Top Tip for Creating Towns/Cities/NPCs || D&D with Dael Kingsmill 

You had me search "Dael Kingsmill sperm" because I didn't remember the meaning of the letters. I hope you are happy. On the good news, it WAS the first result at least

When you said Glasstide runs a "ferry service" ...it took me a second, because what I actually heard was "fairy service" and immediately envisioned Pixies delivering special order packages... but then I realized, ooooh, "ferry," doh!

You forgot something! You always say to me that one of the big things you think of is "where do they bury their dead?" This has been really useful for me.

I just realized that the acronym S.P.E.R.M. also makes a great life philosophy: S: Social - Make time for friends, family, loved ones, etc. P: Political - Be involved in the local happenings of your neighborhood, town, city, region, etc. E: Economic - Contribute to your community by having a job or giving others opportunities to work for you; or, be creative in some way which gives yourself and others something to enjoy that wasn't there before (like the cooperative story telling experience of D&D!) R: Religious - Further yourself in some way--either through self-care, spirituality, ethical philosophy, etc. M: Military - Be healthy... like an army (this one's a bit of a stretch). Your body is your army with your mind as the general, so feed your brain with nutritious knowledge and your body with exercise and a good diet. So there you have it, go forth and be S.P.E.R.M.!

I hope it is as easy to remember as you say... I just wrote SPERM on a post-it note and stuck it with my campaign notes...

Something to keep in mind is that if you’re talking about a city, especially one where people get around principally by walking, the SPERM needs will need to be met for everyone in every different part of the city. There may be a centralized trade district, but this is not the only place that trade happens. Most people do most of their economic activity close to where they live. In the same way, there may be a big temple where the high priest does rituals on holidays, but that is not where most people worship. If it’s culturally acceptable, people would rather have a local church or shrine that’s within an easy walking distance. So you can think of a map of a city kind of like a fractal, with each neighborhood filling most of the SPERM needs of its residence, and the centralized locations you can easily see on the map of the whole city like the trade quarter as being supplementary to the decentralized locations that most people use in their day to day lives.

We used something similar to the SPERM system . Ours was called PERSIA and my World History teacher taught it to us in 10 Grade High School. PERSIA stands for: i. Political ii. Economic iii. Religious iv. Social v. Intellectual (Technology and Improvements) vi. Artistic Military was spilt between Political and Intellectual areas.

So just to sum up: Social: anything involving the people? Inn, Restaurants, Pubs, Bars, etc. Political: Who runs the town and enforces the laws? Townhalls, Mayor, President, Monarch, Jails, Judges, Council, etc. Economic: Sources of incomes or trade for the town? Trade routes, Fishing, Mines, Farmland, Blacksmiths, Alchemists, etc. Religion: What deity is worshipped? Priests, Temples, Chapels, Churches, Shrines, Cults, etc. Military: How are the laws enforced? Guards, Police, Patrolmen, Neighborhood Watch teams, etc. Did I get everything correct?

I will resist the urge to indulge in low hanging fruit and just say you've got an excellent acronym/mnemonic device there, and while I don't want to ruin the joke there is one thing missing that I always like to add to my towns during creation: conflict. It's the question of what problems does the town have. Now there may be campaign related hardships that the towns wrapped up in like the advancing army of the undead, a Goblin horde, the fact that the moon is going to crash into the world in three days ect, but I like to have problems and conflicts in the town that would exist there even outside of the greater plot arc. The acronym that I use for deciding this is MPC, which stands for Money, Power, and Conflict. I ask myself first, who in the town has the most power and why, as well as how do they maintain it. Next, I determine if there's anyone else in town how wants power for themselves and what they are willing to do/already engaged in doing to get it. The steps are very much the same for money. Who has money, who dosen't have money, and why is that? How do the people with money make it/keep it and how do the people without it, or without ENOUGH of it to satisfy their greed, go about getting it? The one difference here is that now we're going to see some overlap. If someone in town has a lot of money, then clearly they could be expected wield a fair amount of power in the town as well. The question then becomes, "Does this person/faction have so much money that their power supersedes that of local authorities?" For me, the conflicts basically write themselves after that. In a small town like the one you describe people could be arguing over who really owns the rights to the best fishing spots and maybe a murder has occurred, leaving one of the claimants dead. In a larger city one of the mercantile guilds has grown so powerful recently that they have come to gain the ear of the local regent in many matters, somthing the local arm of the church considers its exclusive right and duty. How will those two factions act against one another? Openly? Or perhaps in a shadow war that gets the local thieves guild involved. Of course, my players are free to ignore any of my towns problems if all they care about is saving the world, but they've slowly found over the course of the game, that helping the NPCs with their MPC problems can win them powerful allies and useful boons. Also enemies.... but of course I'd never use my DM powers to have that turn around and bite them at the worst possible time >.>

Your town map is awesome, you should make a video about how you create them if you don't have one already.

I just want to say as a player of 35 years, I am happy to see someone young and female making content for D&D and RPGs in general. I hope this hobby I have enjoyed for so long continues to grow it audience. However I do want to say there have always been female players, just think they made up a much smaller percentage of the group then now. Thanks again for great content.

I love the blackened-but-erasable battle mat cover idea.

I'm not a d&d player (yet) but this is also incredibly helpful for writing, when creating a city I always run out of ideas really quickly and nothing seems to make sense. This makes it so much easier, thank you Dael!

Holy crap!! I’m 7 minutes in and you’ve already made my city building so much better I had to pause the video just to say thank you. This is amazing content. Than you!

This is perfect, and having such a humorously memorable acronym means that it's also unforgettable. Perfect for generating the town I'm working on!

I started applying SPERM to my campaign and I got more work done in one night than I had in the preceding two weeks You're a godsend, you really are

Oh. My god. How did I miss this video? And it came out around the time we were building a setting for our University West Marches game... Lovely video, thoughtful, insightful. I feel more confident in tackling some of the little details of worldbuilding. It goes to show the dedication you put into being a DM. You're players are very lucky to have you at the helm.

I had a course planned this autumn (that the university cancelled at the last minute) for writers looking at how to apply medieval history and research techniques in their fantasy and historical fiction worlds - this video is very similar to what I was going to be talking about for writers creating the city maps they use in their books. The effort you put into applying it into rp is amazing.

FYI. There's an area just outside of Mexico City that is farmland and has been so since the time of the Mayans. It was swamp at one point. They turned it it rivers and people farm it still today.

Big props on the Donnie Osmond calendar! I had a huge crush on his sister Marie back in the late 70s, early 80s.

Great world building. I can tell that as your world grows more complex, the first thing you ask yourself is how NPCs interact with that world. They have secondary and tertiary opinions about how other NPCs interact with it. That's what makes the world feel alive

This is a very good method of fleshing out towns and major NPCs with in those towns. I'm gonna steal this one!

A good book is Cities of The World by Georg Braun & Franz Hogenberg

This was so extraordinarily helpful wow!! I literally sat and watched and took notes like I was in class, hah! I’ve been working on building my home brew world for a couple of months now and this absolutely helped me fill in the missing thought processes for how to flesh out my world. Your whole d&d series is so helpful! Thanks again! :)

I'm so glad to have found your channel!! I'm a new DM and all your advice is really helpful, fun to watch, and fits in with my DM style as well!! Thanks for posting :D

I honestly can't tell, but it's impressive if you're just spouting off these ways as you go. Brava!

“Email this to your Grandma”. Great exit. As always, awesome content. Thanks!!

RU-vid sent me to your videos and I've watch two so far and have learned so much! You have such great ideas, thanks!! ❤️❤️

A+ hand based communication, amazing maps, and a memorable acronym to boot! I was really taken aback when I stumbled upon this channel in my recommends, it looks more like Smosh than a D&D channel, but I think it easily stands head and shoulders above the average output of the D&D RU-vid'verse. Bravo.

Really thoughtful and useful. You really have a knack for this stuff. Kudos to you!

Dropped a like for the Acronym and a comment to say man I'm late to the party but as a late 70's and early 80's RPG gamer it's good to see people bringing new levels and dimensions to the game.

Hay Dale, I only just recently ran into your clips through your role playing clips. I didn't pick up on your accent being Australian, but then again I was accused today on a stream to being English myself and not Australian. I clicked on an old clip of yours Re-Australian Slang from 2015. The amount of energy (and apparent anxiety) on your clips make them amazing to watch and I am going to start recommending them both on my Twitch channels private discord for cast, and also to viewers of my channel. I love supporting other Australians even when they have a far bigger viewership than myself already. Keep up the amazing work. Its great to see someone so passionate and entertaining. Karsh the Goblin

The second video of yours I've found and they were both great! got yourself a new subscriber keep up the great work!

Not sure if it's the type of content you want to be creating for your channel, but I always appreciate seeing the process of designing digital maps. I would love a more detailed look at that specifically, just the brief glimpse we got of that map with it's unusual geographic patterns and intriguing overlays got my imagination running wild.

Great video, and great job making one of the seemingly insurmountable tasks of a GM seem small and easy. Keep up the great work and the videos

holy crap you're a genius. I've been running games for 20 years and never thought about the shaded-plastic-for-the-dark thing or SPERM (lol).

This was incredibly helpful. I love videos leave me thinking "I know exactly how to use this information in my next campaign."

That perspex trick is amazing.

Brilliant video and brilliant timing as I just had to quickly design a new major city before next week! Fifteen minutes in and it's already coming together - thanks Dael :-)

Very true - I grew up in colonial Connecticut and remember asking my Dad why there were so many roads. He told me they were virtually all paved cow paths :)

I didn't see the shout out, but you popped up in related channels with Matt. Great stuff, glad I popped over.

You’re awesome, thank you! I’ll be looking out for more of your content :)

Absolutely fantastic video. Just found you on Recommended and subbed!

Potential session on Thursday, and I had no npcs nailed down for the town the party is traveling to, just an adventure seed. About thirty minutes later, after this, I have eleven, all of whom contribute to the flavor of the town and have tensions between each other that make sense. Thanks, Dael!

Useful tips!

This was unexpectedly fantastic and helpful. Thank you so much.

This is genuinely the most useful tip for creating a homebrew population I've ever heard. The SPERM principle. I wasn't even halfway through the video and my own homebrew nation is suddenly fleshing itself out more in my head. Thanks Dael!

Damn, I'm now looking at the stuff in my campaign differently, made up a random city to start with that I'm going to develop using this method more, but I've also got a pregenerated one that's part of an adventure I bought a long time ago that I'm now running and I'm seeing this fitting into that :O

more awsome hints for us! Yay, thank you for sharing and caring! :D

I just found this video and I'm so happy I did. I'd just propose an addition to your S.P.E.R.M. mnemonic. How about E.G.G.: Environment - you need a good setting (Marsh in your example) Great Places - landmarks with a history to them so that it's not just cookie cutter (this marsh has a giant's skull in the very middle etc) Great People - every town needs a history of not just those who live there but those who LIVED there and everyone knows for whatever reason. Anyway, thanks for the video! Every sperm needs an egg, it's why we're all here! (Get it? As in why the city is where it is)

I built a small city for our D&D game and watching this video I've realised that I was following SPERM without even realising it. Our key areas were a couple of inns (social), a weekly market with traders from the nearby towns and countryside, and the city docks (economic), a couple of temples, one of which housed our villain (religious) and the city militia (military). I've missed political off the list because the party didn't meet anyone in power until quite late on (although I knew who they were and where they were based). I'll definitely bear SPERM in mind when I'm designing the next few places :)

Very well structured way to make a town. Very impressed! I will use these ideas.

I've been working on fleshing out a main city that my players will be in, and boy has this been one of the hardest things. I started to make a map and just scrapped it because I couldn't picture how it should look. So I've just been mentioning places without giving them a solid representation. Now, though, with this brilliant tool you've given me, I feel like I can make something of this town and make it more believable for my players! Thanks for sharing SPERM!

I like this music! I love your organization tips!!!

So many good tips in this video. I think this may be my favourite of your D&D videos. Regarding Wolfgang, I can confirm that it is both good and fun, and definitely worth checking out.

Wow! The level of world building you get into is freaking amazing :D This would also be really helpful for developing stories and towns and all that. Definitely going to apply this type of thinking when I write later on! Thank you! There's alot of brilliant ideas in this ;)

In ‘Murica (well, Catholic high school), we learned SPIRE: social, political, intellectual, religious, and economic. I like the addition of “military.” I found it a great world-building tool, as well! BTW, kudos on the brilliant videos

That darkness overlay sounds so cool! Edit: Also that was some outstanding work on the city. They did the whole "Upper/Lower" thing in the early days of Canada as well. As it was all about location relative to the St. Laurence river, it ended up being a kind of West/East divide. People do get funny prejudices once you start throwing around words like that though!

I really like this! It makes the whole process less overwhelming because you only need to know five things!

what an amazing voice! and thanks for the info, i'll start following your channel!!

Great video, very useful!

OMG this was so amazingly useful

Being a nerd, I'll say something about the Egypt comment at about 4:40 as a bit of a correction about the naming of Upper and Lower Egypt: Upper and Lower Egypt are called what they are because of the direction that the Nile flows, the Nile flows northwards. Rivers can only flow downhill, so it is most certainly true that height plays a role, just not in the way mentioned. When discussing rivers, upper is used to refer to upstream towards the source(s), lower is referring to downstream away from the source(s). As a result these two accepted portions of the Nile: the Upper Nile (which is in the south of Egypt) and the Lower Nile (in the north), gave Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt their names. The confusion comes from the popularity of north-up maps. A connection between north and up, and south and down, obviously have no basis in Science considering our planet is a large sphere so up and down is arbitrary. A look at Egypt on a south-up map clears everything up nicely. Either way, I am clearly not fun at parties. Unnecessary historical corrections aside, it's really nice to see someone else who makes videos about the hobby in a funny and natural way (Matt Colville comes to mind). Keep up the good work and thanks for the S.P.E.R.M.

Some great advice here, thanks for making this video. Something to remember that most towns/cities etc aren't completely isolated and are thus affected by their neighbors in some way. It's always a good idea to work out how the city/town interacts with the others in the area and the country or landmass at large.

Thank you Dael! this is great info. Also I love Wolfgang

I would add that you should pay special attention to potential/intended player actions. In one (official) campaign there was a town with a visiting armed force that was both housed in the town and didn't have their own supply lines. Yet our kill count (they started it) amounted to something like 75%+ of the towns population. As if there were some form of enemy mob spawning machine. Furthermore we had discussed our chances based on how many there were likely to be in front of the DM. It made no sense even though it was intended that we acted as we did. In another (official) campaign the city was ruled by 5ish merchants who set into place economic sanctions. They sell at 3x value, you can't sell to anyone but them, they buy at 1/3 value. Yet there was was no dissatisfaction among the people, no economic crisis, only a tiny black market. They've set themselves up for famine. Furthermore there were no suppliers of goods so we couldn't buy from afar. What? where's my revolution? Think things through when trying to mess with your players. Chances are you're pissing off more than just the players when you lay down unilateral economic sanctions, introduce political instability, over populate, etc, etc, SPERM.

Both of my grandmas have passed away, so once I emailed one of your videos to my mom instead. She didn’t get it. But it was pretty funny. 😂

Nice work on the video!

"Welcome to a D&D Video" -- That's all you had to say. This human is in. 😀👊

At my school we used S.P.I.C.E, Social Political Interaction with the environment and fellow people Culture Economy

You have made it very easy understanding 'SPERM', you are really amazing to me, Dael Kingsmill!

You ever think of streaming any of your D&D sessions?

Me and some friends are doing a dnd and this is really helpful thanks

As a note to people creating residential districts... zoning laws that created these kinds of districts are a modern invention. Before the advent of public transit, commuting was impossible for the lower rungs of society. Because of this most people worked out of their homes, and a district would never have been strictly residential. Homes would be built on top of the place a person worked if possible. When cities did implement strict zoning laws it was often to enforce class but not function, as the rich could afford to commute. This created disparities like what the US saw in their majors cities during the 80s. Poor people locked into neighborhoods without housing equity loans and rich people sequestering themselves away from human contact. Zoning laws like these are the beginning of the end for a city and if yours has this level of disparity it will be on the decline.

Your videos are awesome!

You're a really great world builder! Thanks for sparking my imagination for my own gaming endeavours.

This is absolutely fantastic.

Okay, this is a great way to look at the problem of town/city design. Subscribed.

Donny Osmond was the Peacock on the Masked Singer he was epic. Thank yoi for the vid.

Found this two weeks ago, have been making towns in a quarter of the time! I approve of SPERM! (My players no longer approve of me since I've started shouting this.) Made a little template, and now these things practically write themselves. Thank you!

So I, for one, am going to rearrange this to PERMS when I use it

I'm in the middle of designing my own home brew city. To design it I took all the backgrounds people could pick and figured out where that would be in the city. It ended up being very similar to the process you are describing.

Strongly encourage you to make more D&D videos! We need more female gaming figureheads :D

From now on, I'll using S.P.E.R.M. in my games, my players will love it.

Thank you so much for this, I struggle so hard with coming up with city elements. Particularly NPCs. I'm going to trying these suggestions on my current game.

Great video. I'm building a big city for my campaign and surfing I found this one. The only thing I would add is a recommendation for @MonarchsFactory: read some of the books of Pirenne or LeGoff about medieval economy. They give you another perspective beside the naif we got from RPGs about markets and economy.

Reminds me of a University in Western Australia(?) where the architect forgot to put footpaths in. So he came back a year later and just put them where the grass was worn down. Dunno if it's actually true, but the message is there.

This helped a lot. Thanks :)

The bit about revealing the lit portions of the room is genius! Thank you! Alright. Now I'll unpause and watch the rest!

I feel like DMing ability and RU-vid ability are at least indirectly related, because your hand movements appear both natural and accurately explain your topic through movement and various hand manipulations. Most can't do that. Subbed. I don't even play D&D lol

incredibly helpful channel. commenting for the algorithm or whatever i don't get technology but awesome videos and extremely helpful files shared

Dale, I love you and what you do. You just saved me at least 4 migraines. I have 2 super powers and like 9 satellite states to flesh out by february.

Hey, just an fyi, your dnd videos are actually so fucking helpful, thanks for posting and sharing your thoughts. Think you are amazing.

Nice video, thanks as always! This is pretty similar to my method, although I had no idea there was a system called "S.P.E.R.M." to describe it. In addition to this, I just have a names list on hand with two columns, one for male names, one for female names. That way when some smart ass in one of my groups decides the random beggar on the corner is the most fascinating NPC to talk to, I'm ready.

Thank you this was a good video for inspiration

This was fucking awesome! I super needed this video so thanks for being my savior.

Wow, that's really similar to what I do. Any town I build has a basis for how it sustains itself, even if the town is a placeholder to keep claim on the land. I don't really think of politics as being tied to a location unless there's a polarizing issue in the campaign that some places will support and some oppose. A lot like your town most of my towns don't think much about military unless threat of attack is a feature of the campaign. Every town I make has a leader with some views and opinions that dictate a lot of how things are done. Every time I make has an NPC that represents the town's industry. Every town has a bartender or equivalent where travelers interact with the town (And usually the place where folks who don't feel welcome in the big tavern hang out). The big difference I do is that each town/village/hamlet has a feature that distinguishes it from others, they're close to a ruins, have an exotic religious temple, have a weird industry like Mink-farming, are famous for something they make like blackbird pie. And where there's a village quirk there's some NPC that's sort of the spokesperson for that feature either because they own it or manage it or are an expert.

Amazing! Thank you :D

Useful video. I have never been a DM(I started playing D&D a month or so ago, though i had been wanting to play it for a while longer) but I want to try it at some point. I also have a fantasy universe I design which I will use for that(learning how to create local details are something I need to do as most of my time have gone to design the concepts, gods, and other major characteristics such as the magic system rather than local history(luckily D&D magic is somewhat compatible with the magic system, though I will need to design three npc magic classes as they do not exist in D&D and are the most prevalent classes in that world). Thanks for making the video, it was enlightening.

If there was a "secret sauce" towards making good cities for D&D, it would be this video! Thanks Dael!