One of the best parts of Darkest Dungeon, Pillars of Eternity, and a lot of other RPG video games is building up your home base town over the course of your many adventures. I’m not really talking about giving the town itself a numerical level that scales up, though that’s a great idea if you’re handling domain management at the scale of a duchy or smallish kingdom.
Sidebar: What you’d get from leveling up a whole town is different from the concept I’m exploring here. Let’s talk about that another day. Birthright 5ever.
In thinking about this, I immediately ran into the problem that many campaigns are long-term travelogues, rather than returning to a home base town. Tyranny of Dragons springs to mind here, but it’s true of many 5e official adventures. Conversely, in something like Dungeon of the Mad Mage, it’s reasonable to return to Waterdeep but hard to imagine the players being the ones to level up much of anything in Waterdeep, the City of Splendors, other than Trollskull Manor itself, and maybe the other businesses of Trollskull Alley.
My point is: what if that model of campaign bulked up the rewards of the faction rep grind to fill in for the town you’re not boosting? 5e spends a lot of text on faction play but never quite gets a handle on making them rewarding enough for the work invested. I had good intentions of including factions in this post, but instead I’ll save that for a soon-to-come post once I have your feedback, kind readers, on whether this is a fruitful direction.
The last piece of the goal here is to create, simultaneously, a new kind of adventure reward and a new cash sink for the game (it being widely acknowledged that players want more things that they can spend their ill-gotten gains on in-game).
For my LARP design readers… this is the seed of an idea for y’all too.
Town Amenities
I’m obviously not going to try to cover every amenity a town could have, or even every one that your D&D adventurers might care about. If you’re the kind of table that makes leveling up a cobbler’s shop or a bath house exciting and relevant, that’s amazing! I’m not on your level. For the scope of this article, let’s go with a smithy, a temple, a magic or curio shop, and a tavern.
Every amenity starts at level 1 by default, though there’s nothing wrong with the DM (maybe collaborating with the players) designing the starting town to have one or more unusually advanced amenities at the start, such as if the starting town is a major city.
Amenities advance with the players spending substantial amounts of gold on improving them, or through the players completing adventure goals that improve them. We track this with advancement points. If you want players to engage with this content before tier 2, you’ll probably want to inject some extra money into the rewards you hand out.
| Level | Advancement Points |
| 1 | 0 |
| 2 | 3 |
| 3 | 9 |
| 4 | 27 |
| 5 | 65 |
An investment of 100 gp gets you one Advancement Point. Ordinary purchases don’t grant AP, but when an amenity gains a level, one character might get a gift in return worth up to 100 gp x half the AP gained since the last level.
A standard quest goal grants 3 AP x the adventure’s tier for one amenity, or 1 AP x the adventure’s tier for all of a town’s amenities. (I’m not sure what your story justification would be, but that’s not important right now.)
Discerning readers will note how much this looks like the XP chart divided by 100, so yes, it is gold-for-XP… for buildings. It’s also part of the point that advancing to 4th level on gold is kind of a pain in the butt, to say nothing of advancing multiple factions. Ideally you hit a point where quest rewards or a cool treasure you find along the way is just the thing to level up an amenity. It’s on par with finding Embers in Dark Souls, and if this idea proved popular, maybe it’s easy enough to create a new treasure table for this kind of thing.
I’m not thinking through the effects this would have on player-run businesses. Let’s save that for a later development round.
WordPress is butchering my poor tables, for reasons unclear to me; I can only beg your forbearance, dear reader.
Smithy
| Feature | |
| 1 | Sells standard goods made primarily of wood or metal with a cost of up to 75 gp |
| 2 | Sells standard goods made primarily of wood, leather, or metal, with a cost of up to 750 gp |
| 3 | Sells standard goods made primarily of wood, leather, or metal, with a cost of up to 1500 gp; sells common magic weapons and armor. Sells 1d4 randomly-selected uncommon magic items (mix of weapons, armor, and shields). The items on offer change once a month. Once sold, the item is removed from the list. 1/long rest, when you roll a natural 19 on an attack with a weapon you purchased from this smithy, you can choose for that attack to be a critical hit. |
| 4 | As above, and can now forge adamantine. 1/long rest, while you wear a suit of armor made here, you can use your reaction to reduce one source of bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage by 1d12 + your proficiency bonus. |
| 5 | As above, and can now forge mithril. Sells 1d4 randomly-selected rare magic items (mix of weapons, armor, and shields). The items on offer change once a month. Once sold, the item is removed from the list. |
Temple
| Feature | |
| 1 | NPC cleric can cast 2 spells per day of up to 2nd level, and sells standard holy symbols, holy water, and incense. Site is suitable for the Performing Sacred Rites downtime activity. |
| 2 | NPC cleric can cast 3 spells per day of up to 3rd level, and sells common potions of healing in addition to the items listed above. Performing Sacred Rites here has a 25% chance to grant an additional blessing. |
| 3 | NPC cleric can cast 3 spells per day of up to 4th level. Sells the items listed above, and 1d4 randomly-selected uncommon magic items (holy symbols, cleric/paladin scrolls, potions of healing). The items on offer change once a month. Once sold, the item is removed from the list. |
| 4 | NPC cleric can cast 3 spells per day of up to 5th level. Performing Sacred Rites here has a 50% chance to grant an additional blessing. |
| 5 | NPC cleric can now cast 3 spells per day of up to 7th level. Sells 1d4 randomly-selected rare magic items (holy symbols, cleric/paladin scrolls, potions of healing). The items on offer change once a month. Once sold, the item is removed from the list. |
Temple Blessings
The Performing Sacred Rites downtime activity grants you the blessing below as well as Inspiration, for 2d6 days. Use the table below or create new blessings to suit the faith for which you have Performed Sacred Rites.
| Blessing | |
| 1 | When you finish a long rest, you gain 1d10 + your Wisdom modifier temporary hit points. |
| 2 | You gain advantage on saving throws against curses. |
| 3 | 1/long rest, when you take necrotic damage, you can use your reaction to reduce the damage you take by 1d12 + your proficiency bonus. |
| 4 | You gain advantage on saving throws against the stunned condition. |
| 5 | 1/long rest, when you deal damage with an attack, you can deal an additional 1d6 radiant damage. |
| 6 | 1/long rest, when a celestial, fiend, or undead makes an attack or casts a spell that includes you as a target, you can cast protection from evil and good on yourself as a reaction. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for this spell. |
Magic/Curio Shop
| Feature | |
| 1 | Sells standard arcane foci, books, component pouches, druidic foci, ink, paper, and basic poison. NPC wizard can cast comprehend languages, detect magic and identify. |
| 2 | As above, and sells scrolls with 1d6 randomly-selected 1st-level spells. The items on offer change once a month. Once sold, the item is removed from the list. NPC wizard offers 1d4 spells of up to 2nd level for copying into the spellbook of a PC wizard. |
| 3 | As above, and sells scrolls with 1d6 randomly-selected 2nd-level spells. The items on offer change once a month. Once sold, the item is removed from the list. NPC wizard offers 1d4 spells of up to 3rd level for copying into the spellbook of a PC wizard. |
| 4 | As above, and the NPC wizard shares a teleportation circle glyph sequence with PC spellcasters. The NPC wizard can cast legend lore. |
| 5 | 1/long rest, while you are concentrating on a spell, you gain resistance to your choice of force or psychic damage. |
Tavern
| Feature | |
| 1 | Sells standard food and lodgings. |
| 2 | As above, and offers long-term storage of nonmagical items. When you use a Carousing, Crime, or Gambling downtime activity here and roll a Complication (see XGTE), you can roll twice and choose the result. |
| 3 | As above, and you have advantage on Wisdom and Charisma checks you roll within the tavern. The tavern now has a secret entrance and exit that the PCs can use. |
| 4 | As above, and sells you the finest food and drink available. Meals that you purchase here increase your maximum Hit Dice by 2 for 10 days, and rations you buy here increase your maximum Hit Dice by 2 for 1 day. These don’t increase your maximum hit points, but you can spend them to regain hit points during short rests. |
| 5 | As above, and 1/long rest when you eat a meal here, you gain Inspiration. |
Design Notes
The fundamental issue that I see with this is that these are tables the players need to be able to reference often, and player screens aren’t a thing. This needs a player cheat sheet in the worst way; a player-facing list of downtime activities and how they work would be solid additions to it as well.
For me, the biggest creative challenge of this was coming up with adventure-relevant benefits that it’s okay to offer players, especially for the smithy.
I think there could be a fun bit of work around a series of trainers—probably something like martial, divine, arcane, and primal—that gives you a choice of cool maneuvers. In essence these would be a collection of 1/long rest additional class-relevant features, you expand your options when you level up the trainer, and you choose just one of those options at a time, sort of like a menu of supernatural gifts.
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This whole concept is pretty cool. I’m very much in favor of anything that encourages a player group to stick in a smaller area longer term, The opportunities for deeper storytelling when the PCs have strong connections to a town or group of villages are really exciting from a DM’s perspective.
A couple of comments. I think each of these businesses needs a downtime benefit table like the Temple Blessings one. Or maybe there could be tables for the activities themselves rather than the businesses. I could see the Smithy and Magic Shop both improving the Buying a Magic Item or the Craft a Magic Item activities, but for their specific subsets of item types.
I am also a little stumped trying to figure out what the upgrade and improvement process is supposed to look like narratively. Are the PCs purchasing a controlling stake in these businesses when they pay for explicit upgrades? Are they paying for the upgrades and then expecting discounts in return? You call out that the money spent on upgrades is separate from money spent in the business on normal purchases. The whole thing seems strange from the standpoint of the story. The upgrade process probably looks different for each shop type. The Temple upgrades are easy to explain if the cleric or paladin is providing the money, gotta support the local temple. The Smithy is harder to wrap my head around unless there is a PC that is also trained in smith’s tools and is providing the upgrade in order to have access to it themselves. I dunno, I might be overthinking it.
I have been experimenting with a hybrid XP system that involves XP for gold spent (in addition to overcoming challenges, and major story rewards), so I would love to see this idea expanded.
I’m drawing something of a blank on justifying cool effects from a Buying/Selling a Magic Items activities; having weird side effects from Crafting does kind of explain itself, though.
The narrative side of this is admittedly a little shaky, because it is so inspired by video games that don’t have to justify much of anything. In Darkest Dungeon and Pillars of Eternity, the player has legal control over the settlement, as the local lord. It doesn’t make any sense from the perspective of “what do I get for this investment?”, since what you get the right to spend money on new options. I dunno, it relies on a perspective you usually don’t have in D&D adventures. Needs thought.
The whole section of buying and kitting out a castle from the AD&D DMG comes to mind when reading this. My inclination is to combine a settlement with a keep, Anglo-Norman style. Intriguing reading.
If you’re interested, I wrote a massive series of articles on domain rulership systems over in Tribality. Here’s a link to the last in the series, which has a directory of the rest of the series.