Jersey Devils are attacking your coal shipments. The Brotherhood of Divine Mysticism will descend upon your town after an unfortunate incident involving a Tomb Yard. And teenagers are falling into comas after playing the new hit board game from Walton’s Curios, “Dream Phone.”

The above was an actual conundrum my players were in for our years’ long campaign for The Crypt Has Opened. The players were debating about which to handle first. As they deliberated I reminded them about an aspect of the game they’d forgotten about.

They have a town, full of fellow practitioners, and a stat sheet they’d filled out for exactly this reason.

The addition of the town mechanics was late in the game, but has had incredible impact on the stories and character development. My players decided it would be best to have a group of NPCs handle the Jersey Devils. This allowed them to use their Defenses Civic Path in which they’d put a good deal of their starting points. This choice had beautiful ramifications.

For one, through hilarious roleplay it we collectively agreed that one of the player’s had a huge extended family of rednecks, who were all too happy to gear up and “get some devil meat.”

Here is where the beauty of the town mechanics came in. The player’s town works exactly like the characters. You build a dice pool of the town’s Prominence (equivalent to player’s Magic Die), the relevant Civic Path (like the player’s Spell Die), and they roll against the Imposition.

It was my goal not to have an entirely new sub-system for the town. I’ve found that systems built on top of systems can really bog down a game quickly. Anything that pulls the players out of the action, to jump to another track, can be a major bump in a session. Keeping the resolution mechanic the same, with how you build the dice pool, let the system sing.

It also let the tension build. How that roll panned out would have major ramifications on not just them, but their town. Ramifications that they would also be responsible for. Failure, and those family members would have most likely died. Success with Consequences, the family stopped an attack, but would more be on the way?

They rolled a success. Not only a success, but a Wicked Win! The family rooted out the Jersey Devils and even came back with some of the cryptid’s pelts. Which spurred one of the players to snag up a pelt and turn into a magic item for another player.

Behold, the Jersey Devil Duster of Protection.

This showed me just how powerful a town can be for a group of players. As those rolls can create amazing plot points and story beats for me as the Crypt Keeper to springboard off of. It also will show me what they want to focus on. What is most important to them during this campaign?

I can’t wait to hear about your town and all the shenanigans your players get up to.