The TRPG book that continues to save my campaign(s)!
Showing this off because I’ve gotten a lot of asks for DM advice after my campaign binder post. If you’re a lazy DM like me, this book can potentially reduce the stress of having to track reams of campaign info. It has for me.
Or as the kids like to say, “This [book] cured my depression, cleared my skin, and brought my dog back from the dead!”
It’s called Vornheim: The Complete City Kit. It’s a few bucks for a PDF, but the print version is where it’s at.
Lemme tell you a story from the last session I ran for my Saturday online group.
I woke up with a hangover.
I slept in past noon, spent a good part of my day cleaning up and coping with living it up on Friday night. I ventured out, got coffee, seriously debating taking a nap in the late afternoon.
Then I remembered I had a D&D game to run…in not quite an hour!
My players had just killed Eshrigel the Medusa at the behest of her half-medusa daughter Absalom. The only prep I’d done is come up with a few adventure hooks, all of which I wouldn’t be able to flesh out and run until next week!
I had to run a 3-4 hour D&D session with only about 20 minutes or so to prepare! I’ve got nothing ready, and I can’t just pull a dungeon out of my ass either; the PC’s are between adventures, so starting something big isn’t a good option.
Thankfully, the players are currently in a city (Gran Elfheim), and I’ve got this book.
In less than 15 minutes I was able to generate a dozen assorted NPC’s (with names, genders, quirks, secrets, etc), as well as four decent random encounters:
1d10 (7) face rats (rats with the faces of beautiful humans) attack an attractive NPC on the street. When the PC’s approach, the rats attack them. The rats are used by ugly noblemen to disfigure the beautiful. The scars left by face rats cannot be cured by normal means.
A large nightingale picks at a corpse. It steals a shiny valuable object from the PC’s, and flies off towards the Immortal Zoo of Ping Feng.
A street vendor sells magically tainted sweets to a hungry crowd. He uses the PC’s in his sales pitch.
A devoted old half elf servant mistakes [random PC] for his former master, bringing them to a towertop estate, handing them the key to it. It’s now theirs…as is its problems.
Okay, cool…that should fill at least an hour of play if the players are quick/uninterested. It’ll give me time to come up with something else. Shopping maybe? I dunno.
So I run it. I decide the attractive NPC is the half-elf foreign prince I randomly generated earlier.
After half the rats are dead, the party Barbarian chases after them. I say the rats disappear into darkness.
The barbarian keeps chasing, splitting the party. He goes down a few more alleys.
I say the rats scurry into a dark basement window, well and truly gone.
Barbarian smashes the window, then runs around to see how to enter this building from the front!
Oh shit…now I need to know what this building is. Thankfully, Vornheim is there for me.
In three dice rolls I now have… “A Hatter. Its owner is being bribed by nobles to create more and more ridiculous hats to sell to their rivals. The owner is a random NPC…who turns out to be a dishonest wizard who does shady things”
Wowzers! Things are starting to click!
So, I decide the hatter wizard owns all the rats. He breeds them to attack attractive nobles, and does so at the behest of other rival nobles! That fits.
Next, I use the book to randomly generate a floorplan, and now I have an adventure site.
The Barbarian barges into the hat shop and argues with the wizard at the front desk. Barbarian wants in to kill the rats! Wizard refuses, they argue back and forth, ending up going to the basement to investigate.
Things escalate from there. By the time the rest of the party catches up (with a new half-elf prince NPC in tow), they finish off the rats, banter back and forth with the hatter, and finally head off on their way.
A single random encounter, plus half a dozen random table rolls, turned into almost a whole session’s worth of adventure!
That’s the kind of play Vornheim provides. It takes what is typically a mundane and skipped over aspect of D&D play (wandering through cities) and makes it into a multi-layered and dynamic adventure…all with less than 20 mins of prep!
That’s a lifesaver for lazy DM’s like me, and it’s why this book is a staple in my campaigns: it fills the gaps between adventures with novel and interesting stuff that’s unlike anything in other D&D books!
If you’re a lazy DM, seriously pick up this book!
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