Investigation Check: Spectacular Settlements

For this Investigation Check, we’re going to take a look at Spectacular Settlements by Nord Games.

Right off the bat, I’m just going to tell you that I LOVE Spectacular Settlements. So much so, that I also got Dangerous Destinations, the second book in this series and I am eager to utilize it. I’m also eagerly awaiting the kickstarter for the 3rd book in the series Wonderous Worlds.

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As I noted, I absolutely love Spectacular Settlements. I’ve had the opportunity to use it a couple of times, one for building out the town of Dreadmere, as well as Blyris Bledstone’s Menagerie of Curiosities for my D&D solo game 1. The book is system agnostic; however, it is more tailored to a fantasy RPG setting. You could tweak it to work in any type of environment in my opinion.

Chapter Overview

Following is an overview of the chapters from Spectacular Settlements.

Chapter 1: Introduction

This chapter obviously provides the introduction to what is contained in the rest of the book, first talking about the Builders for each type of settlement while also covering at a high level the types of settlements and important ideas to keep in mind while building those out. It also provides the location for you to grab the supplemental Settlement Sheets you can use while building out the settlement. Think of Settlement Sheets much like Character Sheets where you record the attributes and modifiers for your settlement as you build it out. I was keeping notes on my towns in either a word document or spreadsheet until I used this book and its sheets. Now I keep main location information in these settlement sheets.

Chapter 2-7

These chapters each start off with an overview of building out the specific type of settlement the chapter is focused on. Starting with Trading Posts, and then progressively moving through larger types of settlements from Villages, Towns, Cities, Capitals and finally Fortresses.

Each chapter leads off with a breakdown of the phases or steps to building out the settlement, and then you are provided with various tables to roll on throughout the steps to flesh the details out. Results may sometimes apply modifiers to rolls performed later during the stage of development. For instance, the result of rolling on the Age of the settlement might lead you to apply a +2 modifier to the traffic there which is determined later. I like this dynamic approach as you build out.

Each chapter also ends with 8 premade settlements generated using the steps of the chapter that you could just take and drop into your game.

Chapter 8: Interesting NPCs

This chapter has numerous pre-made NPCs following different specialties such as Innkeepers, Tailors, or Artists etc. These could be helpful to just randomly roll on and drop into your town.

Appendices

Appendix A provides a glossary covering the different location terms found throughout the book, while the other appendices provide several tables to roll on for Encounters, Rumors and various other useful tables relating to settlements.

Verdict

As I noted before, I love this book. It’s makes building out a settlement really fun and provides a great deal of inspirational information for you while you work through it’s development. 5 gold pieces for sure. You can read about me utilizing this book in Well… that was interesting: D&D 5E Solo Game 1 – Session 8.

Pros

• Gives you an easy to follow and dynamic way to build out your settlements in your games.
• The Supplemental Settlement Sheet is a great resource to jot down and keep track of the statistics of your town not only for initial creation, but as a reminder of what the town contains as you play.

Cons

• I honestly can’t think of any. Nord Games has hit a home run with Spectacular Settlements.

Here is a review of Spectacular Settlements from another Youtube channel I follow Mr. Tarrasque.

Just go grab yourself a copy of Spectacular Settlements!