songs for the dusk, my science-fantasy tabletop RPG about building a better future, releases in five days. this post is about a player-favorite aspect of the game: creating your community, the place your characters live and work.
my last post about songs discussed how character beliefs were fundamentally about a character's relationship to this community, but the broader question is this: how does that community come to be? well, the answer is that you'll create it together, before you even create your characters and decide how they've come to work together. community creation involves creating not only a place but the people who occupy it, and without a doubt one of the most frequent pieces of feedback on songs i get is "we already love our community so much and we haven't even played our first active session yet."
community creation in songs starts with filling out a number of prompts for various geographical, structural, and aesthetic features. (there's also a step to choose a region and size, but those are fiction-specific so we'll skip over them for now.) you pick 4ish of each. for example, you could describe a mountain village like this:
Geographic features: Cloud-kissed peaks, a mountain river, an ancient radio tower, strange flora
Structural elements: Terrace farms, watchtowers, wood-carved sculptures, hidden shrines
Aesthetic touches: Wrought iron, string lanterns, geometric motifs, banners
or you could pick a particular district in a major city and describe it like this:
Geographic features: Urban streets, creeping vines, frequent thunderstorms, hilly terrain
Structural elements: Rooftop gardens, ruined industry, train tracks, dry fountains
Aesthetic touches: Peeling paint, colorful signs, stone mosaics, string lights
and forgive me for doing one more, but this was the community that my final set of playtesters built for their original setting (lightly edited for clarity)
Geographic features: stone-arched path out of the highlands, frequent snowfall, lazy river, small crystal outcroppings
Structural elements: train tracks, ruined castle, lighthouse/watchtower, water-powered lift, stone-paved routes, old desert battlefield
Aesthetic touches: prayer flags, steep stairways, homespun fringe, abundant powdered pigment, overgrown leaves, rope bridges
after you set up your community, you set up a few foundations, which are key institutions in your community (think libraries, observatories, troves of old technologies); then, everyone gets to create community NPCs to fill out the residents of your town. NPCs are simple: they get names, pronouns, and a few motifs, key phrases that define them either visually or behaviorally. a character's motifs might be shining armor, an irrepressible smile, a pet dog, or they might bea calm manner, calloused hands, a crystalline staff. you'll assign a couple of these NPCs to represent your foundations—not necessarily leaders, but points of contact for your characters.
communities and community members are one of the most consistently beloved aspects of songs; people love their communities and NPCs. one of the downtime actions you can do is blow off stress by hanging out with these people, but people are consistently delighted by the places they make and the residents of these places well before they get to do that. if this game's community mechanics have taught me anything about tabletop players, it's this: they love building stuff. give them the chance to make and populate places and they'll do so much of the overhead of falling in love with those places for you.
