Hey guys. I've recently gotten into this terrain building thing, and had an idea that I wanted to try. I want to model out an entire small/medium village and some of the surrounding wilderness, and then run a low-level fantasy campaign pretty much entirely in the modelled areas. Has anyone done anything like this? Any ideas on how to make it work, or thoughts on adventures I could run?

We have done something similar with our Warrior Heroes: Armies and Adventures campaign, although it has also involved journeys to the city as well. You can read some of Brother Cedric's adventures here and they might give you some ideas:


It really depends what sort of campaign you are running. An RPG campaign will be different from a skirmish campaign. Ours falls half way between the two, sort of RPG-Light. Anyway, your adventures could easily involve kidnappings, raids, wild animals attacking the local farmers and murder/mysteries. You might have a dungeon near the village that houses great treasures but also great dangers. What about siting the village on top of a hellmouth? I'm sure that has been done before somewhere but it's an idea that could provide a constant source of enemies for your players. Another thing might be toi involve the players in local politics. Plenty of opportunities for role-playing if they are involved in politics.

The Paizo Kingmaker adventure path might provide some ideas for you:

That is one RPG path I would really like to adapt for our WHAA games. The players must clear out all the hostiles from the area, gaining rank and power as they do so, until they can try founding their own kingdom.

And finally, the old Keep on the Borderland module for D&D is a classic of its type. The Caves of Chaos house numerous bad guys for the players to defeat and drive off. The adventure is set in one area and you could easily adapt that idea, as with the Kingmaker adventure path, to have the players clearing out the bad dudes and then helping people to settle in the area.

With regard to the terrain, are you planning to model just one area and have that set up pretty much permanently? If you created a number of sets instead, you could have a bit more variety. Like a low budget TV show, you could have The Village, The Dungeon, The Wilderness and The Town. Each scene could be set in one of these. Given the modularity of the WWG sets, you could easily vary them as needed.

Hope this helps,
Ruarigh

Building everything for an entire village is a project, building everything for wilderness is another project, and building dungeons are projects all their own. Having a village fully setup requires a lot of square footage; I couldn't even fit a small village on my 3 big gaming tables (about 10'x5' of pure gaming table space; this includes saving a few feet for people to sit with books, papers, and snacks) Here are some examples of Falcon's Hollow; I could only get about 1/5 of a pretty small town on the game table (10 buildings of about 50). Certainly not the entire town or any surrounding area.







Here's one large building with a small courtyard. It took up about 3/4 of the gaming table area. What was good about this was that a lot of encounters could occur in one area with out having to setup other areas in order to continue. You can also see how players tend to spread out; papers, drinks, food, dice, books, etc... so you can't really soak up every square inch of the tables with terrain or people get cramped and things get knocked over.




What I'm getting at here is that if you don't have the space to setup an entire location (village, wilderness, dungeon, etc) then you spend a significant amount of time removing things from the game table and then setting up the next area. Having things staged a head of time as best you can really helps.

What do you really want to represent with terrain? Does every block of the town need to be on the table all of the time? Does the entire dungeon need to be on the table at the begining of the adventure... or at any point really? What I did was just build terrain and setup major encounters. Everything else could be done quick and dirty with out much setup or simply harken back to D&D games of old and skip the terrain.

It's hard to keep up with a group sometimes. Especially at higher levels when they can travel quickly to far reaching areas of the world... or other worlds. Trying to have terrain for, and render, every place their characters move to just isn't feasable. The inverse is to restrict them to an area, which works some times, but I try not to be too heavy handed about that because that really does limit the freedom of players and their characters.




As for suggestions on what adentures work well with WWG terrain... I thought all of the adventures in, and around, Falcon's Hollow were a perfect fit with a few WWG model sets.

Hollow's Last Hope is a free adventure module from Paizo. A great way to see the quality of stuff you get from Paizo; I gladly paid for subsequent products from them after running this adventure. http://paizo.com/store/paizoExclusives/v5748btpy82r0

There are several other adventures set in this area which all would work well with certain WWG model sets.
D0 - Hollow's Last Hope (lvl 1)
D1 - Crown of the Kobold King (lvl 2)
D2 - Revenge of the Kobold King (lvl 5)
E1 - Carnival of Tears (lvl 5)
D4 - Hungry Are The Dead (lvl 6)
PFS scenario Pallid Plague

WWG model sets that work well with these adventures:
Village Works
Thoumonts
Exterier Works: Hinterlands
Interior Works: Pubs & Inns
Interior Works: Castles & Keeps
Kitbash: Village Works Interiors

Shameless plug for Dave Graffam's models. If you can find some of his old free models they are nice, look great next to Village Works models, help fill out or diversify any village, and can't beat the price!

Anyway... I've said too much already... good luck!

I can't help you with published adventures but I am running a campain simmular to the one you are discribeing. I used himm streets to build a town square that is the home base for all the action. But week to week I'm not afraid to let the players wander off and then build a new pit stop for the guys to dig into, then going back for main plot hooks. It's a nice home base but you can supsrize them every week with a little side builds or throw in a map or what ever. Last week I used 1 inch grid paper for a nine foot long rooftop skill chalenge. They never saw it coming. But feel free to explore keeping it all on one map. It should be cool for one adventure but your players will be moving on before long. Maybe get thoumonts and give them Inn or manor to call home.