How I Run the Game: It Takes a Village
In my last post, I provided a high-level walkthrough of my Cult of the Morach campaign and the lessons I learned from running it. In this post, I wanted to discuss how I handled a key aspect of the module: the town it revolves around. (Light spoilers to follow.)
To recap, Morach focuses on a conspiracy carried out by cultists infiltrating Hagsbuck, a once serene fishing village on the edge of a dark forest. The module is part small town mystery and part dungeon crawl.
Characters in Morach will probably spend a lot of time in Hagsbuck, talking to NPCs and scrounging for clues. My players spent roughly four out of our eight sessions dealing with matters in town, with the rest spent exploring the nearby wilderness or dungeons.
Hagsbuck isn’t small: there are 19 locations within the town, two nearby, and a cast of named NPCs roughly a dozen strong. Most areas contain clues or at least some indication of the strange things underway in the village, with one location doubling as a small dungeon.
Setting the scene
I wanted to make sure my players started off with a decent sense of the town and how it all fit together, and while the map included in the book is great, I didn’t want to rely solely on those visuals to convey a coherent sense of place.
My solution was to introduce it with what amounted to a narrated tour. The PCs rode into town from the southeast (the bottom left corner of the map) with instructions from the merchants who had hired them to to consult with the local lord at the manor house at the far end of town (Area 18).
Tracing the main road brought them past a shrine to local gods with notable scorch marks surrounding it (Area 1) and a building used to house caravan workers and their horses in the trading season (Area 3). While giving the building a look, an NPC who introduced herself as village headwoman Reeba Uln darted out of her cottage (Area 4) to figure out what they were doing in town. (She also explained that she was in charge of maintaining that building, among other things.)
After Uln left, the players continued on, making their way past the cozy inn (Area 5) and the burnt-out ruins of a brewery (Area 12). When they arrived at the manor house, they learned that the local lord had disappeared after heading into the woods a few days prior to investigate something strange — and that since then, the men-at-arms garrisoning the manor had repelled attempts by strange creatures to scale the walls. From there, the PCs were turned loose to investigate, armed with the map and a newfound sense of place.
Local color
Like I mentioned before, the town has a lot of named NPCs. In addition to the dodgy headwoman they met in Area 3, there’s the innkeeper with the checkered past, the baker who saw the brewery burn down, the crotchety sergeant left in charge of the manor in his lord’s absence, and many others.
Getting this many characters to stand out is hard, and I don’t know how well I conveyed each of them individually. But the trick I found for getting them to gel as a town is to provide characters with reputations and histories that other NPCs acknowledge and talk about.
No one likes the headwoman because she’s a jerk and pretty useless around town. Everyone thinks the wizard in his weird little tower (Area 14) is up to something. The herbalist knows all about those creepy ruins you want to check out.
The adventure comes with a rumor table that contained some leads the players had already uncovered by the time I rolled on it, but the rumors helped prompt me to recognize what kind of town Hagsbuck is: it’s small, everyone knows each other, and everyone loves to talk shit about everyone else.
All of these details about the town and its inhabitants came together at the end of Session 2, when monsters that had been hiding out in Area 3 decided to abduct some villagers in broad daylight. The PCs figured out where they went, broke in, beat the crap out of the monsters, and then pointed out only one person would have the key to the building — the village headwoman. And when they called her out and she asked the other villagers to stand by her, they remembered her reputation and what they knew about her, and they turned their backs on her.
At the end of that session, one of my players said that his highlight was how the village felt like a village —and I think the key to that was setting the scene and giving the NPCs lots of opinions about each other.