Explore a detailed, immersive town, with unique NPCs, local businesses, regional lore, and quest hooks.
I'm preparing a brand new campaign and I wanted to make the starting town a really detailed, well-realized location, filled with interesting NPCs, stores, and stories. The result is this 10-page PDF, covering the town of Ardenwold, the surrounding landscape, and the main quest hook that the players are going to encounter at the outset of the game.
As always, Ardenwold is presented in a setting-agnostic way, so you can drop it into literally any fantasy campaign world.
Trust me - my session prep never really looks like this in practice. Normally it's a Google Doc with the words, "Goblin with dynamite??" and not much else. But since this is the first session of a new campaign that I plan to run for quite a while, I wanted to go all-out.
Enjoy!