Ten inessential worldbuilding features for local communities in your fantasy RPG:
- A grievance or conflict of interest with a neighbouring community which the community’s members feel much more strongly about than the issue’s magnitude really warrants
- A substance or commodity important to everyday life with no local source, and the complicated and inconvenient arrangement the community has made to obtain it from outside sources
- A local practice or custom whose original motivation has been rendered obsolete by changing circumstances, and which is now carried forward out of tradition
- Something that’s technically illegal, but everyone does it on the sly anyway, with enforcement of its illegality being reserved for people the community’s leaders want to mess with for unrelated reasons
- An obscure piece of trivia or local history which the community’s members regard as obvious and widely known, to the extent of treating outsiders with contempt for revealing their ignorance of it
- Some undertaking or realm of achievement in which the community isn’t particularly exceptional, but which the community’s members believe they’re the best around at as a point of civic pride
- A mostly harmless thing that nobody talks about because its existence or some facet of its historical context is regarded as an embarrassment to the community
- A particular prank that’s become traditional to play on visitors to the community, and which occasionally gets taken further than is strictly appropriate
- A specific area of the setting’s history where what the community’s members insist really happened is wildly at odds with the accepted version of events
- A genuinely dangerous circumstance that everyone treats with casual disregard because it’s always been there, and only a damn fool would actually get hurt by it anyway
Combining them - a local extremely dangerous monster/cryptid that no one ever does anything about (10) because it follows certain Rules and anyone who doesn’t deal with it properly frankly got what they deserved (5).
I’m from West Virginia. The mothman has official stats in Pathfinder. This is absolutely how we would handle things
if it were real.Yeah, 5+10 is always a fun combo. Other frequently entertaining ones include 1+6, 2+4 and 3+9.