How Boring Demographics can become Exciting Adventure Hooks

While some of us do actually enjoy reviewing demographics, up to a point, they are not on their own particularly interesting for adventurers. However, by doing a little pre-game work on a city and figuring up its demographics, there are ways to extrapolate any number of interesting adventure hooks for your players.

Quite some time back I ran across this website on demographics and from it was able to create a series of rules for myself for determining the demographics of a given city or nation. I won't go into those at the moment, though I'll be happy to do so later should anyone wish to see them. The results, however, allow me to determine the number of blacksmiths in a city, the number of wizards, sorcerers, clerics, etc. along with more mundane things like number of herbalists, laborers and farmers.

On the surface this seems pretty dry and useless to my players. However, once I know how many of a given profession is in the area, I can then look for inspiration among the numbers. If there's just one guy in a given profession then he's probably the talk of the town since he's the only one they can go to for whatever it is he does whether that's blacksmithing, herbal remedies or possibly even religious or magical services. This can bring up the question, why is he the only one? Is the town just too small to support more than one, or is there something more nefarious at work.

If there are two or three of a given profession, then they are more likely to be in competition with each other than working together as a guild or other organization. However, if we're looking at 5 or more members of a profession, chances are they've formed some sort of trade association and I can either roll randomly to make that decision or if putting them in an association (or keeping them out of one) serves to generate an adventure hook, I can simply arbitrate that. If they work together as a guild, what is there goal? Are they good or evil aligned as an organization (this may not be as relevant for certain professions, one isn't likely to run across an evil aligned order of carpentry . . . though it could be amusing)?

By answering these questions and any others that come to mind as you look at the distribution of professions and whether you (or the dice) feel that they should be organized into an organization you will quickly see your dull demographics taking shape into NPC's and organizations with goals, resources and needs from which adventure hooks almost naturally spring.

Next time I'll post the write-up of an organization I built recently using a combination of this and the Walking the World method mentioned in my last article. Since this is Tuesday and I'm trying to get back to M/W/F posts, I'll put that up for your reading pleasure/resource tomorrow.