Exploration is a huge component of roleplaying games that I have struggled with for a long time. It’s a hard thing to really explain but I love Places. I often will just sit and visualise a location in my mind. Part of the joy of RPGs is finding ways to explore place and setting, see what happens when we walk around in them.
I often fail at describing a place to people particularly well, but I still love the challenge of trying to paint a picture of a location. Trying to make them feel what is different between this particular desert city or ancient tomb or whatever and what has gone before is endlessly fascinating for me.
Years ago now, I wrote about the exploration pillar of D&D and how I thought it would be worth a revisit and I am happy to say that since then, a lot of games have been publish that do some of this work. The latest edition of The One Ring, Twilight 2000 and The Electric State are all interested in the idea of journeys. I realise as I write this they are all Free League Publishing games, which may say something about the company rather than trends in gaming as a whole, but still, I am glad to see that we’ve started to think about location as a pillar of play, even if we are just passing through.
When we look at any scene in an RPG, it is taking place somewhere. Almost all parts of an RPG are about people in a place and time making decisions. So I think it’s important to consider location as more than just pretty description. Let’s look at some ways we can think about places as deeply as we think about NPCs or adventure plots. Try to ask yourself the following things –
What Is The Mood?: Firstly and most obviously, a location can create a mood. A Gothic windswept mansion on a lonely peak, an abandoned dwarf fort taken over by hobgoblins and a crashed cloud giant flying castle that hit cliff and is now hanging precariously over the edge are all on the face of it an above ground dungeon in a mountainous environment but the conscious varying of description adds expectation and set the mood to Creepy, or Melancholic or Chaotic.
How Can I Add World Detail?: Not only do locations had details that are specific to them, but they can have details that help show us about the larger world they exist in. If we investigate the dwarf hold, we will find historical relics, items of a dwarven civilisation that no longer exists. If we brave the gothic mansion, then we might find a history of who lived there, or find ghosts of important historical NPCs. In the giant castle, we might find maps for the plans of other giants, the location of their strongholds, a plan for invasion. This means that we are using them as a way of defining a larger story, a sense of a deeper world, one that is lived in through an allusion to time and distance.
What Challenges Exist?: A location presents challenges. In the giant castle for example, the challenge might be getting from broken section to broken section without the whole thing plummeting down the cliff. In a city, it might be impossible to move from location to location without at least keeping an eye out for pick pockets. Or maybe it’s the opposite – the town guard is fairly oppressive and series of checkpoint gates must be negotiated.
Where Can I Layer Revelations?: A great location is a series of discoveries, parcelling them out for heroes to find smaller revelations as they move along. This can be broken down and down. Take a city for example. We can break it down into districts, streets and houses, all with small variations.
Perhaps the pick-pocket area and series of guard checkpoints above exist in the same city – just different areas, where one is a reaction to the other. We might find out about the thief quarter because we visit the checkpoint area and see the rich have to be kept safe from crime. We learn in the thief quarter the gates were secretly proposed by people who wished to sell a false sense of security to the rich.
Players who learn this might not be pushing the plot forward but it is a series of discoveries that help them feel like they are really exploring the setting, finding things out that not everyone knows. This is world-building but it’s also parcelling secrets by location and it teaches players to look under every stone to find clues. Suddenly, players will invest in looking into every location. At which point your game is running smoothly.
This is true of any environment. In fact you can base entire narratives simply around a settlement with things hidden underneath. Games like Tales From The Loop or Call Of Cthuhu can run for a long time just based on ‘this place has secrets’. This is such a successful format, it is the basis for a vast amount of TV shows.
How Does The Place Shape The Dwellers?: Remember that in most areas an environment will shape anyone you meet there. It can be fairly basic and obvious:
In the dwarf fort, the hobgoblins are likely to be decked out with old well made dwarven weaponry.
More general:
The levels of pollution in this space hive tend to make the people sluggish and grey skinned compared to people elsewhere. They look old before their time but also slightly more durable, like a resistance to level of toxins appears to have become a genetic condition.
Or Even related to darker secrets:
Everyone in the town keeps away from the old barn. You often see people cross the street to avoid walking past it. Children who play there are often disciplined hard. However, the terror doesn’t seem to extend to any actual deaths in the town. Instead this is just met with a resigned shrug, like they knew it would come.
As we can see, the environment here has shaped the NPCs in it. It’s worth thinking about. Even in wild locations, those that live there are often a product of the the place they inhabit. A chimera that lives in a swamp should be different than one who dwells in a desert.
Finally, the physicals: You probably had this down from the start, but go back now and just run over the senses of a place. What does it feel like to move through this environment? What is the lighting and temperature? How does it smell? What sounds can we hear? Think of one type of wildlife that might flee or be nonplussed by the players and a few objects that might be around. Add details about that space that are not just description but about interaction. Objects and animals, sounds and smells, they make players think of the place as a thing they can touch, not just a theatre backdrop for their discussion with NPCs.
Hopefully, these ideas allow you to think about location in a different way when you are running a game, not just about providing a description or for plot but so that the world you show your players takes on a deeper explorative feel.
Creative Commons art credit: “The Troll Cave” by AlessuaHV, “Smuggler’s Cave” by TomPrante, and “A woman walking down a path in the woods 1” by MHoltsmeier.
