Players love going "off mission", exploring side paths, or wandering around your sandbox. Creating everything you need for a village without making it feel too vague or undercooked is impossible. Those detours require detail.
Even if you have useful tables, you don't want to bog down your sessions by rolling on random tables and taking notes just to answer simple questions like "where can we sleep?" or "where is the blacksmith?'
Published adventures offer interesting locations but sometimes feel restrictive or too closely tied to a campaign. Perhaps they're written just to serve as a catalyst for the main adventure, making it feel less like a breathing, living village and more like a video game prompt.
Homebrewing villages takes hours for what often amounts to only a few minutes of gametime interaction. Even if you use AI (yuck), you have to spend time generating those questions. Plus, you have to know what questions to ask the generator.
And even then, those answers are probably relatively weak, lacking proper continuity!

Just Passing Through is the perfect toolbox for the Gamemaster who lacks adequate time to prepare.
These two books offer a total of 32 settlements, complete with:
Read-aloud descriptions of each location
Fully detailed maps
A handful of interesting NPCs to serve as helpers, quest-givers, and even enemies
Important locations in each settlement offering places to stay and purchase things, as well as mysterious locations to explore, which may lead to quests
A rules-agnostic adventure that you can easily insert into your campaign
Random encounter lists for day and night
Additional adventure hooks
The books will also contain:
Historical information on Euro-medieval villages and towns if you want to strive for historical accuracy
Lots and lots of random tables
Information on how to easily adjust the settlements to better suit your campaign world
Notes on rules system adaptation (5e, OSR, and so forth)
These books are 100% rules agnostic. That means you can use any tabletop role-playing game ruleset you prefer—Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons (2014 or 2024), Old School Essentials, Mork Borg, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and so forth.
The content is drop-in, flexible, and endlessly reusable.
DM Dave
2025-09-25 15:58:51 +0000 UTCJohn Clanton
2025-09-25 15:57:43 +0000 UTC