It’s All About Location . . . .

or to be more specific, location description.

This month the folks at Campaign Mastery are hosting a blog carnival and the topic is location, something that every RPG GM and player most likely knows something about. We all have our favorites, places we’ve read about or maybe have played in, what makes them special? What makes them memorable?

The description, and the holes that our imaginations fill.

Let me start with the write-up I did for the Green Griffon, a location I used during my Realms of Rylon Campaign.

The Green Griffon Inn is one of many inns in the city of Valon. It’s a modest four-story affair with a common room, private rooms and suites, a bathhouse and a full pub/restaurant. The Inn itself is located on what is know as Merchant Square and is just a short walk from the wharves.

The Innkeeper, Donovan Tellis, is well respected in the community and charges a fair price for both rooms and meals. Regular patrons can expect Donovan to know them by name and he can usually remember special requests concerning accommodations and meals.

I will lay odds that you already have a ‘feel’ for what the place is like. You’re filling in the gaps already from your past experiences, things you read, things you’ve seen in movies, and I’ll also bet they don’t match what I saw when I wrote that up as GM.

Believe it or not that’s okay – our visions don’t have to match. There are some that may not feel that way and I will heartily disagree with them, it’s about the experience and enjoyment at the table not that you see things exactly the way I do.

As you can see, I tend not to include all the details in my descriptions, unless there’s a specific reason to know that the building was painted bright orange, I won’t even mention the color. I want the details to be left to the players, let them see it in their own eyes, if they mention a detail I make a note of it for future reference.

What you had above it the sketch of the physical building from the outside – the inside was handled much the same way.

On entering the Griffon on the far side of a sea of bodies, you see a bar stretching nearly the length of the interior. Every race in Valon seems to be represented here and all are gathered at tables and enjoying themselves. You see a few card games taking place and hear the sound of dice as you make your way across the room.

Got an idea of what things are like inside? Do you have a sense of the type of establishment this is? Does it feel like a place you would want to come back to?

Again, you’ll notice the lack of a lot of details. The card games and dice were important so I included them. I didn’t mention anything about the food or drink, the servers, the lighting or any of another hundred details as they weren’t necessary to convey the ‘feel’ of the place. It’s okay they were left out.

There’s a second reason why I tend to leave out all the details – it takes time to create them all. I’m sure I speak for a lot of GMs out there, time is typically in short supply when it comes to prepping for a weekly game session so we are always on the lookout for areas we can trim without impacting the game. I feel this is one area that you should consider – leave out some of the details that won’t impact the story, let your players’ imaginations fill in the void and enjoy the game.

There is a benefit to leaving out all the details as well, when you mention on the players have a tendency to pick up on and figure it’s important. This is actually really useful as a GM, on one hand it lets you highlight those important items while on the other hand giving you yet another opportunity to hand out the occasional ‘red herring’ to keep them guessing.

Be sure to check out the kick off post of the blog carnival at Campaign Mastery for links to other posts about this topic.

I’d also be interested in how you handle location descriptions. Do you give a lot of details, just a few, or do you rely on visual aids instead?

May your dice roll well.