How to Develop Places of Interest in a Setting

Good tabletop game writing answers all of the interrogatives: who, what, when, where, why, and the elusive how. Games are almost always clear about who (the players and the featured NPCS), the what (the quest), and the why (the reason behind the quest). Players themselves provide the how--it's the method they choose for progressing. The when is rarely a real question--it's answered by the context of the campaign and usually not given much thought. But the where! The where is a question that usually gets relegated to a secondary concern. It doesn't have to be, though. With a little bit of work, you can turn the places in a campaign into integral and interesting elements of the game. I call these developed locations "places of interest," parts of the game that double as settings and characters in their own right (a character in the sense that New York is kind of a character in movies about New York). Read on for a guide on how to develop a place of interest (or several) for your campaign. 

A word about the inspiration for this guide: recently, I created a tabletop game involving time travel and historical settings. When designing the game, I began with the where. I chose places (and times, but the time was informed by the place), and my first step in filling out the game was to create places. People came afterward, as did motivations and timelines. The individual locations in each place came to be not just significant locations in and of themselves, but also anchors that kept the places alive. So I want to apply that design to other tabletop games, and the guide below will show you how to do so. 

The first step in designing a place of interest can vary. Personally, I recommend beginning with a purpose. You may derive this purpose from a narrative concern--you need a place for the BBEG to hide out, or a place for the player characters to make a discovery, or a place that is chaotic and filled with people for a dramatic reveal. Or you might pick a place that serves a function in the community it's a part of--it serves a common utilitarian purpose, or it expresses something unique about the place it's in, or it is a regular hangout place for a particular faction of people. Any of these options are good starting points, and other ideas not listed here will, work too. What matters is that you have a grain of meaning to begin with that you can spin into a pearl. 

Once you have your purpose in mind, it's time to select a place that suits it. For the purposes of this guide, I'll complete each step with an example. Per this example, our developed place of interest will both express something unique about the place it's in and be a faction hangout. The unique aspect of the community it represents is that the town is built across a river, and rather than build a bridge, the city has planted a massive tree in the center of the river and strategically cut it as it grew--now there is a bridge across the river formed by the trunk of this tree, which has been cut into in its branches to create homes and businesses. So this tree is the center of the city and one of the more prestigious places to live and work. It also serves as a faction hangout. The most elite merchants who have businesses in this tree have formed something of an alliance to keep competing businesses out of the tree. They also want to grow the city around it at large, so they fund business ventures in the surrounding city. Although there is official governmental authority in the city, the real seat of power is these businesspeople. 

We can add a name to the place at any point in the process, so I'll pick one now. I want it to reflect the natural profile of the tree but also the power that it holds. For bonus points, something that reflects its purpose as a bridge would be good too. I'm going to go with "Great Oakbridge," which is good enough for my purposes in illustrating the process. 

The next step is in filling out the other functions of the place. Great Oakbridge acts as bridge, apartment, business complex, and base of operations for the elite merchants. But how does everyday life progress there? We know that because the location acts as a bridge, there are a good number of people who pass through every day. This could create safety concerns for residents, so I will add that there are only businesses on the bridge-level of the tree; in order to access the houses built into it, people must climb a staircase which spirals around the tree as it ascends. This trend should bear out as the tree's heights are reached; almost all the businesses are lower on the tree to make them easier to get to. Thus, the tree is divided more or less in half--businesses below and homes above. The most wealthy and elite of the merchants on the tree also have homes higher up, and the higher the home, the more prestigious. 

We also know that the elite merchants use the tree as a base of operations. But real estate on the tree is precious, and a dedicated space for meetings would be impractical. (Other residents of the city might also complain that livable space is dedicated to being empty most of the time.) So we can determine that the meetings take place in the personal spaces of the elite merchants. Let's say that these merchants take turns hosting the others in their respective businesses for the meetings. Obviously, this would not happen during business hours, so these meetings must happen either very early in the morning or later at night. I want these merchants to be industrious, and an early morning meeting feels more in line with that vibe, so we'll say that the first few floors of Great Oakbridge are alight with activity early in the morning before the first shoppers are out and about. 

Now that we know about the place a bit, it's time to attribute some characters to it. You might take an NPC or two who would fit the place and add them, and you can also create characters to fill the place out. I recommend a mixture of both. For the purposes of this example, let's create a few characters: 

• Violet Higgins - One of the elite merchants vying for control of the merchant group, she owns a business that sells common goods in a kind of expanded general store. Because she has irons in so many different fires, she is one of the more active members of the group, pushing for general business rights. She is aggressive in terms of business strategy and is in a bit of a rivalry with Gregory Illinel, a producer of finished goods. 
• Gregory Illinel - A new addition to the elite merchant group, he oversees several small companies which create specialized goods and resells them to merchants. Illinel is regarded by the other elite merchants as something of an outsider--he is the only one in the group to be primarily involved in resale rather than engaging in vertical integration like the others. He is somewhere cautious, and he regards the rest of the elite merchant group as potential assets he needs to convince of his value. 
• Janice Hornblower - The only artisan to be a part of the elite merchant group, she creates the city's finest metal goods. As the expert smith in the city, she has gained a following from adventurers for her high quality work. She has recently organized a form of apprenticing, charging for her tutelage--many of the regions best smiths trained under her. She represents the interests of labor, and is often outvoted by the other merchants. 

Already from these three characters, we get plenty of story opportunities. Violet Higgins can be used as something of a nemesis as she makes business interests more powerful than individual people; she might also be a strong ally if the party is looking to establish their own business. Gregory Illinel might provide quests to work with individual craftspeople; he might also be empowered to help growing businesses in the city over established businesses. The rivalry between the two could be ripe for a story about a power struggle amongst the city's most powerful people. Janice Hornblower could be the heart of a story about empowering laborers and craftspeople; she might be the center of a quest to change the business strategies in the city at large. These are just possibilities, and there will be more if we look closer. The important thing to recognize, though, is that these personalities came out of the place we built. 

We might then expand. We can do so in a number of ways. We could expand from the place: if the city in question has this combination bridge/apartment/shopping center, what other places would be necessary to serve the city. We still have lots of roles to fill: religious centers, governmental centers, cultural sites, and many more. We might make an individualized version of each of there: a temple that caters to all the good-aligned deities with considerable freedom of worship, a modest mayor's office that is overwhelmed by public demands for action, a formidable library of literature and philosophy from every culture. These places add complexity to the city and make it seem like a living place. 

We could also expand from the people: where else might Violet Higgins spend her time? Certainly she would check in on her various business concerns--we can develop those. She regularly visits creators of rope, textiles, and clothing at one location (a textile factory run by local laborers); she works with a shipping company (perhaps her own) to ensure timely deliveries (Higgins Deliveries is dedicated to transporting only her wares); she checks in at the city temple in order to reach out to the city's underprivileged with offers of work (she considers it good business practice to hire people who are formally aligned with good behavior). We might do the same for the other two people, following these steps for each place. 

And then we might expand from considering the opposite of what we've crafted so far. If the city has a good-aligned temple, a modest mayor's office, and a formidable library, what else might they have? Perhaps the less-than-good residents of the city have their own temple for evil-aligned deities, and it is carefully hidden away from the public. Maybe the mayor is not really the most powerful person in town, and the former mayor (now retired but not uninvolved in the city's progress) has been pulling the strings unseen. Mayhaps the library is so high-minded that common people have little use for it, instead preferring a local book collector's array of practical texts. Now we can develop these places further, and the result will be a complex mixture of places that represent all walks of life. 

The opposite approach also works for people. Let's consider Janice Hornblower. Her opposite is someone who works hard but hasn't broken through to success, someone who is more focused on their community than on themselves. They are not an expert like her, but they do have considerable skills in organizing people. Perhaps as Janice Hornblower uses her business expertise to advocate somewhat for laborers, our foil to her is a labor organizer who doesn't feel she works hard enough for common people. Now, Janice Hornblower is caught in a bind between the labor organizer and the other elite merchants, forcing her to pick a side. 

The best thing about the opposite approach is automatic conflict. In the examples from expanding based on place, we see that immediately, the good-aligned temple is in conflict with the evil-aligned temple. Similarly, the mayor and former mayor are locked in a struggle, as are the libraries of high knowledge and practical knowledge. One thing I have learned concretely about running games is that players pick up on conflict and almost always insert themselves into it. But creating places and people that oppose each other, we not only represent more than one side of a story, but we also give the players opportunities to assert themselves in the gameworld. 

In the end, your developed place should include what happens there (both in terms of its intended purpose and what people actually use it for), who frequents the location, and a counterpart to it (usually an opposite like we built, and sometimes a shade of grey when the story calls for it). What matters is that you have a complete sense of the place. And you want to communicate as much of this to your players as is reasonable. You don't want to drown the players in information, but you definitely want them to have more than a name to go off of. 

As your players explore your world, they'll begin to notice that places in your campaign are more than just a scene for the drama to unfold. This in turn leads them to investigate locations more completely, and you as a GM will be in a position to depict the other locations in your game more fully. And of course, remember to include the details you brainstorm. I for one am guilty of occasionally coming up with all manner of interesting detail and then neglecting to share all of that information with the players. It's in my head, so they must get it too, right? I wish that were the case. You can get away with more description of places than other elements of the game, so really show your players what a place is like. 

The amount of work you need to put into the overall process depends on your goals. For a small settlement that won't be a major part of the campaign, I recommend developing at least 3 places of interest. For a mid-size city that will be visited a few times, at least 5 places of interest should do it. But if you're going to base a whole campaign in one city (as I have before, and as I do in the game that inspired this guide), you want to get very granular. In my custom TTRPG, I developed 12 places of interest for each setting. That's quite a lot, and I don't think you need to go into that level of detail for any campaign. But I will say this: the more you know about a place, and the more complex and varied that place is, the richer it is as a setting for both you and your players. Think about it like sightseeing: would you rather go to a city which boasts 3 interesting places, or one that claims over 10? Give your players cause to get excited about exploring!

That's all for now. Coming soon: a one-shot based on the movie Snakes on a Plane, the value of reviewing last session's events, and a profile on music in my homebrew setting. Until next time, happy gaming!

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