Question! Our goblins are about to have an adventure in the ville of another group of goblins. Any experience prepping such a thing? Pitfalls to avoid? The reason they're here is to try to find someone actually good at cookery to import that skill into Goblinville. My current plan is to prep like I normally would prep a "dungeon in a town", namely, NPCs who would want things from the PCs and larger-scale town issues that simply exist and see what happens. There are two resource bits I'm not clear how to rule, though: what should I do re: gaining and spending scratch? and what should I do re: letting the PCs use this other town's "available locations"?
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Uncharted territory! We are working on an adventure-in-town, but it we don't have finalized procedures for it. So these are suggestions/ ideas rather than any kind of official process.
- Clearly split adventure/ town phases. Goblins must spend a ration or a scratch to enter town phase. They can then use a single town location or camp action.
- During the adventure phase, run marching order as usual and see what happens with the "NPCs who would want things from the PCs and larger-scale town issues".
- Put the large scale issues on a clear clock. What's the worst case scenario with whatever plots or crises are present? Work toward that in a concrete way at the end of each turn.
Result: higher ev, higher variance than a standard dungeon. Another goblin area is quite the resource at stake, and getting on their bad side might mean certain death. But they're intelligent beings with a lot in common, so I'd expect by default PCs can do very well here.
My prep was:
1. Define the necessary town elements. The PCs had established that this other goblin settlement had a profusion of cooks and a mine. Choose its size. I chose smaller than Goblinville but with the same number of starting elements. Roll the other elements. I chose to reroll duplicates so it was completely distinct from Goblinville, and ended up with a sawmill and barracks. We already knew the hex was primarily mountainous, so I put the new town in a forest on a mountain with a mine in the mountain and gave it a backstory that a wiped out warband settled here.
2. Set up three big problems, write names for the obvious NPCs (a big boss, a boss for each town element, an extra cook, and an NPC to showcase each of the big problems if none obviously already did). Give each NPC a one word personality and write their relationship to the big problems and what I know the PCs are coming here for.
Edit: also a dead simple map just so I could describe locations consistently.
3. Take your suggestion of 1 ration to enter town phase and use a town element; camp is normal; no progression on major events by default because that's too coincidental, not everything is Going Down exactly when PCs arrive. Instead just play the NPCs.
Things worked out pretty well... getting what they wanted wasn't a pushover, though aborting at most points would have been easier than when deep in a dungeon. But they were poisoning folks and framing them and causing trouble all on their own, plenty of Danger to be had.