Much like my Ring Map method is a nice fallback to generate a hexmap area, sometimes you want something smaller than that, and that’s what this Down the Road tool is for. You have a band of adventuring types, going to different places, and helping people or treasure hunting or whatever it is.
It can work for fantasy or sci-fi depending on how you want to scale it, but it assumes about 3 communities in a proximate area, and some kind of adventure/combat problem, which could be a dungeon, an abandoned space station spewing combat drones or whatever.
Two Towns
First come up with two towns or communities that live a distance away. They know of each other and you can decide if they are distantly friendly, neutral, cool, or hostile to each other. Each town or community is just large enough to get by and maybe make a little profit – they’re not really in a situation to be able to conclusively solve any problem or danger; they might have enough to fend off pirates, but not enough to get rid of them for good, for example.
There’s a good chance that people have distant connections between the two, and that sets up very different problems depending on if those two towns are friendly or hostile. They’re not tight enough to be in full alliance so this kind of thing is the exception and not the norm.
You can get into detail about the towns and NPCs later, after you get everything else put together.
One Settlement
There is one settlement that is smaller than the two towns, and socially distinct. This may be people who are from outside the region (“Miners from the capital started a camp up in the hills”) or it could be a socially ostracized group (“Those are the Bird Talkers. They have a weird religion.”) etc. Relations are cool between the settlement and either one or both towns but there’s probably some minimal trade going on.
Figure out if there’s a power dynamic, and whether the settlement has more, or less than the towns, and a general idea on how they see things differently. This is an easy place to put a second source of drama and conflict.
One Problem
There’s one problem in the region that’s pretty well known. A dungeon, a band of bandits, whatever.
This is the Big Problem for this small arc in your campaign or game. This problem is either fairly recent or became less manageable only recently. This means that no one is really well set up to handle it or work around it. The most affected communities may be in the midst of heated debate about what to do, or some might be minimizing the problem while others suffer from it.
Note that while I say “big problem” it doesn’t need to be epic. In a fantasy game, a single giant in a small valley might be a disaster by itself. Or a weird alien ship is blocking a warp gate and no one can get them to move, or whatever. It’s a big problem for the region and you can keep that local or scale it depending on what kind of game you’re running.
One Mystery
There’s some weird thing going on in a different local area. It’s rumors, or weird stuff, and you can basically drop in whatever. “People swear they keep seeing a ghost along the Forest Road”. “3 ships lost all their data records of language going through this sector”, etc. You can make the mystery a threat, an opportunity, an NPC, or even tie it to the One Problem or some other issue tied to one of the communities, but don’t have it overshadow the One Problem.
Fun Stuff
- If your game deals with supplies and gear, it helps to have the different towns and the settlement each have different things they can offer or specialize in.
- If it’s plausible, drop in some contacts or connections to any of the PCs in one of these places. If it’s not a local who lives here, maybe another person they know in in the region for other reasons.
- Do the PCs already have a reputation? Has that reputation come across differently to the different communities? Does that impact how they are treated?
- Each community has at least one person who is trying to get over on self interest, one old grumpy person who knows a thing that is very useful but no one listened, someone with little social power who has seen something or found something helpful, and one person who is influential whose only goal is to keep tradition, routine and status quo the same.
- There’s also likely allies in any given community who might be recruited to help. This depends on your setting and game expectations if they’re mercenary hirelings or if they get won over by some deeds or whatever.
Anyway, the thing I like about this is that it’s a very easy tool to jam together a short run campaign or if you have some kind of module you can drop it in with this and build out from there. You can get the outline on a single page just from ideas, and then get into whatever specifics you need later.
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