Getting Players Attached To Their Home Base

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Getting Players Attached To Their Home Base

Home bases are like Swiss Army Knives for GMs. A collection of useful campaign tools in one small package.

With home bases, we get great GM boons:

GM Better. Each time you run the home base, you flesh out more detail, roleplay with confident familiarity, and improvise with greater ease.
Plot Machine. When players care about a place, they will spend all their health points and spell slots to protect it. This gives us a powerful, personal, and relevant way to motivate the party.
Treasure Exchange. A dragon horde of gold becomes meaningless when you can’t do anything with it. Why not trick, con, and steal the party’s loot? Er, I mean, let’s give the party ways to spend their gold, gems, and other treasure.
Player Connection. Baseless PCs can feel disconnected from your world. They feel like tourists, passing through and solving problems before moving on. A home anchors them as citizens, neighbors, and people who belong.

When players get attached to their home, all kinds of plots and adventures open up.

However, if players are willing to pour gas on their base and throw a match over their shoulder on the way out, we’ve got a problem.

Here are some tips on how to get players attached to their home base and caring a great deal more about your world and campaign.

Make It Player Choice

Start the campaign off in the home base or make it a form of treasure. Offer the home base. Don’t force it. Let players opt in through story and reward. Choice breeds ownership.

Disassociate yourself from your most desired outcomes here. This came up in a coaching call the other day. The GM wanted the party to pursue his plot and was frustrated players weren’t biting on the hooks.

When this happens, follow the players’ direction. Avoid forcing play as this consumes a lot of your energy. Instead, meet the party where they are at and try new hooks.

So, if players reject the home base, so be it. Let the consequences play out.
This is where the real game begins, turning player choices into compelling consequences that become the next adventure.

If we can have players experience the downside to not having a home base, they might reconsider. And regardless of outcome, we can use the consequences as plot and encounter hooks.

Even when something we offer gets rejected, we can still mine it for gameplay opportunities!

The Consequences

If players decide to walk away from the offered keep, ship, or hidden grove, don’t punish them. Instead, let the world react logically.

The absence of a home base creates its own set of problems that will naturally highlight the benefits of having a place to call home.

1. Rival Occupants

The most powerful consequence is that someone else takes it.

That abandoned watchtower doesn’t stay empty forever. A few sessions later, the party hears a rival adventuring party, local lord, or even an arm of the thieves’ guild has moved in, fixed it up, and is now enjoying the benefits.

The base becomes a recurring landmark of a competitor’s success that could even become an obstacle for the party later.

2. Logistical Nightmares

The party exits the dungeon alive and brimming with loot. But some of the rewards are…inconvenient.

Without a safe place to store these things until sold, they become a burden. Perhaps there’s exorbitant storage fees, or risk of vermin or theft.

Selling such treasure becomes harder with strangers, as well. Social skill checks get negative modifiers.

3. Nowhere is Truly Safe

Inns, taverns, and streets are public places. Emphasize their lack of security.

An important NPC they needed to protect is attacked in the room next door. The party’s rented room gets looted while they’re out. Persistent enemies can easily track their movements by asking around at local inns.

Without a fortified, private space, the party is perpetually vulnerable.

4. The Slow Burn of Inconvenience

A home base provides resources. Without one, everything costs time and money.

Need to do research? You have to gain access to a guarded library. Need to brew a potion? You’ll have to pay a local alchemist to use their lab. Need to train up a skill or level? Every downtime activity that would be simple at a home base becomes a small side quest of finding and paying for access elsewhere.

5. Low Status

When the party tries to negotiate with the baron, he asks, “And who are you, exactly? Where do you hail from?” The answer, “We’re wandering adventurers,” carries far less weight than, “We are the masters of Stonefall Keep on your border.”

A home base provides legitimacy, a title, and a place in the local political landscape. Non-citizens might get treated poorly.

Without stakes in the area, PCs become homeless mercenaries at best, and meddling criminals without any rights at worst, and powerful people will treat them as such.

6. The Patron Moves On

If PCs don’t establish roots, it’s one less reason for notable NPCs to stay in the area. Especially if the villain’s making life uncomfortable as the party struggles for victory.

Examine each character sheet. Behind many sheet elements are valuable NPCs who also decide to move on for various reasons. Gear suppliers, components and spells provider, trainers, healers, sages, hirelings, and so on.

Alternatively, if offered from a powerful patron, then rejecting the base could be seen as rebuffing support. Disappointed, the king, baron, or guild offers the base and their support to another group.

Characters now find that this other group gets the best quests, inside information, and political backing that could have been theirs.

It’s Your Move

Noodling a bit in advance on What If…the party ignores your home base opportunity, we can turn lemons into citrus potions by plotting the consequences and turning them into future gameplay.

NPCs treat the characters differently, maybe even poorly
The party feels rootless and unwelcome
Setting friction increases with relationships and standing in a community

If we succeed in playing out the consequences, players might change their minds. If they don’t, we’ve got several developments to play and find out what happens!

And if you want any help on how to build a home base settlement for your campaign, check out CampaignCraft and start crafting today.

How to Create a Village Story Arc

Why would players want a Home Base?

“It’s just another thing to get screwed over by the GM, right? An anchor. It’ll slow us down, make us vulnerable. No thanks, Johnn.”

We hear that skepticism a lot when we talk about player characters acquiring a Home Base. And it’s understandable. After all, why invite trouble?

But What If… a Home Base wasn’t a liability, but rather a dynamic source of endless adventures and player engagement? What if it was the “carrot” that made your players actively want to protect and develop something truly their own?

Today, let’s explore how a well-designed Home Base, using principles from CampaignCraft, can become a central pillar of your campaign’s unfolding story.

The Secret to a Beloved Home Base: A Built-In Story Arc

Think of a Home Base not just as a location, but as beloved property players can acquire, defend, upgrade, and earn cool campaign boons from.

We’vew touched on the “stick” – the potential downsides and missed opportunities when players don’t have a home base, making them feel less anchored to your world.

Today, we focus squarely on the “carrot” – the powerful incentives and inherent plot drivers a Home Base provides, ensuring players want to engage with it.

The first rule of How To Build a Village in CampaignCraft is this: we don’t break the players’ toys prematurely.

We’re not here to punish player investment. Quite the opposite. As Game Masters, let’s make an oath: We will not attack the Home Base until the second half of the campaign.

With this commitment, we build trust, allow players to bond deeply with their acquired property, and foster a sense of security before introducing major threats.

The commitment also brings up a critical question: What narrative structure could make a Home Base feel alive and valuable, even when it’s not under direct threat?

In CampaignCraft, every important NPC, location, and item should function as a tiny plot hook engine. Through carefully crafted details, connections, and secrets, we ensure all aspects of a village promote the story and offer players interesting choices. This applies especially to the Home Base.

So let’s dive into a fantastic plot structure we can layer onto any Home Base:

The Classic Home Base Arc

Serenity. Hommlet. The Silver Chalice Inn.

The key is that wherever or whatever the party calls home should not remain static. We want the home base to change as our campaign unfolds, making it feel alive and dynamic, and deeply hooking players.

To achieve this, we leverage the versatile 5 Room Dungeon method as our plot structure. It’s concise, has clear story beats, and is specifically designed for TTRPGs, not passive audiences.

This gives us a compelling Home Base arc with five distinct phases:

Acquire
Choose Sides
Defend
Upgrade
Feature

Let’s explore the first phase:

Story Arc Phase 1. Acquire

This is the Origin Story of the party’s Home Base and how they came to possess it. This initial step is crucial for player buy-in and establishing a personal connection to the location.

Here are a few ways players might acquire their Home Base:

It looks like an old Browncoat cargo ship. Based on its design, from the old war. Salvage rights make it yours, if you want.
Burne congratulates you on defeating the evil bandits. ‘We all can finally sleep well tonight thanks to your heroism. As a thank you, here is a deed to land at the edge of the village. First year of taxes are on me.’
An old friend summoned you to the city. The message hinted only at grim portents. You now stand before the Silver Chalice Inn, which has seen better days, alas.

Helga opens the door wide, in tears, and shoves a paper in your hands. It’s a Last Will & Testament. And your names are on it as inheriting the inn! Helga leans closer. ‘Something terrible has happened…’

The Acquire phase should not just be a handout. It’s an an important part of the tale that anchors characters to your campaign and setting.

Next Up: Choose Sides

Today, we’ve introduced the power of the Home Base as a “carrot” for player engagement and laid out the skeleton of its dynamic story arc using the 5 Room Dungeon method.

And Phase #1 is all about players acquiring their Home Base and ensuring an engaging origin story.

This structured approach helps players want, protect, and even customize their home without us resorting to constant attacks.

It also allows us to anticipate future story beats and let gameplay naturally direct when to trigger each new phase of the arc, all without railroading your players.

In the next part of this series, we’ll delve into the “Choose Sides” phase, getting your party entangled in the exciting plots and machinations that

make a Home Base truly come alive!

Ready to transform your campaigns and create unforgettable worlds?

Dive deeper this summer with CampaignCraft: From 5 Room Dungeon to Universe. Unlock the secrets to building detailed settlements, compelling factions, and dynamic stories that will keep your players hooked for years.

Stop prepping endlessly and start gaming more. Your most engaging campaign starts now. Click here to begin your CampaignCraft journey.

Choosing Sides

The Easiest Way to Help Characters Care About Their Home Base.

Here’s an automatic crit for getting players to bond with their Home Base and your setting at the same time.

The story arc series continues… Last week we talked about why I love home bases for characters. We also talked about the challenges of getting characters attached to theirs.

And one of the best ways to achieve player engagement involves turning the Home Base into a story arc with five parts, modelled after the 5 Room Dungeon:

Acquire
Choose Sides
Defend
Upgrade
Feature

We’re on Story Beat #2. Choose Sides today.

An Easy Way to Get the Party Involved

Villages have been my most common type of Home Base over the years.

They interlock well with character sheets via equipment, training, and improving scores.

They support the story with NPCs at hearths who have delicious hooks for hungry ears, and a bed to get those double healing rates.

And they support the plot because, where there’s a village, there’s conflict. Hatfields and McCoys, Montagues and Capulets, the Professor versus the Millionaire and his wife.

It’s ridiculously easy to inject factions into a village. This is a specific step we perform in CampaignCraft. It’s fun. It involves drawing a map and some zones. Zones become territories. Instant factions.

However, not every GM wants a lot of this in their campaign.

Imagine faction play as being on a spectrum. On one end, every character, location, and mission bleeds flags, heraldry, and the company song.

On the other end we have a realm of lawless individuals fending for themselves in the zero sum game of anarchy.

And somewhere in the middle lies your brand of faction world building and relevance to play.

A wonderful thing about Home Base factions is we can run them as mere golden exclamation marks or as intense Soap Opera Webs (my lingo for how I run social conflict in a place).

I think where many GMs nope out is the encumbrance of creating factions and running them. A hassle.

If this is you, I have good news.

We can earn all the GM boons I mentioned above with the barest minimum of work. A name and a word that identifies them is all you need for today’s Home Base tip. The Bankers Guild, Ravenstaag Nobles, Church of Zeus, corrupt guards, haughty elves.

And if you love factions, then you’ll love today’s framework for the second story beat of our Home Base Story Arc.

Three Layers of Faction Conflict (and a Sneaky 4th)

In general, we want to assign a faction to everything. The people, buildings, land, and resources of the community.

Based on this approach, here are three easy ways to hook your player characters into faction play:

Make the party’s Home Base land or zone a contested hot spot that factions compete over.
Assign a faction to each enemy and ally.
Make each villager loyal or subservient to a faction.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve also created a fourth faction without even trying: the neutrals. Because, when everyone’s in a faction, the neutrals become a faction.

Two easy faction types I use a lot for villages are clans and wealth. Feuding families offer endless conflicts. And stratified societies offer class warfare.

In this way, no character can escape.

But players won’t feel any burden, and so won’t resent it. It’ll be a fun new aspect to play that spurs great roleplay.

In Story Arc Phase 2. Choose Sides we help players bond with their Home Base and start connecting with our setting via the existence of factions.

Players will be drawn better to your plot hooks, setting details, Home Base play, or all three, by having them choose sides.

Examples

Our examples from Part II of this series were the ship Serenity, the village of Hommlet, and the Silver Chalice Inn.

Without any effort on our part, we let world logic and player choices do the work of picking sides.

The trick is skinning: applying a new setting layer (the faction identity) to an existing game piece (an NPC, monster, item, location…) without changing its fundamental nature.

Take what you’ve already prepared and assign factions to those game pieces. Faction name and 1-3 word descriptor suffice:

The Red Hands, top storey heists
The Smiths’ Guild, high fixed prices
The Wildwood Elves, save the forest

Then we play to find out what happens.

For example:

Does the party advertise the cargo ship’s Browncoat origins, or attempt to disguise it as an Alliance vessel?

If the PCs do nothing to change the appearance of their cargo ship, they advertise they’re rebels.
A property this far from the village puts the party officially in the wild lands and in the territory of faerie rings, dogmen raiders, prickly elven rangers, and an elemental cult gaining popularity amongst young villagers.

When PCs see smoke rising over yonder then hear howls of dogmen, they know a caravan or farmstead is in peril. Do they run to help?
The inn our PCs inherited lives in a rich neighbourhood that three thieves guilds fight to control. The Church of Asmodeus next door claims the party’s souls are doomed unless they sign a contract. And the local guards, who loyally serve the greedy district Overseer, are nothing more than ill-mannered thugs seeking to line their filthy pockets.

When the party spots rogues plying their trade on inn customers, what do they do? Turning a blind eye means war breaks out in the common room as it becomes the next battleground for The One Thieves Guild to Rule Them All.

From Conflict to Opportunity

Story beat number two, Choose Sides, turns our village or Home Base into an interesting backdrop of conflict and events.

This dynamic gives interested players a roleplay puzzle. How will their Home Base exist within the community?

Players will likely aim for the neutral route. I don’t blame them. But, as we’ve seen, the plot structure bakes into the game automatic side-choosing. Or, at least, perceived choice.

Three Examples

Regardless of party neutrality or side joined, we don’t attack the Home Base directly. Quite the opposite. We twist the conflicts into opportunities for more gameplay.

Serenity: The cargo ship is slow and will need repairs, but ironically, it’s old-fashioned design makes it stealthier on modern sensors.
Land in Hommlet. The faeries use their charms and tricks to get the party’s help. Dogmen raiders tend to have lairs full of pillaged loot. Elven jerks make awesome guides. And the cult has many needs for a group of hobos.
The Silver Chalice Inn: If Little Phingers joins a thieves’ guild he’ll earn all kinds of missions for the group. Asmodeus has all the hot gossip you could want. And the local guards will tip-off the party about great potential loot drops (for a share, of course).

Our job is to present choices and dilemmas to the players in this stage of the campaign such that the PCs end up being identified as having picked a side whether they intended to or not.

Players will either choose one side, try to play multiple sides, or try to stay neutral.

In all these cases we have fantastic gameplay afoot.

Your Home Base Story Continues

Give settlements their own story arcs to hook players. Use the 5 Room Dungeon structure as your guide.

In the Choose Sides phase, your goal is to transform the party’s Home Base from a static location into a hub of conflict. By reskinning existing village elements with factional loyalties, you create a web where every PC action — or inaction — gets perceived as taking a stand.

This simple step gives players a tangible stake in your world and their place within it. They will start to see their Home Base not just as a place to rest, but as a place to protect.

And they’ll need to, because once the lines have been drawn and their allegiances are known, the next phase of our story arc becomes inevitable: it’s time to Defend.

If you’re ready to build entire worlds with the same powerful, low-prep techniques, then I invite you to check out my Campaigncraft: From 5 Room Dungeon to Universe program:

Discover more and join here.

Do your villages feel like just a collection of shops? A place for players to quickly sell loot, abuse, then leave?

Starting now in CampaignCraft: From 5 Room Dungeon to Universe, we’re tackling that problem and more. I’ve just launched our newest Quest: How To Build a Village, and the first two lessons are available for all CampaignCraft GMs.

We’re building this course “in public”, which means CampaignCraft GMs get instant access to lessons and tools as they’re created. You can apply these concepts to your game immediately and even help shape the final product with your feedback.

And if you prefer, you can chain smoke the entire course like Netflix once all the lessons are complete.

For all of August, the CampaignCraft spotlight is on mastering settlement design. This is your chance to work with me and fellow GMs to craft a home base that will anchor your campaign and become a beloved part of your world. When September rolls around, the spotlight moves to our next Quest, so let’s make the most of this month.

For current CampaignCraft GMs: You’re all set. Jump in and start building right away. Access How To Build A Village Here.

Not yet a CampaignCraft GM? If you’re ready to transform your settlements from simple inns to dynamic micro-worlds of adventure, I invite you to join us.

Let’s Build a Village Together.

Cheers,
Johnn
roleplayingtips.com
https://discord.gg/6MxTRAqQ76
Have more fun at every game!

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