Friday, March 27, 2015

Coming Up: April's A-Z, Towns of Wampus Country

In previous years, Wampus Country hasn't participated in the A-Z madness of April that annually infects some segments of the blogosphere.  A few years back, the Wampus contribution to the ritual was the Arcane Abecediary, although it wasn't a one-letter-per-day exercise, but rather a "dump everything at the end of the month" gambit.

This year, we're going to attempt the full alphabet, daily-posting achievement - ably aided by the ability to pre-write and schedule posts, of course.  By the end of the month, I hope to have presented twenty-six or more towns of Wampus Country, written up in a useful way.

By "town", I mean any inhabited place - we may see some villages, towns, a ranch here and there, a castle, whatever.  No dungeons or ruins count for our purposes this month; and I'm going to try to avoid talking about the larger towns that have already been covered in the past on the blog (Thistlemarch, Frogport, et al).   And by "a useful way", I mean...well, I'm not certain what I mean.  Town write-ups really vary in usefulness.  I can remember seeing a short village write-up in some Forgotten Realms product or another which consisted of a breakdown of population by race (5% halfling) and a short paragraph of description.  Well, that isn't enough.  I only care that the major export is apples if you give me an adventure hook to go with it.  No maps for these.

So that's the goal - to do these short write-ups in a way that provides information that would be a) useful for a DM to riff off of, and b) intriguing for a player (or PC) to hear about.  We want towns that PCs will want to visit!

I'm thinking the layout will look something like this:

Town name
Short description (including location)
What to See - there must be a reason to visit!
Where to Stay
Where to Pray
What to Eat
What to Buy
Who to Meet
Thing to Avoid

Aiming for PC-centric concerns with each of these; sort of mini-answers to some of the Twenty Questions for each locale.