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Hey, you guys have mentioned it on and off but could you make an episode all about Curse of Strahd and horror since no one has made a good video on how to go through the book or improving the story. Heavily biased, DMing a 9man party and the book just can't challenge that till I rewrite everything.
Hey guys, I know $2 patrons are supposed to do episode ideas but I can't spend the extra money until I find a new job, so is there any chance you could talk about suicide dice and other odd ball stat rolling methods? I'd love to see it, and thanks for the great content
Hi! We answer Patron questions for some specific short videos, but we take suggestions anywhere and everywhere! Thanks for asking! Here's an older video on rolling stats. May not be exactly what you're looking for, but it covers what we have experience with. ruclips.net/video/a4NQPjR76P8/видео.html
So, I'm the type of DM who doesn't mind taking ideas and inspiration from other sources and putting them in my game, and I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm probably going to steal every town, city, and settlement you just described and plant them in my game lol you guys are pure genius, and your videos are always so densely packed with information. I love it.
I think a lot of these definitely need that revision process that they mentioned early on. The city where no one dies for example, why did they decide to test various forms of killing, by killing a bunch of different people? Why not just kill one guy (probably someone that no one likes, like a criminal) in a hundred different ways?
some fights/madness are going to break out if your alive forever and can't leave, after its established they can't die most of the mutilations would be for sadistic cruelty moreso then anything else
An idea I have for my homebrew setting is a city that is very like Venice, with its canals and gondolas and ornate architecture. Except, because it's also home to Tritons and Merfolk and Sahagan and other aquatic races, there's a lot more going on _below_ the water line than actual Venice. You can walk down a set of stairs into the water, and the city just keeps going down, with vibrant activity going on. It's a rich city - the center of a vast and lucrative trade network - so it's flush with magic items and wizard colleges. Any random air-breathing citizen could _happen_ to own a Cap of Water Breathing or other such item, so they can go below the water and do business. Not to mention those water-breathers who are amphibious, so they can pop up to the air levels to do _their_ business. Not to mention that vast trade network means the city is cosmopolitan, and full of people and goods from distant lands. Much larger than actual Venice, because the aquatic inhabitants can build out farther into the water than the land-bound people could. And they construct their buildings tall enough that they breach the surface, and can be built up from. So it's an ever-expanding metropolis. Like Venice, the city is run by a council of business leaders. Half of them are aquatic folk, so the center of their government - the Palace of Pools - incorporates water into the basic features of its meeting halls. Because you don't want the Tritons or Merfolk getting dried out; gotta have easy access to places they can hang out and moisture up. Many buildings in the city have such features, really, to accommodate water-bound citizens and customers. The local tavern (one of the hundreds thereof) the PCs visit might be half underwater, with retaining walls with flat surfaces on top that divide watered and dry spots, so patrons can freely mingle. And it might have a siren in the corner, singing a low-key magical melody to sooth the atmosphere. I also like the idea that this city has a major bank in it, and the bank is owned by a Bronze dragon. Whether the owner is _openly_ a dragon, or it's a secret, or it's an open secret, I don't know. I just love the idea that the bronze dragon flies over the city or swims beneath it, or polymorphs himself into humanoid form so he can attend sessions of the city government. Maybe another member of the council of merchants is a water genie from the Elemental Plane of Water. For conflicts, nothing seems more appropriate than an Aboleth trying to gain a "foothold" in the city, hiding in the sunken areas of the city and plotting how to take it over.
The idea of a city that looks like a small cluster of islands and canals but is actually just the tip of huge spires and castles and skyscrapers is so cool
Check out the first in the "Gentlemen Bastard" serious of books, The Lies of Locke Lamora. The city of Cammor is a lot like this, minus the aquatic races.
I was running a campaign for younger kids where I had a town who's commerce was 100 percent story based, you had to tell a story to earn your supper and boarding, I used it to get the kids to be more into roleplay
I think I recall previous episodes where they actually show "outtakes" of gags that didn't make it usually because they both started laughing mid take. The outtakes weren't just bloopers of the same line, but entirely different gags for the same video. So aside from the confirmation above there's actually some proof to back up you suspicion
I love watching your video, but this video, and some others, really stand out and are very helpful as a DM. The questions that you pose and the list of ideas are massively helpful. You make it easy to be a patron. Thank you.
Unfortunately, the Terrasque has the ability earth glide which would make building a city impossible. And the end result of the city crashing down to the ground when the Terrasque dives in the earth would not be a pretty site.
@@garrettwilson8471 use it to build a fortress somewhere with plenty of resources, use the terrasque to move it and "plant" the fortress where you want.
I made a city that had an aboleth as its ruler, since it essentially had infinite knowledge. People would try to get some form of unique information that the aboleth didn't know, and if it was something that it didn't know, the person would be eaten (since the city's religion was that only those eaten by the aboleth were able to go to heaven essentially).
If I may add to the concept: What if the brains of those eaten by the aboleth end up in organic vats within it? These vats would run simulations, in which the consumed individuals live their personalized afterlives.
Perhaps a city in a cold climate has a bound and captive dragon or giant fire elemental in the centre, and the city radiates out with the warmth. The inner rim is the "old town" and has big fancy houses occupied by the nobility and merchants, while the outer rim is the workers and the poor in more solid houses. You can even make a plot point: the dragon breaks out or is freed, but the dragon turns out to be like Alexstrasza, an intelligent and gentle creature who was forced into captivity. Do the party drag her back to the city in irons and deprive a good creature of her freedom, or do they let her go free but possibly doom a city full of people in the process?
That may not be possible if she is convinced she will be harmed or mistreated if she goes back. After all, she did trash the place on her way out. But I'm just bouncing an idea. I've also played with a city that was full of undead, but there were two factions who constantly fought and killed each other and then were resurrected back.
Something I'm going to be implementing to make locations more memorable is mundane oddities that happen. I got this idea after listening to Tales from the Gas station. The party is walking through a forest and sees a garden gnome on a branch of a tree. They think it's weird and keep walking. More gnomes turn up along the path, but they literally mean nothing. When they ask at the forest village what's up with the gnomes, they are told "oh yeah. Don't worry about those. They turn up every now and then. Don't touch the ones with green hard though, they bite." Once again, there is no bigger story. It's just a thing that happens around here. Like Jim mentioned about a place where any animal might be a familiar, you could take a leaf out of The cats of ulthar and have all cats be conscious, sentient creatures who act as the guards and royalty of the city. Also if you've played Sunless Sea, do something like anthropomorphic apes be the citizens of a town. Everyone treats it as normal, but the players will be like "woah okay this is a thing."
I've started for my game a homebrew setting, that basically runs as what if Athas had Eberron's magical technology. Where instead of despotic Dragonkings, cabals of mages dedicated to the advancement of magic, and thusly the survival of civilized races, had formed and took over. I started with simple ideas, like having nine countries ran by different magocracies, each one based around an alignment, and, like you suggested, I kept adding layers of logic to each idea to get how one country would affect the world. It forms a more "modern" fantasy than most aim for, as in general we try to escape the modern, though, actually, due to concepts like Warforged, Teleportation, and even simple magics like Cure Wound or Goodberry it touches on being more slightly futuristic fantasy. I admit I've taken ideas from other medias: the 'lawful evil' country is heavily based around the Coalition from Rifts, and I have a Warforged Wizard king that utilizes a modified Clone spell to ensure that he is never permanently assassinated, a la Dr. Doom, from Marvel.
I love Web DM you guys put out the most helpful content. If you guys ever come to England you are always welcome at my table. Keep up the great world guys!
I love the idea of big scary monsters as a ruling class in my campaign i wanted it super high fantasy and high magic so I made the continent ruled by a council and the heads of the council are ancient metallic dragons that made a deal with buhammat to advise the mortal peoples of the realm and are unable to interfere directly.
It's not too outlandish but I've always liked Lankhmar a lot. The street names appeal to me like Cheap Street, and the Street of the Gods. Those Mike Mignola illustrated comics for the stories have a lot to do with my appreciation for it, and of course the original stories are terrific too.
Kahlyl Roberson I was thinking something subtler, like the food they get there is also an illusion (like the creation spell). Like, they feel full immediately after eating it, but the next morning they're hungry like they didn't eat, and have to make a Constitution save to avoid a level of exhaustion. If that prompts someone to cast Detect Magic, everything (including the people) show up as illusion. And everyone showing up as illusion in range stops what they're doing and staring at the caster until the spell is dropped. For added creepiness, maniacal smiles slowly spread across their faces
I appreciate the shoutout to my Inuit cousins up North but just an FYI: "Eskimo" is largely considered offensive, and many Indigenous people (esp. in what is now Canada) consider it a slur
The whole bubble city idea Jim brings up would make an interesting inter-planar settlement where the bubbles are amorphous demi-planes that are in some kind of planar lava lamp. Like, someone/something powerful created a utopian society inside this demi-plane, but they died or lost their power and the demi-plane is now unstable and scattered, and now the disparate "bubbles" float around and only occasionally collide. Maybe there is some kind of effort to fix it, but the people keep being separated and it's messing up their attempts to stabilize the plane. I dunno. That's what I thought of.
I just thought of an idea for a slightly underwater city a coral reef where bubbles stream up constantly and devices siphon off the air but the higher it floats up the less air is left so the people living in the higher stacks get less air
Definitely has nice potential for D&D. The locations essentially being time gated on their accessibility can create narrative tension, and move/force things forward or into action. One of those "bubbles" can also have more resources (another source of tension) so every time there's an overlap in the bubbles there could be fighting over valuable commodities only available in said "bubble". Cool idea.
Ahhh... aqueducts. My yuan ti haunted Omu must have these. Remaining ruins of such aqueducts can serve as pathways for the tree bound locals and a great ambush perch.
I think it would be interesting to do a video ( and dm a game) on an ecumenopolis since most adventures take you from City to Forest to dungeon, I've always wondered how someone would handle a high fantasy low technologically medieval fantasy coruscant basically.
In my world there’s a dwarven city suspended above a volcano where the lava is a portal to the plane of fire and these dwarves forge the rare metal starsteel which has a melting point of 100,000,000,000,000,000°
Gives the user the a bonus 20 feet of movement and if they use it they get a charge attack with advantage (basically Deadpool’s negasonic teenage warheads powers but with 19 AC
an ice drangon keeps the suspended volcano city cool. but the dragon is imprisoned, so it won’t escape. will they (the party) free the good dragon ...or search to get the precious starsteel to craft magic weopons to slay the crazy wizard-demon that has cast a undead spell on their home city....
I always thought that a polar campaign on a world that had been subjected to massive climactic changes in the unimaginably distant past would be interesting. You’d still have the midnight sun and the polar night, but in a more or less temperate environment. If you moved too far north or south you’d end up in a place where agriculture was difficult or impossible, inhabited by nomads. If you kept going you’d come to an almost impassable band of desert circling the equator, and the whole area would be dotted with artifacts of dead civilizations, giving it an almost ancient-Egyptian vibe.
Great ideas and points here. I very much like Jim's approach of, "Okay, it's a normal village except for these three things." One thing people might want to look at for this is the game Numenera. Or pretty much anything by Monte Cook (his "Arcana Unearthed" for 3e is also pretty good). The guy's just a master of weird shit. One city in Numenera is built on - and sometimes in - the pipes of some ancient machine. Another is built atop a kind of inverted mountain. A "City of Bridges" built over the water. A city built into the walls of a massive chasm. A rotting nightmare of a city built in the lightless depths of another chasm. I'm probably not going to _run_ Numenera anytime soon. But I have _no shame whatsoever_ in stealing the ideas within it.
Disclaimer: Had to watch again from the beginning because the sink faucet was too loud while I was doing dishes. I have this somewhat Waterdeep-like city which supports a corrupt cycle of crime syndicate politics, essentially having various Zhentarim-like factions. The province's shady governor lives in a manor within the city, named after his family's surname. Underneath is a sewer system which has its own ecosystem, with some areas having an economy in addition. Under the sewers is an Underdark of sorts, with the drow pushed down even further into the depths due to dwarves and rock gnomes banding together to make flintlock firearms and firearms of a magical nature. This city has different facets to it, depending on what the player characters have as a class and background. My current surviving campaign is a father and son team of rogues, one a human arcane trickster, and the other a drow thief. I structured my world to operate as legacy content, essentially enabling my players to affect my other campaigns in my world. However, regardless of legacy content, my world does have a specific narrative 'skeleton' in which it operates, so the rest of my world has to follow suit if need be. Were my current surviving campaign to fail, I could hit a sort of 'reset button' so my improvised major narrative 'hubs' can be explored from the beginnings of their story points without previous interventions from past players... like change in law, power structure, and so on/so forth.
One minor thing that I think can be easily overlooked when making unusual/memorable locations is animals. What kind of pets do people have? What strays move around your cities? What animals are considered food that maybe would otherwise be considered pets? Stuff like that. Also, an easy way to introduce secret portals is to have people walk into buildings from abnormal doorways, making it clear that they didn't come from that room. The only other time I have seen players become so intensely fascinate with doors was in Season 1 of Critical Role. But now I need a shirt now that says, "There are Bitches, she is saying hi to them."
One of my cities that I’ve ever created was based off the idea “What if the cities most prestigious college professors were also the rulers?” An aristocracy based on grades in school made for a hyper competitive and dark school system, although the rulers were all educated.
Another great video guys! #TeamSigil Friends and I recently made a map using the map/community building (an RPG...kind of?) game called The Quiet Year (with fantasy as a theme). I'll be using the stories we made as inspiration for fantastical elements and locations for my upcoming campaign we'll be playing in.
I would like to remark, that this is not really a video about memorable places but much rather fantastical (high-fantasy) cities. Great inspiration, I just came here for the wrong reason.
The mediocre movie aside, I love the "water world" trope, especially when set in a high magic setting, rather than post-apocalyptic. Metal and anything else mined from the earth is extremely rare, but armor made from wyvern scales and warships made from Dragon-turtle shells are comparatively mundane.
I like Yellyark, in TOA. The goblin village on top of trees that folds itself into a wrap n is hurled away by a tree sling in case things get nasty. Cool as f.
I have a capital city that also a port city built onto of a mega dungeon. They also have trade agreements with towns and cities within the dungeon like a town of gnolls and two cities of sentient skeletons and drow. I also have an island with a pyramid grown out of the islands trees that's a home for an order of nature paladins
Anthony Tanguay demon lords. No one hates arch devils like demon lords. Also other devils, but they could only aid through things like patronage rather than open combat due to the laws of the hells. Obviously the party could try to align themselves with his good counterpart (varies with what pantheon you’re using but I believe Pelor is his opposite in the dawn war pantheon). Any number of cosmic beings would want their shot at the lord of the hells, the party just has to find them.
an idea I had, the moody rouges inn... its an in enchanted with a spell that creates infite corners even though that would not be visible and yet have a square tavern...in each corner is a dark booth and the barmaids are trained to go up and ask so what do you want sweety so the moody edge lord that is there can replay in his already prepared speech and them walk away....in the in the party can pay to leave their edge lord there without the PC knowing....so its a edge lord daycare. you are of course free to use this just remember to please state that you didn't come up with it.
Was going to run a dark sun campaign but the more prep I did the more it became my own homebrew thing that was loosely based on dark sun, and one of the things I did to be lazy turned out really fun. Dark sun had ceramic pieces as it's core currency, which is super cool and hammers home the lack of metal and post-apocalyptic vibe. However because we play online with digital sheets, I'd have to learn coding to change cp , sp , gp , pp into bd , bit, cp, sp, gp system dark sun uses. To mitigate this, I took the abbreviations for copper, silver, gold, and platinum pieces and tried to think of what else they could stand for. Which led me to glass pieces as the core currency. This ended up being really cool, making the non-metal coins harder to make forgeries of, and just sounding better in conversation. "Glass and glory" weird local sayings about dangerous places to loot well and greed "Get a handful of glass but bleed out before spending it". It's a little goofy but ended up being pretty neat.
I was 3D printing a figure of a king. Well, he turned out about 40% too big. But he looked so good that I decided to run with it I now have "Stormvald, Giant-kin, Lord of the Mountain". Within minutes I had a 3 page backstory about the king including his ascension from an oversize peasant kid to a baron to becoming king, along with notes about his relationship to storm giants and how he's just too lazy to be dishonest. You can grab ideas anywhere...
In "The Bakery", a campaign I ran a couple years ago, the capital city of Seaside had a sewer brigade that included otyugh sewer cleaners who were official citizens of the city. To help make sure the party didn't attack them unnecessarily, I portrayed each one using an eye stalk sock puppet. Hilarity ensued.
So here I am, making breakfast and getting ready for work, when you guys up and release this video. Now I’m going to go stop being a responsible adult and make up a bunch of supernatural towns for my campaign because you great big, beautiful nerds had the nerve to go and give me a bunch of inspiring ideas. Dammit, you two!
This channel has been very helpful. I have put together a group of new to RPG players who are very interested. We will be using Quest rules with some home brew to introduce RP to the group. We will be building the world with this rule set to eventually move to D&D 5e rules. We will eventually play D&D in this same world we built as a group.
I have a bit of a soft spot for the city of Lion's Arch from the Guild Wars series of MMOs. A port city that's been destroyed and rebuilt by refugees and pirates who started pulling wrecked ships onto shore and turning them into permanent dwellings.
Just to add something helpful, Salt in the Wounds is the Module/Supplement that is about a city that uses a tarrasque to make the entire city function. - www.saltinwoundssetting.com/
Thanks, now I have a name for my town: Milquetoast. I think I might make it a city of rings. The buildings get taller as you leave the center with soldiers on the outermost wall of inhabited buildings
You guys make 40 years of d&d accessible enough that I'm going to try to convince my family to do a one shot over Christmas. Count me in as a web demon!
I want to make a town that in self defense; tried to protect themselves from an outside calamity by casting a spell in which shrunk the town to the size of a globe and encased it in a protective field. The place where it used to be has a huge spherical area dug out, and the “orb” of the town fell to the bottom of the ocean. Now they exist yet are remnants of an older time, trying to continue to live in pitch darkness and an area the size of a large town.
My campaign had a Fomorian tribe in the Underdark that lived off of a hydra. They would cut off a head that then grew more heads and used them as a food source. Over time they eventually gain the trait of regeneration.
The one problem I have, I want to draw my places the more fantastic it becomes the better to play, but to draw is a real difficult sometimes. Eeh a good well detailed description never hurt nobody.
Can you guys talk about brain in a jar undead cues I'm think of doing a frankensten castle campain and I wanted to know what the interworkings of the brain in that jar
kobold city, they where isolated long enough that the average age of their population became high enough for them to develop a stable society and culture.
In dark souls 2 there is a city called eleum loyce where the city is built right over basically the door way to hellso the the king and knights can stop them if they try to invade
I had a mirror city to Sigil called Ligis created by Aoskar the moment before the Lady killed him. He made it to ensure his priests who were put into the Lady's Maze would find a home. Basically, when you get put in the Maze and you stick with it long enough you'll end up in Ligis. A secret the Lady doesn't even know about. There is, of course, no escape. Unless... You make an escape a Quest and then you know get to have the people of Ligis invade Sigil. If you steal this idea, have fun, it's a good time.
Absolutely pronounce fantasy or fictional names/words how you want. But for those who are interested. Sigil - an inscribed or painted symbol considered to have magical power. Pronounced: ( Sih - gel ) like hair gel Sigil - The Dungeons & Dragons city located in the Outlands the official pronunciation by Wizards is ( Sih - gill ) like fish gill Source: Chris Perkins
Of the people who cover content that you guys cover, y'all are for sure my favorite. You're informative, fun, and your "how-to's" never come off as the ONE TRUE WAY. Watching your vids made me take the leap to use resources available to find a group(a few, actually) after almost 30 years away. So, thank you for that. (edit) I also find the comments sections of your stuff to be almost as entertaining and informative as the videos. Rare.
My current game takes place during the post revolutionary period. So the settings have been limited to how fantastical 1780’s New York is, but I’ve found even with out fantasy settings you can make something fantastical if it is foreign, by playing up the fact that the players may not have much experience with it. Even if it’s not magical you can still get the same sorta effect.
Been thinking about running an Avernum game using Veins of the Earth. Avernum is basically the Underdark being used as Fantasy Australia by the Evil Surface Empire to exile its undesirables.
I built a halfling village for my campaign that was essentially on stilts. The village was on a huge flood plain, and in an area with large predators, so I asked myself how they'd adapt. Visually it's sort of micronesian stilt home with short rope bridges connecting the buildings.
Here's my idea for a magical city. There is only one city in the entire world, but it's more of a teleportation network with most of the portals leading to grown structures in-between plains. The idea is that every structure adds to a grid of structures that tracks, and catalogs any breaches in to prime material plain. You basically are given a home structure for free because it's relatively cheap to make and any money they do get from you for upgrades just is a bonus for a structure they would make anyway. It's basically like a free to play game on your phone, but with housing. Shops work the same way. There is no towns in the world, no roads as well. There are mining, wood cutting, and farming camps, but no one lives there they all live in the "City". They work then at the end of the day they go to a teleporter and go home. The cool thing about this idea is that when the party wants to go somewhere outside of the city, say a ruin, or looking for some artifact, it's way more dangerous, because there is no civilization there, no well worn roads, just empty, rugged terrain, and monsters everywhere. However down time activities become quicker, and easier in a way. Your never more than a few seconds from anywhere, and any person.
I've had my very first world cooking in my head. Right now its pretty much a fairly generic concept, but I've slowly been trying to flesh it out. My general idea is a few segmented nations of more homogeneous populations converging on a single "waterdeep styled" city with a variety of races within its population that strongly features a colosseum. The world is beyond post-apocalyptic. Civilizations were brought down and new ones were born out of them. These new civilizations are just reaching maturity and the world has been settled for just about 100-200 years. There is no human nation, but humans are pretty much everywhere. The waterdeep city being founded by humans coming together to carve out a single place that is representative of who they really are, bringing a little bit of everywhere together in a wild part of the world. The only culture I've really thought out at all has been the city. It doesn't have a name yet. It does not have a military per se, but every citizen is trained to fight somehow, whether through physical or magical means. This being a result of it simultaneously being in a wild part of the world where monsters can and do literally attack the town and they have to deal with that, but since its a part of just about every other nation, it cannot organize a true military because politics. They do have a semi-organized militia that just defends the town from monsters that every citizen of age is required to join. The city is also a city of walls, almost every district is gated off by high walls to protect from possible monster attacks. The colosseum is a more combat-as-sport styled arena, magic is used to transport unconscious fighters out of the ring where they are healed. Citizens often participate in open tournaments there run by the city's government. They pay money to get in and get paid out depending on how well they did. Think the lottery, but decided by fighting instead of chance. There are also tournaments that feature competitors sponsored by prominent merchants within the city which can get very... "unconventional," in that as the tournament progresses a lot of cheating goes on since the sponsors throw around so much money that it gets overlooked. Its probably pretty evident that I've been thinking about an adventure that features the colosseum a lot. I want to create a combat based adventure that gives room for me to create interesting encounters and room for the more social and exploration focused PCs to do some of their own stuff like learn information about their opponents before the match so that an effective strategy can be made or even cheat during a fight. Its funny, as I was listening so many of the actual details formed in my head and I just had to get them out there before they were gone.
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Web DM that intro was weird and fun. I liked it.
Hey, you guys have mentioned it on and off but could you make an episode all about Curse of Strahd and horror since no one has made a good video on how to go through the book or improving the story.
Heavily biased, DMing a 9man party and the book just can't challenge that till I rewrite everything.
Hey guys, I know $2 patrons are supposed to do episode ideas but I can't spend the extra money until I find a new job, so is there any chance you could talk about suicide dice and other odd ball stat rolling methods? I'd love to see it, and thanks for the great content
Hi! We answer Patron questions for some specific short videos, but we take suggestions anywhere and everywhere! Thanks for asking!
Here's an older video on rolling stats. May not be exactly what you're looking for, but it covers what we have experience with. ruclips.net/video/a4NQPjR76P8/видео.html
What song is that in the outtro?
The Dungeon Salesman:
(slaps door) This door is actually a monster, roll initiative.
Even if it is an overused meme I love it
Best use of this meme I've seen
Monk unarmed strike
The City of Brass: where the Elite of the Efreet like to Meet in the Heat.
So, I'm the type of DM who doesn't mind taking ideas and inspiration from other sources and putting them in my game, and I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm probably going to steal every town, city, and settlement you just described and plant them in my game lol you guys are pure genius, and your videos are always so densely packed with information. I love it.
Steal away!
Plagiarism is the first rule of scholarship! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
I think a lot of these definitely need that revision process that they mentioned early on. The city where no one dies for example, why did they decide to test various forms of killing, by killing a bunch of different people? Why not just kill one guy (probably someone that no one likes, like a criminal) in a hundred different ways?
If you dm and dont steal ideas then you're not do all that you can
some fights/madness are going to break out if your alive forever and can't leave, after its established they can't die most of the mutilations would be for sadistic cruelty moreso then anything else
An idea I have for my homebrew setting is a city that is very like Venice, with its canals and gondolas and ornate architecture. Except, because it's also home to Tritons and Merfolk and Sahagan and other aquatic races, there's a lot more going on _below_ the water line than actual Venice. You can walk down a set of stairs into the water, and the city just keeps going down, with vibrant activity going on.
It's a rich city - the center of a vast and lucrative trade network - so it's flush with magic items and wizard colleges. Any random air-breathing citizen could _happen_ to own a Cap of Water Breathing or other such item, so they can go below the water and do business. Not to mention those water-breathers who are amphibious, so they can pop up to the air levels to do _their_ business. Not to mention that vast trade network means the city is cosmopolitan, and full of people and goods from distant lands.
Much larger than actual Venice, because the aquatic inhabitants can build out farther into the water than the land-bound people could. And they construct their buildings tall enough that they breach the surface, and can be built up from. So it's an ever-expanding metropolis.
Like Venice, the city is run by a council of business leaders. Half of them are aquatic folk, so the center of their government - the Palace of Pools - incorporates water into the basic features of its meeting halls. Because you don't want the Tritons or Merfolk getting dried out; gotta have easy access to places they can hang out and moisture up. Many buildings in the city have such features, really, to accommodate water-bound citizens and customers. The local tavern (one of the hundreds thereof) the PCs visit might be half underwater, with retaining walls with flat surfaces on top that divide watered and dry spots, so patrons can freely mingle. And it might have a siren in the corner, singing a low-key magical melody to sooth the atmosphere.
I also like the idea that this city has a major bank in it, and the bank is owned by a Bronze dragon. Whether the owner is _openly_ a dragon, or it's a secret, or it's an open secret, I don't know. I just love the idea that the bronze dragon flies over the city or swims beneath it, or polymorphs himself into humanoid form so he can attend sessions of the city government. Maybe another member of the council of merchants is a water genie from the Elemental Plane of Water.
For conflicts, nothing seems more appropriate than an Aboleth trying to gain a "foothold" in the city, hiding in the sunken areas of the city and plotting how to take it over.
Bluecho4 this is honestly amazing
This is awesome
The idea of a city that looks like a small cluster of islands and canals but is actually just the tip of huge spires and castles and skyscrapers is so cool
Check out the first in the "Gentlemen Bastard" serious of books, The Lies of Locke Lamora. The city of Cammor is a lot like this, minus the aquatic races.
Im 100% using this almost word for word its brilliant.
I was running a campaign for younger kids where I had a town who's commerce was 100 percent story based, you had to tell a story to earn your supper and boarding, I used it to get the kids to be more into roleplay
Yoink. Will be using this if I ever run a game for the niece and nephews.
That’s an absolutely brilliant idea
I want to believe that Pruitt comes up with those intro gags on the spot. Shakespeare level puns.
Honestly that's pretty much how it happens most of the time. He is a master.
I think I recall previous episodes where they actually show "outtakes" of gags that didn't make it usually because they both started laughing mid take. The outtakes weren't just bloopers of the same line, but entirely different gags for the same video.
So aside from the confirmation above there's actually some proof to back up you suspicion
I love watching your video, but this video, and some others,
really stand out and are very helpful as a DM.
The questions that you pose and the list of ideas are massively helpful.
You make it easy to be a patron. Thank you.
A city built on a Terrasque is the biggest Chekhov's Gun you can have in a D&D setting!
Unfortunately, the Terrasque has the ability earth glide which would make building a city impossible. And the end result of the city crashing down to the ground when the Terrasque dives in the earth would not be a pretty site.
@@garrettwilson8471 use it to build a fortress somewhere with plenty of resources, use the terrasque to move it and "plant" the fortress where you want.
Avatar the last airbender is great inspiration for cool locations
Avatar is great inspiration for everything
Is that a pun?
I made a city that had an aboleth as its ruler, since it essentially had infinite knowledge. People would try to get some form of unique information that the aboleth didn't know, and if it was something that it didn't know, the person would be eaten (since the city's religion was that only those eaten by the aboleth were able to go to heaven essentially).
That's a great idea.
YOINK!
If I may add to the concept:
What if the brains of those eaten by the aboleth end up in organic vats within it? These vats would run simulations, in which the consumed individuals live their personalized afterlives.
Perhaps a city in a cold climate has a bound and captive dragon or giant fire elemental in the centre, and the city radiates out with the warmth. The inner rim is the "old town" and has big fancy houses occupied by the nobility and merchants, while the outer rim is the workers and the poor in more solid houses. You can even make a plot point: the dragon breaks out or is freed, but the dragon turns out to be like Alexstrasza, an intelligent and gentle creature who was forced into captivity. Do the party drag her back to the city in irons and deprive a good creature of her freedom, or do they let her go free but possibly doom a city full of people in the process?
Convince the dragon to stay ;)
That may not be possible if she is convinced she will be harmed or mistreated if she goes back. After all, she did trash the place on her way out.
But I'm just bouncing an idea.
I've also played with a city that was full of undead, but there were two factions who constantly fought and killed each other and then were resurrected back.
J. Jonah Jameson Nice
Sounds so much like FrostPunk
Never played it, but I've heard it's a similar premise.
Something I'm going to be implementing to make locations more memorable is mundane oddities that happen. I got this idea after listening to Tales from the Gas station.
The party is walking through a forest and sees a garden gnome on a branch of a tree. They think it's weird and keep walking. More gnomes turn up along the path, but they literally mean nothing. When they ask at the forest village what's up with the gnomes, they are told "oh yeah. Don't worry about those. They turn up every now and then. Don't touch the ones with green hard though, they bite." Once again, there is no bigger story. It's just a thing that happens around here.
Like Jim mentioned about a place where any animal might be a familiar, you could take a leaf out of The cats of ulthar and have all cats be conscious, sentient creatures who act as the guards and royalty of the city. Also if you've played Sunless Sea, do something like anthropomorphic apes be the citizens of a town. Everyone treats it as normal, but the players will be like "woah okay this is a thing."
I am a simple man. I see a video by webDM I stop everything I am doing and watch.
That’s the way
I've started for my game a homebrew setting, that basically runs as what if Athas had Eberron's magical technology. Where instead of despotic Dragonkings, cabals of mages dedicated to the advancement of magic, and thusly the survival of civilized races, had formed and took over.
I started with simple ideas, like having nine countries ran by different magocracies, each one based around an alignment, and, like you suggested, I kept adding layers of logic to each idea to get how one country would affect the world.
It forms a more "modern" fantasy than most aim for, as in general we try to escape the modern, though, actually, due to concepts like Warforged, Teleportation, and even simple magics like Cure Wound or Goodberry it touches on being more slightly futuristic fantasy.
I admit I've taken ideas from other medias: the 'lawful evil' country is heavily based around the Coalition from Rifts, and I have a Warforged Wizard king that utilizes a modified Clone spell to ensure that he is never permanently assassinated, a la Dr. Doom, from Marvel.
I once had my players visit a deep gnome city which was only visible to people who knew it was there
Oh my god an ancap mage city
MrZeyami basically, yeah
Telvani archmages?
Y'all didn't even need photoshop for the cover this time.
I love Web DM you guys put out the most helpful content.
If you guys ever come to England you are always welcome at my table.
Keep up the great world guys!
I wish they would come to some cons over hear
As always Pruitt’s word play for the intro is top notch! Thanks for all the work y’all do!
The underwater city - Leomund's Giant Dome. The wizards casting it can NEVER leave, otherwise it would pop like a bubble.
Can imagine the extreme measures the citizens would go to to keep those mages safe.
Graven The Red put them inside another leomunds tiny hut
I love the idea of big scary monsters as a ruling class in my campaign i wanted it super high fantasy and high magic so I made the continent ruled by a council and the heads of the council are ancient metallic dragons that made a deal with buhammat to advise the mortal peoples of the realm and are unable to interfere directly.
It's not too outlandish but I've always liked Lankhmar a lot. The street names appeal to me like Cheap Street, and the Street of the Gods. Those Mike Mignola illustrated comics for the stories have a lot to do with my appreciation for it, and of course the original stories are terrific too.
That was a perfect close to an episode.
A city that's abandoned and falling into ruin, but looks like a thriving bustling place due to illusions?
Licjr 1018
You mean Anor Londo?
That sounds really cool the party might need special goggles that give them true sight to see the facade
Kahlyl Roberson I was thinking something subtler, like the food they get there is also an illusion (like the creation spell). Like, they feel full immediately after eating it, but the next morning they're hungry like they didn't eat, and have to make a Constitution save to avoid a level of exhaustion. If that prompts someone to cast Detect Magic, everything (including the people) show up as illusion. And everyone showing up as illusion in range stops what they're doing and staring at the caster until the spell is dropped. For added creepiness, maniacal smiles slowly spread across their faces
Jimothy the Green I don't know what that is, my apologies if I accidentally ripped someone off
@@Licjr Wow I love that idea so much!! Do you love the school of illusion?
I appreciate the shoutout to my Inuit cousins up North but just an FYI: "Eskimo" is largely considered offensive, and many Indigenous people (esp. in what is now Canada) consider it a slur
The whole bubble city idea Jim brings up would make an interesting inter-planar settlement where the bubbles are amorphous demi-planes that are in some kind of planar lava lamp. Like, someone/something powerful created a utopian society inside this demi-plane, but they died or lost their power and the demi-plane is now unstable and scattered, and now the disparate "bubbles" float around and only occasionally collide. Maybe there is some kind of effort to fix it, but the people keep being separated and it's messing up their attempts to stabilize the plane.
I dunno. That's what I thought of.
I just thought of an idea for a slightly underwater city a coral reef where bubbles stream up constantly and devices siphon off the air but the higher it floats up the less air is left so the people living in the higher stacks get less air
Definitely has nice potential for D&D. The locations essentially being time gated on their accessibility can create narrative tension, and move/force things forward or into action. One of those "bubbles" can also have more resources (another source of tension) so every time there's an overlap in the bubbles there could be fighting over valuable commodities only available in said "bubble".
Cool idea.
You guys got your intro and outro reversed. THAT OUTRO NEEDS TO GO FIRST
Now I'm going to feel slightly disappointed at every video that *doesn't* feature Jim Davis blowing us a kiss.
Excellent video, gents! Thanks!
Ahhh... aqueducts. My yuan ti haunted Omu must have these. Remaining ruins of such aqueducts can serve as pathways for the tree bound locals and a great ambush perch.
Good way to start the day, Gets the brain pumpin.
SPOOKY 0:43 i see you are sneaking in stuff for the Halloween episode.
A really good episode! I got loads of ideas and inspiration! Time for me to get back to work on the good ol' campaign!
Love how Pruitt can barely stop himself from making a Walking Dead joke when Jim Davis says "Coral" :D
Nice community reference
I think it would be interesting to do a video ( and dm a game) on an ecumenopolis since most adventures take you from City to Forest to dungeon, I've always wondered how someone would handle a high fantasy low technologically medieval fantasy coruscant basically.
In my world there’s a dwarven city suspended above a volcano where the lava is a portal to the plane of fire and these dwarves forge the rare metal starsteel which has a melting point of 100,000,000,000,000,000°
What's the benefit of starsteal?
Gives the user the a bonus 20 feet of movement and if they use it they get a charge attack with advantage (basically Deadpool’s negasonic teenage warheads powers but with 19 AC
@@davidotoole2853 that sounds amazing!! Might consider giving your players the ability to set up a mine if they wanted to
an ice drangon keeps the suspended volcano city cool. but the dragon is imprisoned, so it won’t escape. will they (the party) free the good dragon ...or search to get the precious starsteel to craft magic weopons to slay the crazy wizard-demon that has cast a undead spell on their home city....
I always thought that a polar campaign on a world that had been subjected to massive climactic changes in the unimaginably distant past would be interesting. You’d still have the midnight sun and the polar night, but in a more or less temperate environment. If you moved too far north or south you’d end up in a place where agriculture was difficult or impossible, inhabited by nomads. If you kept going you’d come to an almost impassable band of desert circling the equator, and the whole area would be dotted with artifacts of dead civilizations, giving it an almost ancient-Egyptian vibe.
Gnomes the original Venture Capitalists. 😂😂😂
A morning upload before i download my daily RUclips videos for work ? Why thank you DM
Great ideas and points here. I very much like Jim's approach of, "Okay, it's a normal village except for these three things."
One thing people might want to look at for this is the game Numenera. Or pretty much anything by Monte Cook (his "Arcana Unearthed" for 3e is also pretty good). The guy's just a master of weird shit. One city in Numenera is built on - and sometimes in - the pipes of some ancient machine. Another is built atop a kind of inverted mountain. A "City of Bridges" built over the water. A city built into the walls of a massive chasm. A rotting nightmare of a city built in the lightless depths of another chasm.
I'm probably not going to _run_ Numenera anytime soon. But I have _no shame whatsoever_ in stealing the ideas within it.
Hey the Yuuzhan Vong are awesome :D At least they were a different threat than another empire remnant...
Disclaimer: Had to watch again from the beginning because the sink faucet was too loud while I was doing dishes.
I have this somewhat Waterdeep-like city which supports a corrupt cycle of crime syndicate politics, essentially having various Zhentarim-like factions. The province's shady governor lives in a manor within the city, named after his family's surname. Underneath is a sewer system which has its own ecosystem, with some areas having an economy in addition. Under the sewers is an Underdark of sorts, with the drow pushed down even further into the depths due to dwarves and rock gnomes banding together to make flintlock firearms and firearms of a magical nature.
This city has different facets to it, depending on what the player characters have as a class and background. My current surviving campaign is a father and son team of rogues, one a human arcane trickster, and the other a drow thief. I structured my world to operate as legacy content, essentially enabling my players to affect my other campaigns in my world.
However, regardless of legacy content, my world does have a specific narrative 'skeleton' in which it operates, so the rest of my world has to follow suit if need be. Were my current surviving campaign to fail, I could hit a sort of 'reset button' so my improvised major narrative 'hubs' can be explored from the beginnings of their story points without previous interventions from past players... like change in law, power structure, and so on/so forth.
One minor thing that I think can be easily overlooked when making unusual/memorable locations is animals. What kind of pets do people have? What strays move around your cities? What animals are considered food that maybe would otherwise be considered pets? Stuff like that. Also, an easy way to introduce secret portals is to have people walk into buildings from abnormal doorways, making it clear that they didn't come from that room. The only other time I have seen players become so intensely fascinate with doors was in Season 1 of Critical Role.
But now I need a shirt now that says, "There are Bitches, she is saying hi to them."
The ideas you guys come up with are so good. I could listen for hours
This is a nice video for this moment as im preparing a evil campaign on a 3 layered city controlled by crime lords, merchant lords and mage lords.
Damn guys this is a hell of a video. Made me realize I foolishly have not subscribed until now
One of my cities that I’ve ever created was based off the idea “What if the cities most prestigious college professors were also the rulers?” An aristocracy based on grades in school made for a hyper competitive and dark school system, although the rulers were all educated.
Awesome video, can't wait to use some of this material in my Homebrew campaign!
Same here!! Definitely using some of this stuff, it's pure gold!
Another great video guys! #TeamSigil
Friends and I recently made a map using the map/community building (an RPG...kind of?) game called The Quiet Year (with fantasy as a theme). I'll be using the stories we made as inspiration for fantastical elements and locations for my upcoming campaign we'll be playing in.
I would like to remark, that this is not really a video about memorable places but much rather fantastical (high-fantasy) cities.
Great inspiration, I just came here for the wrong reason.
The mediocre movie aside, I love the "water world" trope, especially when set in a high magic setting, rather than post-apocalyptic. Metal and anything else mined from the earth is extremely rare, but armor made from wyvern scales and warships made from Dragon-turtle shells are comparatively mundane.
Lol sphinx bankers
I like Yellyark, in TOA. The goblin village on top of trees that folds itself into a wrap n is hurled away by a tree sling in case things get nasty. Cool as f.
I have a capital city that also a port city built onto of a mega dungeon. They also have trade agreements with towns and cities within the dungeon like a town of gnolls and two cities of sentient skeletons and drow. I also have an island with a pyramid grown out of the islands trees that's a home for an order of nature paladins
My party is planning to fight against Asmodeus, i just need to know who would need to help for them to have a chance, any ideas?
Anthony Tanguay demon lords. No one hates arch devils like demon lords. Also other devils, but they could only aid through things like patronage rather than open combat due to the laws of the hells. Obviously the party could try to align themselves with his good counterpart (varies with what pantheon you’re using but I believe Pelor is his opposite in the dawn war pantheon). Any number of cosmic beings would want their shot at the lord of the hells, the party just has to find them.
Asmodeus is a god, so other gods would be the minimum amount of help you would need.
I mean, the forsaken -had- the undercity... RIP, noble sewerprison.
an idea I had, the moody rouges inn... its an in enchanted with a spell that creates infite corners even though that would not be visible and yet have a square tavern...in each corner is a dark booth and the barmaids are trained to go up and ask so what do you want sweety so the moody edge lord that is there can replay in his already prepared speech and them walk away....in the in the party can pay to leave their edge lord there without the PC knowing....so its a edge lord daycare.
you are of course free to use this just remember to please state that you didn't come up with it.
I miss this 😢
PRUITT!!! You do you BOO!! I’m like 50 and I love that CL jam! Minus of course the negative connotation associated with the word bitches.
Was going to run a dark sun campaign but the more prep I did the more it became my own homebrew thing that was loosely based on dark sun, and one of the things I did to be lazy turned out really fun. Dark sun had ceramic pieces as it's core currency, which is super cool and hammers home the lack of metal and post-apocalyptic vibe. However because we play online with digital sheets, I'd have to learn coding to change cp , sp , gp , pp into bd , bit, cp, sp, gp system dark sun uses. To mitigate this, I took the abbreviations for copper, silver, gold, and platinum pieces and tried to think of what else they could stand for. Which led me to glass pieces as the core currency. This ended up being really cool, making the non-metal coins harder to make forgeries of, and just sounding better in conversation. "Glass and glory" weird local sayings about dangerous places to loot well and greed "Get a handful of glass but bleed out before spending it". It's a little goofy but ended up being pretty neat.
I was 3D printing a figure of a king.
Well, he turned out about 40% too big. But he looked so good that I decided to run with it
I now have "Stormvald, Giant-kin, Lord of the Mountain". Within minutes I had a 3 page backstory about the king including his ascension from an oversize peasant kid to a baron to becoming king, along with notes about his relationship to storm giants and how he's just too lazy to be dishonest.
You can grab ideas anywhere...
In "The Bakery", a campaign I ran a couple years ago, the capital city of Seaside had a sewer brigade that included otyugh sewer cleaners who were official citizens of the city. To help make sure the party didn't attack them unnecessarily, I portrayed each one using an eye stalk sock puppet. Hilarity ensued.
So here I am, making breakfast and getting ready for work, when you guys up and release this video. Now I’m going to go stop being a responsible adult and make up a bunch of supernatural towns for my campaign because you great big, beautiful nerds had the nerve to go and give me a bunch of inspiring ideas. Dammit, you two!
This channel has been very helpful. I have put together a group of new to RPG players who are very interested. We will be using Quest rules with some home brew to introduce RP to the group. We will be building the world with this rule set to eventually move to D&D 5e rules. We will eventually play D&D in this same world we built as a group.
Because of one campaign I played in, I have PTSD of Waterdeep. Fuck Waterdeep.
I have a bit of a soft spot for the city of Lion's Arch from the Guild Wars series of MMOs. A port city that's been destroyed and rebuilt by refugees and pirates who started pulling wrecked ships onto shore and turning them into permanent dwellings.
Just to add something helpful, Salt in the Wounds is the Module/Supplement that is about a city that uses a tarrasque to make the entire city function. - www.saltinwoundssetting.com/
Thanks, now I have a name for my town: Milquetoast. I think I might make it a city of rings. The buildings get taller as you leave the center with soldiers on the outermost wall of inhabited buildings
You guys make 40 years of d&d accessible enough that I'm going to try to convince my family to do a one shot over Christmas. Count me in as a web demon!
I want to make a town that in self defense; tried to protect themselves from an outside calamity by casting a spell in which shrunk the town to the size of a globe and encased it in a protective field. The place where it used to be has a huge spherical area dug out, and the “orb” of the town fell to the bottom of the ocean. Now they exist yet are remnants of an older time, trying to continue to live in pitch darkness and an area the size of a large town.
My campaign had a Fomorian tribe in the Underdark that lived off of a hydra. They would cut off a head that then grew more heads and used them as a food source. Over time they eventually gain the trait of regeneration.
The one problem I have, I want to draw my places the more fantastic it becomes the better to play, but to draw is a real difficult sometimes.
Eeh a good well detailed description never hurt nobody.
Well you could make the geography simple but the things in the geography fantastical
When you guys up load, it’s got to be the best part of the week!
that bubble city is fully explored in One Piece's Sabaody archipelago
Can you guys talk about brain in a jar undead cues I'm think of doing a frankensten castle campain and I wanted to know what the interworkings of the brain in that jar
kobold city, they where isolated long enough that the average age of their population became high enough for them to develop a stable society and culture.
BWHAHAHA
So no one's gonna comment on Pruitt's "I don't give a shit" minute at the end? xD
In dark souls 2 there is a city called eleum loyce where the city is built right over basically the door way to hellso the the king and knights can stop them if they try to invade
Here I am, blatantly ripping the location and style of the capital city of Horizon zero dawn
An Inuk here, love the channel, like the reference.
"There are bitches-" *as one* "And she is saying hi to them." Lost it man, love these guys.
FYI, I am stealing your terrasque idea btw. thanks!
A fun city could be some people living in trees that migrat in the after the sesons
It's official. Pruitt should've gone into sales.
*This workout isn't the best, because he switches the weights between excercises.*
" There are bitches she's saying hi to them." That CL easter egg is the best thing ever. xD
Have you tyed pathfinder kingmaker pc game?
I had a mirror city to Sigil called Ligis created by Aoskar the moment before the Lady killed him. He made it to ensure his priests who were put into the Lady's Maze would find a home. Basically, when you get put in the Maze and you stick with it long enough you'll end up in Ligis. A secret the Lady doesn't even know about. There is, of course, no escape. Unless... You make an escape a Quest and then you know get to have the people of Ligis invade Sigil. If you steal this idea, have fun, it's a good time.
Absolutely pronounce fantasy or fictional names/words how you want. But for those who are interested.
Sigil - an inscribed or painted symbol considered to have magical power.
Pronounced: ( Sih - gel ) like hair gel
Sigil - The Dungeons & Dragons city located in the Outlands
the official pronunciation by Wizards is ( Sih - gill ) like fish gill
Source: Chris Perkins
That dance number... PRUITT FOR PRESIDENT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM PLEASE!
Of the people who cover content that you guys cover, y'all are for sure my favorite. You're informative, fun, and your "how-to's" never come off as the ONE TRUE WAY. Watching your vids made me take the leap to use resources available to find a group(a few, actually) after almost 30 years away. So, thank you for that.
(edit) I also find the comments sections of your stuff to be almost as entertaining and informative as the videos. Rare.
My current game takes place during the post revolutionary period. So the settings have been limited to how fantastical 1780’s New York is, but I’ve found even with out fantasy settings you can make something fantastical if it is foreign, by playing up the fact that the players may not have much experience with it. Even if it’s not magical you can still get the same sorta effect.
Lords of the Underworld...= Skaven
Been thinking about running an Avernum game using Veins of the Earth.
Avernum is basically the Underdark being used as Fantasy Australia by the Evil Surface Empire to exile its undesirables.
Hard g gif soft g sigil, and that is the ground I will die on.
I built a halfling village for my campaign that was essentially on stilts. The village was on a huge flood plain, and in an area with large predators, so I asked myself how they'd adapt. Visually it's sort of micronesian stilt home with short rope bridges connecting the buildings.
Here's my idea for a magical city. There is only one city in the entire world, but it's more of a teleportation network with most of the portals leading to grown structures in-between plains. The idea is that every structure adds to a grid of structures that tracks, and catalogs any breaches in to prime material plain. You basically are given a home structure for free because it's relatively cheap to make and any money they do get from you for upgrades just is a bonus for a structure they would make anyway. It's basically like a free to play game on your phone, but with housing. Shops work the same way. There is no towns in the world, no roads as well. There are mining, wood cutting, and farming camps, but no one lives there they all live in the "City". They work then at the end of the day they go to a teleporter and go home. The cool thing about this idea is that when the party wants to go somewhere outside of the city, say a ruin, or looking for some artifact, it's way more dangerous, because there is no civilization there, no well worn roads, just empty, rugged terrain, and monsters everywhere. However down time activities become quicker, and easier in a way. Your never more than a few seconds from anywhere, and any person.
Will there be an episode on some of the funnier creatures of Mordecrand's like the Grey Render or The great race of the HIPPOS WITH GUNS.
I've had my very first world cooking in my head. Right now its pretty much a fairly generic concept, but I've slowly been trying to flesh it out. My general idea is a few segmented nations of more homogeneous populations converging on a single "waterdeep styled" city with a variety of races within its population that strongly features a colosseum.
The world is beyond post-apocalyptic. Civilizations were brought down and new ones were born out of them. These new civilizations are just reaching maturity and the world has been settled for just about 100-200 years.
There is no human nation, but humans are pretty much everywhere. The waterdeep city being founded by humans coming together to carve out a single place that is representative of who they really are, bringing a little bit of everywhere together in a wild part of the world.
The only culture I've really thought out at all has been the city. It doesn't have a name yet. It does not have a military per se, but every citizen is trained to fight somehow, whether through physical or magical means. This being a result of it simultaneously being in a wild part of the world where monsters can and do literally attack the town and they have to deal with that, but since its a part of just about every other nation, it cannot organize a true military because politics. They do have a semi-organized militia that just defends the town from monsters that every citizen of age is required to join. The city is also a city of walls, almost every district is gated off by high walls to protect from possible monster attacks.
The colosseum is a more combat-as-sport styled arena, magic is used to transport unconscious fighters out of the ring where they are healed. Citizens often participate in open tournaments there run by the city's government. They pay money to get in and get paid out depending on how well they did. Think the lottery, but decided by fighting instead of chance. There are also tournaments that feature competitors sponsored by prominent merchants within the city which can get very... "unconventional," in that as the tournament progresses a lot of cheating goes on since the sponsors throw around so much money that it gets overlooked.
Its probably pretty evident that I've been thinking about an adventure that features the colosseum a lot. I want to create a combat based adventure that gives room for me to create interesting encounters and room for the more social and exploration focused PCs to do some of their own stuff like learn information about their opponents before the match so that an effective strategy can be made or even cheat during a fight.
Its funny, as I was listening so many of the actual details formed in my head and I just had to get them out there before they were gone.