If you’ve been following along with Nate’s Tempest Thursday posts, you’ve probably noticed a few of the new Settlement Widgets. These use the rules and statblocks for settlements in the Pathfinder RPG GameMastery Guide, and just like other assets on SyncRPG, they can be inserted into game pages and character profiles, or used on the SyncRPG forums.

Settlements are added with a simple form. Enter a few bits of information (name, population, tag, and description), select the size and alignment, and then choose from the provided qualities and disadvantages to automatically calculate everything else, including the settlement’s statistics and available magic item tables.

You can add your own settlements to Kithera when running The Rescue of Doniert Ironvale, The Riverford Freelancers or your own adventures set in Ironhull or your own worlds! The settlements can be dragged from the SyncRPG website right onto a hex map in the VTT, allowing players to see the name and description, and GMs to view the more detailed information.

There are also macros for settlements! You can think of settlements in the VTT sort of like N/PC tokens, but they only have a few things they can do: The most interesting of which is to quickly see if and when the guards respond when an alarm is raised.

Additionally, NPCs tagged with the name of your settlement will automatically show up within the widget under the heading of notable NPCs. It’s extremely easy to associate characters and their usable VTT tokens with a settlement; just tag it!

When shared on SyncRPG, your settlements can be brought into the games of players around the world. That fun little hamlet of forest cultists can be dropped into the forest in anyone else’s game.

We’re planning to make good use of this community feature in our future Tempest adventure modules, creating large sandbox areas for GMs to expand and enhance the adventures with their own settlements and encounters.

The feature is still pretty new, and might have a few bugs in it. We’d love to hear your feedback and feature requests! Let us know how you’d like to use settlements in your games, and share them online!

Discuss 'Settlement Widget and Macros' on the SyncRPG forums