I'm getting ready to DM RotFM, and something that keeps bothering me is how shallow every town is. The fact that people are posting Excel sheets, with columns like "speaker", "sacrifice type", etc, seems like a symptom of the problem.
You can't have 10 deep, interesting, unique, fully fleshed out towns. It would require the campaign book to be hundreds of pages. So instead each town is a unique combination of just a few possibilities across just a few variables. Sort of like a player creation screen and only lets you pick shirt color, skin color, and hair color.
If you were to try to write a book that included these 10 towns, an editor would quickly slap you silly and tell you that it needs to be three towns, at most. And that instead of being slightly different cookie cutter locations, each town should have a unique personality.
I really wish it was just three more interesting towns. But I am scared of the work it will take to make that change myself.
So I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and I thought I'd reach out to find other people's experiences. Has anyone else struggled with this? When you DM these towns, do you find it they get flushed out and become their own thing? Do you flush them out ahead of sessions, or do you do it impromptu as players are exploring? Or do you just play the towns as-is and find that it works fine?
Given that this is the second time you've made this topic, you obviously feel strongly about it - in which case run RotFM with the ten-towns merged into three towns and don't listen to anything I'm about to say.
For me, doing that would sort of ruin some of the thematic elements - this is a harsh tundra, so settlements are by necessity small and relatively far apart. You are on a harsh frontier, so you shouldn't have access to a metropolis like Waterdeep or Neverwinter where you can buy anything under the sun. It also breaks Chapter 4, which again I think is important to the overall horror theme of the module.
I also think jumping from people are making up cheat sheets to all the towns are cookie cutters is a bit hyperbolic. You get a decent bit of intro text for each settlement, generally explaining (or at least hinting at) why the settlement is there, a description of any notables, and a couple of locations in the settlement. You also get pretty decent maps for all of them, and their associated quests/jobs, which is more than I can say for some modules (looking at you, Out of the Abyss). Remember that most of the ten "towns" barely qualify as villages, so to me it makes sense that a lot of them should be very simple locations.
I do think that the actual towns, Bryn Shander and Easthaven, are maybe a bit light on detail - but I think that is a concious decision by the writers so that people are forced out of the towns fairly quickly, and on to the actual business of the module. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing in some more locations/quests to any of the towns though.
Thanks! I actually forgot that I posted the question here before, apologies. It's less that I feel strongly and more that I have anxiety about remembering all these places while in the hot seat, especially if the party decides to dig into something I don't have prepared.
No worries - sorry if I sounded like the posting police, I wasn't trying to do that.
If it's more being worried about switching between the towns a lot, I think a good way to combat that would be to have a cheat sheet made up with the key info about the town and a mini version of the Icewind Dale region map that's included in the module so you know where they are in relation to each other.
Also, I don't know how you are going to/have been running this module, but I think that RotFM really benefits thematically from taking a strict approach to travel times - don't let the party montage their way from one town to the next, partially to build on the atmosphere of Icewind Dale being a really harsh and isolating landscape, but also because it buys you time to get mentally set up for the town they are heading to.
I know almost nothing about Ten Towns, and very little about FR, but in terms of just general logic...
The way I would handle this if I were trying to DM an area called "Ten Towns" with 10 nearby settlements, and not wanting to flesh them all out and make them all different... I would view Ten Towns as a single region, like a County or a Duchy, and I would detail what the Duchy is like. The Ten Towns would then just be different places in the Duchy, so I would characterize and flesh out the Duchy, rather than the individual towns. I would give each town One Thing that makes it special among the towns.... This town has the main temple to the local deity, whereas the other 9 only have shrines... This town has the large open-air bazaar, whereas the others only have a few shops... This town has the bard college, the others don't... This town has a wizard tower, the others don't... This town is the HQ of the Thieves' Guild... the others just have a few members of the guild as semi-independent operators.... and so forth.
Other than the One Thing, and maybe a randomly generated street map (or one you get, presumably, from the book), each town would be basically the same. I would not try to distinguish them in any significant way, and I would have the people all be relatively similar in terms of culture, traditions, and the like.
I have no idea what the ROTFM book or the FR lore says, but just logically if I were trying to work out ten different towns near each other, that is what I would do. Detail the Region's culture, languages, mores, social rules, what the people are like as a whole, etc., and then make each town that region + One Thing.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Think Icewind Dale as a ski trip to for your party to a winter wonderland. Let's make it a cross country ski trip or snow showing trek (I think the latter is actually encouraged). Ten Towns, while arguably "the protectee" of the game, functionally they're the downtime ski lodge
except for that one event where they're possibly the front line
Ten Towns are the places where the party goes to literally thaw out from the actual adventuring. You can curb any insistence on immersion but simply explaining the party is just too tired and cold to explore the Ten Towns social scene, and if they insist, well it turns out everyone in each town just gathers at the tavern and gets ripped on the local beverage intoxicant ... just like antarctic research stations during the cold months. Keep in mind the long winter has upset Ten Towns society so people are likely affectively and literally bitterly cold and chilly. That's your excuse for allowing some bonds between your party and the people, but minimized.
A flavor hook for you: I did Frozen Sick reskinned to Luskan and the Sea of Moving Ice as a prequel to RotF (party is mostly new players so the two level bump has proven useful. Party consisted of two bards, a barbarian, a rogue and a wizard. Everyone but the wizard has musical skill so the group basically plays as a traveling music and lore act, mostly adventuring to for lore knowledge and exploration (wizard has another agenda, but that's irrelevent). For a bonding joke/immersion I stole the "Ya Ya Ding Dong" gag from the recent Netflix movie Eurovision Song Contest for their first tavern at the Luskan waterfront. The party has this epic act involving dragon lore as well as comments on the state of relations among the humanoid races (one bard's Dragonborn, the other is half-elf) but the waterfront workers only want to hear "Ya Ya Ding Dong". This fanaticism for the song follows them to Ten Towns (the most boisterous fan may be the same person in each locale ... or maybe a clone thing, the party has started asking questions). Feel free to have your party witness this act get coerced in every tavern, maybe they could side quest and discover the nature of "that one guy" who's always there demanding the song.
If you really don't like shifty and "thin" locales, or your party wants to escape the constancy of Ya Ya Ding Dong, you could deposit them among the Reghedmen for some reason, and have the Reghedmen employ them as points of contact / agents for trade between the barbarians and Ten Towns. It'd take a little repotting but basically the Redhedmen become the party's "base" and Ten Towns are simply trading stops, but the PCs could get renown among the Ten Towns by taking up quests as part of their return trip to the Reghedmen. Discussed elsewhere on the forum but would give characters a plausible the option to dip a few levels of Barbarians to see if Rage keeps them warm.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If you were to try to write a book that included these 10 towns, an editor would quickly slap you silly and tell you that it needs to be three towns, at most. And that instead of being slightly different cookie cutter locations, each town should have a unique personality.
The funny thing is (as you’re probably aware), the reason there are Ten Towns is because a number of the Drizzt books are set in Icewind Dale, and that’s what the author came up with. I haven’t read them myself, but maybe they could give you some more depth for the towns.
If you were to try to write a book that included these 10 towns, an editor would quickly slap you silly and tell you that it needs to be three towns, at most. And that instead of being slightly different cookie cutter locations, each town should have a unique personality.
The funny thing is (as you’re probably aware), the reason there are Ten Towns is because a number of the Drizzt books are set in Icewind Dale, and that’s what the author came up with. I haven’t read them myself, but maybe they could give you some more depth for the towns.
They really don't. The Ten Towns were largely just there to provide a place to talk. They're fairly generic.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The D&D Next Legacy of the Crystal Shard module contains a fair bit of info about the Ten Towns that you might like to give the locations more character.
I'm running chapter one of RotFM at the moment, and I'd say that each of the towns is different enough in theme and unique problems to feel distinguishable to players. I think they could benefit from a little embellishment from the DM, but I don't think that you'd need to do a whole homebrew.
As far as your concerns to being unable to keep up with remembering so many different towns, I'd strongly recommend you make sure to make the traveling between towns dangerous with a high chance of encounters. The players should quickly come to find that leaving one town for another is a risky thing not to be done lightly, which oughta keep them in one or two towns per game session. Don't be afraid to ask them where they want to go next at the end of a session too, so you'll have a week or two to prepare and study what is next.
Good luck!
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I'm getting ready to DM RotFM, and something that keeps bothering me is how shallow every town is. The fact that people are posting Excel sheets, with columns like "speaker", "sacrifice type", etc, seems like a symptom of the problem.
You can't have 10 deep, interesting, unique, fully fleshed out towns. It would require the campaign book to be hundreds of pages. So instead each town is a unique combination of just a few possibilities across just a few variables. Sort of like a player creation screen and only lets you pick shirt color, skin color, and hair color.
If you were to try to write a book that included these 10 towns, an editor would quickly slap you silly and tell you that it needs to be three towns, at most. And that instead of being slightly different cookie cutter locations, each town should have a unique personality.
I really wish it was just three more interesting towns. But I am scared of the work it will take to make that change myself.
So I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and I thought I'd reach out to find other people's experiences. Has anyone else struggled with this? When you DM these towns, do you find it they get flushed out and become their own thing? Do you flush them out ahead of sessions, or do you do it impromptu as players are exploring? Or do you just play the towns as-is and find that it works fine?
Given that this is the second time you've made this topic, you obviously feel strongly about it - in which case run RotFM with the ten-towns merged into three towns and don't listen to anything I'm about to say.
For me, doing that would sort of ruin some of the thematic elements - this is a harsh tundra, so settlements are by necessity small and relatively far apart. You are on a harsh frontier, so you shouldn't have access to a metropolis like Waterdeep or Neverwinter where you can buy anything under the sun. It also breaks Chapter 4, which again I think is important to the overall horror theme of the module.
I also think jumping from people are making up cheat sheets to all the towns are cookie cutters is a bit hyperbolic. You get a decent bit of intro text for each settlement, generally explaining (or at least hinting at) why the settlement is there, a description of any notables, and a couple of locations in the settlement. You also get pretty decent maps for all of them, and their associated quests/jobs, which is more than I can say for some modules (looking at you, Out of the Abyss). Remember that most of the ten "towns" barely qualify as villages, so to me it makes sense that a lot of them should be very simple locations.
I do think that the actual towns, Bryn Shander and Easthaven, are maybe a bit light on detail - but I think that is a concious decision by the writers so that people are forced out of the towns fairly quickly, and on to the actual business of the module. There is nothing stopping anyone from writing in some more locations/quests to any of the towns though.
Thanks! I actually forgot that I posted the question here before, apologies. It's less that I feel strongly and more that I have anxiety about remembering all these places while in the hot seat, especially if the party decides to dig into something I don't have prepared.
No worries - sorry if I sounded like the posting police, I wasn't trying to do that.
If it's more being worried about switching between the towns a lot, I think a good way to combat that would be to have a cheat sheet made up with the key info about the town and a mini version of the Icewind Dale region map that's included in the module so you know where they are in relation to each other.
Also, I don't know how you are going to/have been running this module, but I think that RotFM really benefits thematically from taking a strict approach to travel times - don't let the party montage their way from one town to the next, partially to build on the atmosphere of Icewind Dale being a really harsh and isolating landscape, but also because it buys you time to get mentally set up for the town they are heading to.
I know almost nothing about Ten Towns, and very little about FR, but in terms of just general logic...
The way I would handle this if I were trying to DM an area called "Ten Towns" with 10 nearby settlements, and not wanting to flesh them all out and make them all different... I would view Ten Towns as a single region, like a County or a Duchy, and I would detail what the Duchy is like. The Ten Towns would then just be different places in the Duchy, so I would characterize and flesh out the Duchy, rather than the individual towns. I would give each town One Thing that makes it special among the towns.... This town has the main temple to the local deity, whereas the other 9 only have shrines... This town has the large open-air bazaar, whereas the others only have a few shops... This town has the bard college, the others don't... This town has a wizard tower, the others don't... This town is the HQ of the Thieves' Guild... the others just have a few members of the guild as semi-independent operators.... and so forth.
Other than the One Thing, and maybe a randomly generated street map (or one you get, presumably, from the book), each town would be basically the same. I would not try to distinguish them in any significant way, and I would have the people all be relatively similar in terms of culture, traditions, and the like.
I have no idea what the ROTFM book or the FR lore says, but just logically if I were trying to work out ten different towns near each other, that is what I would do. Detail the Region's culture, languages, mores, social rules, what the people are like as a whole, etc., and then make each town that region + One Thing.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Thanks for the great help. I will need the advice about travel times, and I think the One Thing idea sounds great, I'll probably try it.
I also got a great idea elsewhere to prepare NPCs, events, locations, etc that can be dropped into any town.
Think Icewind Dale as a ski trip to for your party to a winter wonderland. Let's make it a cross country ski trip or snow showing trek (I think the latter is actually encouraged). Ten Towns, while arguably "the protectee" of the game, functionally they're the downtime ski lodge
except for that one event where they're possibly the front line
Ten Towns are the places where the party goes to literally thaw out from the actual adventuring. You can curb any insistence on immersion but simply explaining the party is just too tired and cold to explore the Ten Towns social scene, and if they insist, well it turns out everyone in each town just gathers at the tavern and gets ripped on the local beverage intoxicant ... just like antarctic research stations during the cold months. Keep in mind the long winter has upset Ten Towns society so people are likely affectively and literally bitterly cold and chilly. That's your excuse for allowing some bonds between your party and the people, but minimized.
A flavor hook for you: I did Frozen Sick reskinned to Luskan and the Sea of Moving Ice as a prequel to RotF (party is mostly new players so the two level bump has proven useful. Party consisted of two bards, a barbarian, a rogue and a wizard. Everyone but the wizard has musical skill so the group basically plays as a traveling music and lore act, mostly adventuring to for lore knowledge and exploration (wizard has another agenda, but that's irrelevent). For a bonding joke/immersion I stole the "Ya Ya Ding Dong" gag from the recent Netflix movie Eurovision Song Contest for their first tavern at the Luskan waterfront. The party has this epic act involving dragon lore as well as comments on the state of relations among the humanoid races (one bard's Dragonborn, the other is half-elf) but the waterfront workers only want to hear "Ya Ya Ding Dong". This fanaticism for the song follows them to Ten Towns (the most boisterous fan may be the same person in each locale ... or maybe a clone thing, the party has started asking questions). Feel free to have your party witness this act get coerced in every tavern, maybe they could side quest and discover the nature of "that one guy" who's always there demanding the song.
If you really don't like shifty and "thin" locales, or your party wants to escape the constancy of Ya Ya Ding Dong, you could deposit them among the Reghedmen for some reason, and have the Reghedmen employ them as points of contact / agents for trade between the barbarians and Ten Towns. It'd take a little repotting but basically the Redhedmen become the party's "base" and Ten Towns are simply trading stops, but the PCs could get renown among the Ten Towns by taking up quests as part of their return trip to the Reghedmen. Discussed elsewhere on the forum but would give characters a plausible the option to dip a few levels of Barbarians to see if Rage keeps them warm.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The funny thing is (as you’re probably aware), the reason there are Ten Towns is because a number of the Drizzt books are set in Icewind Dale, and that’s what the author came up with. I haven’t read them myself, but maybe they could give you some more depth for the towns.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
They really don't. The Ten Towns were largely just there to provide a place to talk. They're fairly generic.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The D&D Next Legacy of the Crystal Shard module contains a fair bit of info about the Ten Towns that you might like to give the locations more character.
I'm running chapter one of RotFM at the moment, and I'd say that each of the towns is different enough in theme and unique problems to feel distinguishable to players. I think they could benefit from a little embellishment from the DM, but I don't think that you'd need to do a whole homebrew.
As far as your concerns to being unable to keep up with remembering so many different towns, I'd strongly recommend you make sure to make the traveling between towns dangerous with a high chance of encounters. The players should quickly come to find that leaving one town for another is a risky thing not to be done lightly, which oughta keep them in one or two towns per game session. Don't be afraid to ask them where they want to go next at the end of a session too, so you'll have a week or two to prepare and study what is next.
Good luck!