Town advancement, part 2

Last time I wrote about town advancement as an addition to player advancement in RPGs. Qualitatively, this should be included in your game already. If there is a party of adventurers that regularly returns to town with heaps of gold and magical items, the world should respond in a meaningful way. The goal is to quantify that impact a bit with a system of advancement that fuels the qualitative changes.

It's probably best to start with a village in the same way that we usually start with basic or low-level characters. There the progress is more evident: a new blacksmith's shop is noteworthy among a small collection of homesteads but would gos unnoticed in a city. I'm imagining a three-fold progression—village, to town, to city—where each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and factions. Advancement from one to the other is marked by a particular feature:

• A village becomes a town when it has a mercantile, civil, or religious feature
• A town becomes a city when it has permanent

These features will have a cost in gold and potentially materials, and might even have prerequisites. E.g. You cannot sponsor a cathedral unless the town already has a chapel. We need to be wary of complexity here and should feel free to hand wave a lot of this. In the words of my brother:

[The worst] part of D&D is simulating a medieval economy

Settlements progress primarily through the patronage of the player characters, but non-player characters should also contribute. Some of these contributions might be benign like a local family contributing to the cost of a guard tower. Others might be malevolent, like cultists building a temple to an evil god. This will provide plot hooks for the heroes as they work to shape their town and steer it from chaos.

We'll need a random table of town events that occur whenever the heroes leave town. Natural events like monster attacks, outbreaks, and natural disasters should be mixed with human events like immigration, new constructions, and local elections. The negative impact of these events can be mitigated by the features of the settlement. The provides additional incentive to advance the town beyond the benefits.

By combining these components, I think we can create a system that is compelling without being heavy-handed. In future installments, I'll try to do that.

Sean McPherson works as a software engineer at Khan Academy, and enjoys playing games and watching soccer. He lives with family in Pittsburgh, PA.