Give your PCs an excuse not to care, and they’ll take it every time.

Burials of Teganshire Post 1 of 30

The number one campaign killer, in my realm of experience, is apathy for the game world. Burials of Teganshire puts in the work to help a DM avoid the Shiv of Don’t Care. Go to the crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to get your copy.

Once apathy sets in, the campaign putters out. Goes splat. Deflates. Poofs in a puff of sadness (and sadness poofs are the saddest poofs of them all). Over the next several days, we’ll be discussing the player association to a campaign and ways a DM can jump on the verisimilitude bandwagon.

Start Local, Expand Slowly only As-Needed

Locality is the number one tool in the DMs toolbox to engage the PCs with the game world. Let’s talk about two products that start small and stay within local boundaries, The Village of Hommlet today and the Crossroads Village in our product, Curse of the Lost Memories, for tomorrow’s Locality Post.

The Village of Hommlet

Gygax’s The Village of Hommlet is, even after all these years (or perhaps more so), an excellent product containing maps, some of them quite detailed, and descriptions of all the movers and shakers of Homlet. Off the top of my head, we have:

• Brune and Rufus, mostly their own faction but within the power-circle of the Viscount of Verbobonic
• The villagers, led by the Mayor, including the Inn of the Welcome Wench
• The Church of St. Cuthbert, which includes their generous temple
• A Druid oversees the worship of the “old faith” and reports to a more extensive druid network
• Evil spies for two factions that oppose each other and the powers in the village!
• A spy for the Viscount, my favorite fake man-at-arms and actual ranger, Elmo

This cast of charters, along with the maps, descriptions of each building, and detailed descriptions where Gygax was expounding on role-playing opportunities, makes it seem that this is a real village. Hommlet has people that lead their little fake RPG lives, even when the characters are not there. Coupled with the Ruins of the Moathouse chapter, the product, (best found in the mega-module Temple of Elemental Evil), has a ton of campaign play without a lot of fluff.

Now-imagine PCs, interacting with all these people, heading next door to Nulb, and then the Temple itself.

Now take those PCs, who probably have a house in Hommlet they built, or rooming with Brune and Rufus, and for the next adventure, shift them 800 miles east. The welcoming wenches were never seen again.

Please Don’t Go!

I get it. You got a great adventure, a great map, and the village of Hommlet is a hamlet. The campaign runs well, and the adventurers are wealthy from their deceptions and shenanigans in the yon Evil Temple.

And they may not come to you and say, “Yo, DM! This little village is terrific! We should never leave!” Maybe they are thinking of that time they tricked the Earth Temple into Going at it with the Air Temple below–but all that skulduggery happened in a game world, a detailed game world.

And the PCs, by interacting with the world, have molded it, and their actions impacted everyone around them. It’s now their world, and more so than Gyax or the DMs.

 Note the map scale. You can cram an entering campaign worth of adventures here and still have plenty of room for the PCs to make their mark.

Don’t throw away that goodness for the new shiny. Good players will care about that village (even if they want to burn Nulb to the ground and build a castle), but if the DM does not, they will soon lose interest. Apathy creeps in, and while there is nothing wrong with rolling dice and killing monsters, rolling dice and killing monsters in a fictional home makes it all the more satisfying.

Burials of Teganshire

We designed Burials of Teganshire for the DM to place just about anywhere. The module and most of the campaign (adventure path) takes place within a day’s travel of the village of Teganshire. If that intrigues you, head on over to Indiegogo and back it. You’ll get an old-school Locality introduction module.

Back us on Indiegogo for some classic, RPG good times!

 Likelihood of rescuing that villager that was working on the bridge–low.