Thoughts on Reading Nord Games's Spectacular Settlements

​Spectacular Settlements, by Nord Games, is a system-agnostic tool for creating settlements of all sizes for your fantasy roleplaying game of choice.  The book was funded for publication through Kickstarter.  I became aware of it when I saw the latest Kickstarter by Nord Games, Dangerous Destinations, and I wanted to see if I liked the kind of work they had done in their previous publication.  I found an affordable copy through ebay. 
 
Of course, affordable is a relative.  Spectacular Settlements is a $45 450-paged, full-color, glossy-papered, art-filled, hardbound book.  The book has high production value, but it is a big, heavy tome to have sitting on your shelf.
 
There is a lot of useful information here, and I found a lot of great insights about why and where settlements pop up and the nature of settlements.  But all that information and insight is arranged with a specific use in mind.  If you are using the book in that anticipated way, then you’ll have what you need.  Pulling the information out, if you’re not interested in using the book as it’s designed, is a lot of work.
 
So how is it designed?  It is set up as a kind of lonely-play world-building book.  You want to make a settlement for your world, so you open up to the type of settlement you want, print out a worksheet for that type of settlement, and then follow the steps in order.  The steps are a series of tables, using an assortment of dice from a d4 to a d20.  The tables are built so you never have to back track and adjust a decision you have already made—in this way, every table looks forward.  To keep information from becoming contradictory at the whim of the dice, earlier rolls will give you bonuses to add or subtract from upcoming rolls.  For example, your roll for population density will affect how likely crime will occur in the settlement, with thicker crowds making everyday crime more likely.  You roll for every detail, in what I assume is an effort to make your settlement as complete in your mind as possible.  Often those contradictions, when they occur, are the little gems that make your settlement unique.  As an example, I rolled up a trading post in which the population’s wealth was “impoverished,” but where the conditions of the trading post were “immaculate.”  (You roll for the condition earlier, and it gives you bonuses to rolling on the population’s wealth table.  That contradiction, along with other unexpected rolls, was the seed that helped me build out an interesting background for the trading post.
 
The larger your settlement, the greater number of tables you have to roll on.  For a capital city, you are rolling up specific districts found in the city, and specific shops that exist in each of those districts.  You’re rolling for type of governance, who’s in the market place, what your government prioritizes, who are some famous residents, what the houses in each district are like—it’s a lot of detail.  And not all of that detail is designed to lead to inspiring contradictions or intriguing facts.  And that’s my first criticism of the book.
 
You could make the argument that you roll for what interests you and let the rest go, but the tables are setup to interact with each other, as later tables are regularly influenced by older ones.  The tables are not built for a la carte treatment (though you can make them behave that way), and they are not built for inspiration.  Some tables are more inspiring than others, and some tables are just facts you note on your sheet, mere data that will likely remain inert in play.  Do you care how the entry to the whatever district is guarded if the characters never go to that district?
 
And that leads me to my second criticism.  The tables are not easy to find or consult on the fly.  I suppose you could ask for a 10-minute break to roll up a district once the characters have decided that they want to go there, but that doesn’t seem like a fun option.  So you can either roll up the entire settlement before play (or between sessions), or you can just make things up on the fly, which is what you can do without the book anyway.  It would be great if there was a section of the book designed to use the tables in a way other than settlement construction from start to finish.  Or alternatively, it could have a set of quick tables for a quick-and-dirty construction without breaking from play.  Instead, at least 100 pages of the book are pre-constructed settlements that other people have created using the methods provided.  I personally have no use for such a collection.  An example or two per settlement makes sense as a way of showing how to turn all your information into an interesting settlement, but what do I need with 8 settlements mapped and built for worlds other than mine?  I got the book to make settlements of my own, not use other people’s creations.
 
And while I’m talking about page-length, the book could be further shortened by judicious use of space.  Tables are spread out in the layout in a way that fluffs the page count unnecessarily.  I feel like this tome could be a tight and useful 50-100 pages if it were given a new layout and the examples were all removed.  There are even almost 50 pages of “interesting NPCs” that I don’t have any use for.  I love supplements of this sort, but I don’t want them taking up more space on my shelf than the games I need to make them useful.
 
The good news is that Nord Games is introducing a paperback version that removes all the examples and unnecessary extras to give you just the table and information you need to create settlements.  And as I said, I found the information very useful in thinking about and constructing settlements.  So I’ll be very glad to trade in my $45 hardbound monster-text for a slim, useful $20 paperback.
 
This book, the way it’s intended to be used, will be most useful at the start of a campaign, when nothing is known about the world.  In order to build your settlement, you naturally have to know something about neighboring areas. In rolling up your city, you might discover it’s flooded with refugees escaping the two warring kingdoms to the South.  The rumors and current affairs of the city are there to give characters immediate hooks to start exploring or investigating.  Once a campaign is running, characters are likely to have enough momentum already, and the world enough flesh on its bones, that such inventions will be at best unnecessary and at worst distracting.  Of course, if you’re not worried about using the cities you bring to life and you just have fun creating new places whether or not they’ll be used in a game, then there is plenty of fun to be had here.  It’s not built to be used the way I would like to use it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not built the right way for someone else’s purposes.