In many game campaigns, visits to such communities and the essential places within them are often given short shrift, and dispensed with in the most perfunctory way. Not every visit to such non-adventuring venues needs to be played out, of course, and it is perfectly appropriate that many not be. Periodically roleplaying visits to various essential places, however, can serve a number of useful functions.

Communities of various sorts often serve as the starting and ending points for all sorts of ventures, and uncounted parties of adventurers have begun and ended their quests in the marketplaces and taverns of the villages, towns, and cities of the game world. Communities themselves can also serve as locales for exploits of all sorts, especially those involving skill use and roleplaying rather than battle, with encounters and characters much different than those typical of the usually more-dangerous wilderness and dungeon environments. Even campaigns encompassing long overland travels or voyages at sea will likely involve occasional stops at settlements or ports to obtain supplies and services beyond what characters in a party can carry or provide for themselves.

Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes a campaign from an unrelated series of dungeon crawls can be the downtime between adventures. Many parties will return again and again to a well-established base of operations, a place where the adventurers can heal up, resupply, and train. Providing a detailed community in which to perform these tasks establishes a sense of continuity, provides a stronger rationale for player characters’ progression in competence and ability, and helps tie together adventures into a cohesive whole. Game-world communities are, unfortunately, often not as interesting or unique as they could be, and the intent behind this book is to provide Game Masters with a resource for making the communities in their worlds more plausible, memorable, and exciting.

Visits to places that have been given interesting details and added dimensions can reinforce the feeling that the characters live in a real, vital, interconnected world. This will seem especially true if various fundamental places and the people associated with them are affected by the same sorts of factors present in the milieu as the player characters are.

Finally, Game Masters can often use communities and the relevant places within them both as locales where player characters might meet non-player characters who might be useful to them or otherwise influence their fates, and as opportunities to insert adventure hooks of various sorts.

Chapter 1: Communities discusses villages, towns, cities, and other locales and covers such things as types of communities, regional and racial influences on them, and the sorts of calamities that can affect them and their inhabitants. This chapter’s section on “Physical Characteristics of Cities” contains some material derived from Wizards of the Coast’s v.3.5 System Reference Document, which is used under the terms of the Open Gaming License. Content in each of the other 10 chapters in this book is completely new and original.

Chapter 2: Craftsman Places explores the locations associated with people who make things and to which characters must frequently go when they need to purchase or commission armor, weapons, clothing, and any other kinds of custom-made or special items. Places it covers in detail include Armories, Arsenals, Blacksmithies, Carpenters, Clothiers, Glassmakers, Jewelry Shops, Leatherworkers, Sculptors, and Stonemasons.

Chapter 3: Entertainment Places visits the locales to which people in the game milieu may go for leisure and recreation. Specific places of this sort that it covers include Carnivals, Menageries, Museums, Parks, Racetracks, and Theaters.