Add a cartographer to your table!

In this week's article, which will conclude the series regarding inspiration and setting for now, see the previous entries here, I want to talk about an idea I recently had to add to your campaign world to get your players more interested in your world.

The idea came from a bit of this video, where it mentions a cartographer NPC, and the gears in my brain immediately started turning: what if you put a similar NPC in your campaign world?

Maybe it's someone that would like to explore the world and make a map of it (or an atlas, to keep the theme from the video) but is unable to move on their own, due to old age or an injury, and asks the party to collect data about the various regions of the world. Therefore he'll ask the party, when they come back to visit him, to bring him descriptions of the various places they visit, so he can "live those places through their tales".

At the table, this would translate in the players being able to, if they're interested, write their descriptions of those areas, and you, the referee, could collect them as "<NPC's Name'>'s Atlas of <Your World's Name>", giving your players a reason to be more invested in the world as a whole. If you play online, you could ask them to send you those descriptions and collect them in a shared Google Doc, or a Discord channel, or whatever you find convenient.

If you play an open table game this would be even more useful, because the atlas would be available to any PC that passes by that town (probably the main HUB in this case), allowing players to share informations about their expeditions and their quests with an in-game reason for it, enriching the immersion of the game itself.

I haven't been able to actually use it in a game yet, but I can't wait to do it, hopefully in an open table, I'd love to try it one day and I feel like this would let the players bond even more and make them feel part of the same group, even if they can't play together because of timezones or work schedules.

 If anyone feels inspired by this little idea and decides to try it, please let me know how it went! I'd love to hear about it.

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!

May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon


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