By now you should be an expert in creating new settlements. You figured out locations and districts and filled it with a bunch of interesting landmarks. But what to do now?

We have concentrated on stocking our settlement. The next step is to breathe some life into them. But what does that actually mean? Instead of adding even more procedures, we can reuse existing one. It will all fit like jigsaw pieces.

Settlements as Factions

We already introduced Tiers as a measurement of Wealth of a settlement. You know what else has a Tier? That's right: Factions.

As a faction, a settlement will have a status towards your characters. A positive status (and I consider 0 to be positive here) means, that they are safe in this settlement. A Haven. This is where your characters go back time and time again after their adventures. The Keep on the Borderlands.

As a faction it is also affected by the world itself. Settlements will have a stability. Shake it to much, it will loose Tiers and could ultimately be abandoned. One way to achieve that is by introducing negative goals, or Troubles. Other factions could also have it as their goal to topple a specific settlement - or it could be yours if you want to deliberately destroy a settlement.

What is a Trouble exactly? As I've mentioned it is kind of a negative goal. Once its progress track is filled, instead of going up in Tiers you go down. Troubles are something internal to the settlement, like a plague or a volcano that is going to erupt. If somebody is acting against the settlement it is also troubling, but not a Trouble. You can also think of it as Pressure.

As characters you can now interact with such Troubles and goals. You can help in stopping or advancing them. Once it is fulfilled it will move a settlement from stable to unstable and ultimately the settlement with loose Tiers. The size will remain unchanged, but they will no longer be able to provide certain services. Shops are getting closed due to less demand and wealth.

To keep things simple, limit the amount of Troubles of a settlement to one and only give a Trouble to the settlement, the characters are currently invested in. Keep the focus of the lens on their current location. Progress it normally during the faction turn.

Settlements as Sites

When it comes to navigating a settlement, you can handle it as a site. Either each district is its own site (the fractal nature of sites), or you can use a single site to represent the complete settlement. This also gives the characters a layout of the place and might introduce some barriers, for example they can't access the upper city because they don't have the necessary papers.

You can also use a site, to generate a settlement. This is especially interesting if you are not in a Haven but are rather exploring an enemy city or opposing faction camp. At that point it becomes a dungeon and you have to sneak your way around. This also makes monsters more integrated into your world, if you give them a settlement.

Actions and Complications

Now that there's some live in your settlements, characters want to interact with it. Go shopping, explore the city or do some other stuff. All of this takes time of course. And if there's time, there will be tension.

If you are in a Haven, the Tension Pool will not increase when you take actions. It is a safe place after all. If you take reckless actions however, you will still roll the pool. Same goes, if you are not in a Haven, you will use the pool as normal.

Within a settlement actions will take about a watch. Depending on what they are doing of course, you can maybe have multiple actions within a watch (like quickly shopping for some stuff).

Speaking of shopping. You don't need to fully play out a shopping episode if you don't want to. Your merchants can be nameless and faceless NPCs if need be.