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Boxed Text: Sayben

A little farming town on the plains that is facing a drought due to nearby monster activity.

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I often write boxed text for new in-game locations. I find it easier to think through the sights, smells, and other sensations during GM prep and write them out, rather than improv’ing when I’m trying to write a game. Here’s one such location.

As you enter town, you cross a wide but short stone bridge that arches across what used to be a small creek, but is now a trickle through a muddy gully. In front of you, a long, rounded wooden roof rises above the thatched cottages. Half of it covers a building; the other half is an open pavilion over some tables and other seating.

Just outside the pavilion, there is a bit of open grassy space surrounded by shops. Oleson’s Dry Goods sits furthest north, with a tall, broad storage shed out back connected to the dirt road that runs through town. Next to it there’s a fenced-in area nestled between the other buildings, and from the equipment you recognize it as a blacksmith’s shop. The Winter Wheat Inn is on the other side of the green, a quaint two-story cottage that serves as a boarding house. Next to it sits the Dalmora Brewing Company, a rather plain wooden building with a high pitched roof.

To the north, just up a small rise–partially natural, partially reinforced by a retaining wall–sits a bathhouse. Behind it is one of the few copses of trees that dot the town. Between the buildings, you can make out a gully winding its way from the north into town, but like the one you saw as you entered, it seems to be muddy and rather empty. Beyond that, you see a windmill and a grain silo on the road leading north out of town.

The plains of Dalmora continue rolling south of town, out past a cluster of farmhouses and off into the horizon. Towards the west, the road continues off through the fields.


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