Give Towns Character

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Albertville, Alabama is known as “The Fire Hydrant Capital of the World”.  Colma, California is referred to as “The City of the Silent” due to a great deal of the land being dedicated to cemeteries.  Benham, Kentucky proclaims itself “The Little Town That International Harvester, Coal Miners, and Their Families Built”.  The people in these places took pride in their town or city’s history.  They embraced their uniqueness and proclaimed it to the rest of the world in an effort to stand out and hopefully attract new residents and new businesses.  Just a few minutes on the website Roadside America will prove that people are always looking for ways to stand out from each other.  So if you think that only characters can be quirky then you are missing out on a great way to set the scene for your players/readers!

What do you think would be more memorable, a town whose name only the DM seems to be able to pronounce or a town whose every resident has a stone statue of them standing outside their house?  Would you remember a huge sprawling city or a huge sprawling city with mirrored fountains that marked every cross-road?  Would you be more interested in exploring a city that boasted “the best mead and feed in all of Pheh” or one called “Brownsville”?  Giving your towns, cities, and villages a unique identifying quirk is a great way to bring even more depth to your story’s landscape.

As noted before, many towns and villages take a great deal of pride in what they can produce, build, or create but they would also take pride in the fun aspects of their town.  Perhaps a giant was killed on the grounds the town was built on and every year they have a festival that re-enacts that event.  News of this festival spreads to nearby towns and like any game of “telephone” the story becomes more and more convoluted until eventually the town is known as the “giant slayers” or that it’s infested with giants (and now the town uses that as means of defense against raiders), or some other giant related misinterpretation.  Maybe they constructed a huge statue, or walk on stilts to fight enemies, or who knows what else!  Maybe your party of adventurers hear this rumor of a giant infestation and go to have a peek thinking they might do a good deed only to find a quirky little town obsessed with selling the idea of the elusive giants in the area (think “bigfoot”).

Giving a town or city a rich history that is reflected in it’s current daily life is a good way to make your world more real and more interesting.  It can provide for festivals at any time of the year (“come celebrate the fall of the giants on the twelfth day of Sunders Moon”); as well as explain any unusual occurrence in the area (such as a potion shop in a tiny town that wouldn’t normally have anyone schooled in such arts now does because it’s “The Home of the Roaming Mushrooms” and provides an unusual assortment of magical mushrooms in the area).

Though I highly recommend using a bit of caution if you sell it as a “roadside attraction” with a barker and carnival-like feel.  That might work in a big city type setting but small towns and villages who are out of the way would be less inclined to have a salesman at the ready on his box shouting to the distant woods for people to “step right up”…or would they?  You never know, perhaps the entire town is under the delusion that they are a traveling circus or in a big city.

Also, though the occasional “town under a spell” trope can be fun, it gets played out quickly.  It’s also interesting for return visits when the quirky town is still as odd as ever and can often make the townsfolk more endearing to your players/readers.

Lastly, it’s a good idea to make note of these quirks for when you are creating a map.  If the town is “The Home of Roaming Mushrooms” and yet there’s no fields/woods in which they grow within the town then this becomes a bit of a plot hole.  You’ll need to set aside an area that would allow a large assortment of mushrooms to grow and that the town goes out of their way to protect (as it makes them unique).  You can use the landscape to help make identifying quirks (“The Land of the Red Mountain”) and that will lend to the names of those areas on your map as well as help shape the local dialect.