Town in a Pizza Box (Solo RPG Prompt)

Or: An inspiration tool for lonely fun.

I love “quantum game prep” techniques, where players or GMs can flesh out an RPG (or wargame) setting on the fly. The brilliant RPG Weird Heroes of Public Access uses this technique, charging the players with imagining localities in the fictional town of Fairhaven. I played (unfortunately only) two wonderful sessions of Brindlewood Bay a few years back and the GM employed a similar technique, having us answer leading questions to fill in the details of our PCs’ little burg.

How then can a solo RPG enthusiast, or maybe a GM looking for inspiration during prep, replicate the unpredictable responses of a group of diverse gamers? As always, the dice have the answer.

I made up a quick way of generating a map of small rural town, with the dice indicating not only the spatial positions of the landmarks, but the relationships between them. I generated the landmark category table by referencing the Yellow Pages for my own hometown. Modifying the die roll table could conceivably generate a different setting: a space station, a neighborhood in a metropolis, or a fantasy settlement for instance.

I playtested the idea just this morning and I’m happy to say it works well, at least with my overactive imagination. Only three rounds of rolling (and only the d8, d10, and d20) yielded a couple of juicy relationships that could spawn adventures and NPCs, including a direct relationship between the police station and a financial business over by the local dam.

A quick roll on my homebrew oracle answered “Yes, And…” to the question “is the relationship shady?”; in fact, not only is the relationship shady but it is also a well-kept secret. The nearby presence of the (randomly rolled) dam immediately spawned thoughts of flooded lands drowned by a controversial reservoir project. Illegal seizure of private land? A convenient way to hide the bodies? An inconvenient discovery of a sacred archaeological site? Who knows why the land was flooded and why the police helped hide that reason… it’s a meaty adventure hook that I can leave vague enough to branch off in a number of red herrings.

I haven’t posted this to my downloads page because I plan to expand the tool, adding at least another page to provide examples of each landmark category and include some additional rolls I use to further define certain features (like quantifying elevation changes).