Few of the published Dungeons & Dragons adventures make use of a home base that you return to again and again. This is not, in fact, that surprising. When you think of classic fantasy adventures, I bet mostly you think of adventures that take place far from home. The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, and many more – they feature trips to exotic lands where the heroes must face a variety of challenges.

This isn’t to say that there are no adventures set around a home base. As I noted in my last post, Lost Mine of Phandelver revolves around the small town of Phandalin. And Waterdeep: Dragon Heist takes place entirely in that city.

These two adventures show two approaches to the home base: the home as hub, to which you return after each expedition, and the home as adventuring location, where it includes all of the action.

I’ll discuss more of the home-as-adventuring-location in a future article, but I want to talk a bit about the home-as-hub here.

The Adventuring Hub

There are many campaigns which use hub towns and cities. In computer games, they’re particularly common. (It was actually something mentioned during the marketing of Horizon: Forbidden West). In some, you travel between hubs. In each hub, you exhaust the available side quests and perform the main quest, then move on. These don’t really feel like home bases, for good reason. They’re just adventuring locations.

In others, it’s just a single hub, to which you keep returning. I’ve been playing a lot of Stellar Blade of late, and its use of the hub (Xion) made me think. It has recurring characters, who engage you on several missions – both main and side – and one-shot characters as well. The one-shots give variety, but the recurring characters give you connection to the place.

Your missions are in quite varied locations (rarely in Xion, though some are), but you always return. In a very nice touch, just before the end of the story, the main recurring characters gather to wish you well. That’s what you want to see – the characters that matter continuing to be used.

Recurring Characters

This is something that is absent in Lost Mine of Phandelver. There are some very interesting characters in the town, each with one quest, and then they’re never heard of again. What’s going on here? Well, we’re running into one of the opportunities of a role-playing game with an actual living DM. And one of its drawbacks.

The opportunity is that the DM can react to what the players like. If they really like Halia Thornton and don’t like Sister Garaele, then you as the DM can invent more situations for Halia to get involved in. With a computer game, you’re limited to what the programmers have included.

The drawback is that the DM may not have much else but their imagination as to what Halia does. The adventure doesn’t provide additional direction as to how Halia involves herself in the characters’ lives thereafter.
“Ah!” you say. “You’re a DM! Why don’t you just make it up?”

Well, making up stuff works best when you have a good base of underlying knowledge from which to start. The amount you need varies from DM to DM. I have a history of running and reading books with Zhentarim and Harpers in the Forgotten Realms, so it’s easier for me. But I’d far rather have suggestions than nothing at all.
And this is one of the useful techniques that designers can use: providing short quest ideas for future use of potentially interesting characters.

Quest Givers with Depth

Although I’ll discuss Waterdeep: Dragon Heist more in my next article, this is something that it does well in the faction quest section. Each faction has a list of four quests linked to levels. Each is not long, but when you consider that a party could very easily be doing the quests of three of the five factions, that’s a lot of content! Yes, you need to fill in a lot of details – but just having an adventure hook and the details of Waterdeep help a lot.

Don’t underestimate the usefulness of a recurring quest giver, especially if you make them more expressive than a doormat. React to how the characters fulfil their objectives. Be snarky if required, praiseful if warranted, or sympathetic if everything went really wrong.

It’s those recurring characters that really make a home base work. Meanwhile, you also have the mechanical side of things. And that’s a very interesting kettle of fish.

Character Benefits at Home

We’ve seen many attempts at providing things to benefit characters who are home. Strongholds and Followers, the new Bastions system of the 2024 DMG, and the franchises of Acquisitions Incorporated to name but three recent versions.

They’re tricky to pull off!

Underlying the stronghold rules is this problem that they’re often very internal. That is to say, they only affect the player character and not the campaign. (Bastions are probably the most obvious of these positions). From time to time, you have some event at the stronghold, but many of the modern versions give some benefit to the characters that then is in effect when they’re elsewhere.

And thus, you get wildly different reactions to them based on the individual players. Some players very much engage with their individual fiction of their stronghold. It may not impinge on the DM or other players at all, but it very much matters to them. The stronghold has real narrative heft – even if you’re unaware of it.

And others look for the best bonuses and couldn’t care less where they come from. They have a +1 to hit? Fantastic! Oh, it came from a stronghold. Well, I had to spend the money somewhere!

Do the Players Care?

You also have the systems that players can’t be bothered engaging with. I’ve ended up playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla this year. It has a home base – a village you’ve founded in England – but very little action takes place there. You come back mainly between major arcs to spend your plunder and upgrade the village.

There’s a mechanic that allows me to call a village feast, which gives my character bonuses. All I have to do is ring a bell and watch (skip) a short cinematic. How often do I do so? Not at all. Once I’m in the new province, I never go home – and so the bonus wears out since I’m there for hours over several play sessions.

Meanwhile, if I’m playing Cyberpunk 2077, I go back home every night to my apartment (in the Glen), where I shower and sleep – gaining small bonuses to healing and stamina.

Same player, completely different reaction to two systems. And with most stronghold systems not being terribly well integrated into the main game?

As I get older, I’m most interested in the idea of having the stronghold/bastion than the reality. Unless I manage to populate it with interesting characters which get used in the campaign again and again…