and Gloomwrought Square at the center. Each district is painted with murals depicting the types of beings that are reborn into that realm.
- Memento Moris abound. Perhaps they drink from skeletal goblets at the local tavern. The strong presence of contemplation of the afterlife lends a sense of controlling one’s destiny, while also realizing that one can be struck down at any moment.
- The Heimspeki, a college focused on philosophies of law vs chaos, good vs. evil, houses frequent, rigorous, debates on the virtues of each as it pertains to the future of the soul and the world. As a result, the citizenry of Grafarvad are much more philosophical than the other lands.