An Engine of Inspiration
Spectacular Settlements will help you create all manner of places to populate the worlds in which you play, be they existing settings, or your very own.
Inside, you’ll find easy-to-use settlement builder chapters, interesting NPCs, and a wide variety of other useful tables. For GMs in a hurry, 64 fully-realized pre-generated settlements, each with their own unique artwork and full color map, are ready to be slotted in to any game world in seconds.
With the help of this book, realize the places that have been locked within your imagination!
borflogz@gmail.com (verified owner) –
This book is now my all time favorite tool for 5e. It has completely changed the way I build cities and my players are already noticing a difference. Whenever I need a trade post/village/city this book is going to be the first thing I grab! I cannot recommend this enough. Don’t think just buy it.
totalpartychill (verified owner) –
The way this book lets you fill in your game world is fantastic. It’s great for fiction writers too. It isn’t a rigid system, and once you start going through and building a settlement, you can’t help but think about a ton of ideas and adventures coming from it. This is a must for world-building.
Kyle Rose (verified owner) –
Great tool for any Dungeon Master to help complete their world.
plainshow (verified owner) –
I ordered the hardcover version and I was impressed! This is a great source of inspiration to any home brew campaign setting, or accessory to build out and expand an existing module. Just after skimming the sections for the first time, I was flush with ideas to build this trove of inspiration into my campaign. The book quality is solid, and the work that went into the content is obviously massive. I’ve never run a collaborative world building campaign, but Spectacular Settlements makes me want to try! I was a little leery at the price, but a over 450 pages long, it was well worth it.
The big topper for this book: I didn’t order the PDF version, but immediately wanted to have nice, printed copies of the generation sheets in the appendix. Nord gives you free copies of the sheets to download off the website, even if you don’t get the downloadable PDF version. That customer service and awareness was totally appreciated! They didn’t hit me up for a few more bucks, or make me buy the PDF, it was just there. I can’t stress how nice it was to see a company, with quality content, having a great attitude with their products. I look forward to getting more Nord products.
Jakob Tonkin (verified owner) –
Does what is says on the tin. Helps you build up and develop your settlements. You do still have to do a lot of the legwork in developing the shops themselves but I have found the direction it provides invaluable. Additionally the character sheets for the settlements are very useful when running sandbox campaigns which require a lot of villages and towns
thebuzzard (verified owner) –
A fabulous resource for DMs and writers! If you want the settlements in your games to be interesting and detailed, this is the book for you. Definitely one of my best purchases of the year.
laughingdragonforge (verified owner) –
Excellent book, it has added so much depth from my trading post to my cities. It is a great book for adding that extra detail to make your town come to life for your players! Great artwork and thought was put into this book!
cashooter94 (verified owner) –
This book has helped me flesh out the world ive been building for years. It has made me think of so many things to do with my citys and settlements that i never thought of before. So glad i bought this book.
Patrick Wilson –
Spectacular Settlements is perhaps the best DM tool that I own, period. The chapters guide you through creating a trade post, village, town, city, capital, or fortress. The steps are easy to follow and the free fillable PDFs for each type of settlement keep track of everything for you. By the end of the process your settlement will be fleshed out and ready for your PCs to explore. The settlement creation system truly is a font of inspiration. I’ve gotten so many ideas for my campaign just by making one town. The book also provides pre-generated settlements of each type (especially helpful for those DMs whose PCs tend to meander from town to town on a whim). If that wasn’t enough, it also helps create interesting NPC inhabitants, provides tables for locale information, urban encounters, rumors, and more. On another note, bravo/a to whoever wrote the introductory narrative segments for each section!
Boyd Stephenson –
Spectacular Settlements is *HANDS DOWN* the most useful DMing product I own. I like my worlds to feel alive and this product is perfect for making every settlement feel like a real place with its own culture, economy, and inhabitants with their own agendas, trials, and travails!
The best part about this book is how you can either use the entries in this book to jump start your creative efforts or, if you’ve got a basic outline of what you are thinking, you can fill in the gaps in your ideas to generate the other things that would be present in a settlement to make it feel more like a real location.
Nord went above and beyond designing different “character sheets” for each type of settlement.
The first time you generate a settlement, it takes about 45-60 minutes, but you can get a working outline put together in 15 minutes after you’ve done one or two.
If you are in the market for a tool to help you create more realistic settlements, buy this book. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Pay for this book instead!
Peter (verified owner) –
This is a tremendously helpful book.
Sure, you can find town generators available online, and they’ll cough up a tavern name and a list of NPC classes / levels that live there. But I find that the Spectacular Settlements generation process coaxes out a much more vivid and vibrant creation, one that has an origin, a story, an economy. The former are places I generate with a click and discard once consumed. Spectacular Settlements are places I want to come back to.
I like the design nuances between smaller settlements compared to cities and capitals. I appreciate the MANY interesting sample settlements and NPCs. I often get distracted reading a few of them whenever I pick up the book looking for some other section.
There are a few minor and/or likely errors that I hope get corrected in future editions. The village hardships Example where one of die rolls doesn’t match the table result given. Perhaps a population from the city section that got copied and pasted into the capital section’s optional tables for population capacity.
I’d give it 4-1/2, but hey… that rounds up. This is easily my favorite DM resource.
mastergentleman (verified owner) –
What a great tool! Just been using it to make new settlements in my game, and found many more details than I normally would have. An awesome tool to use, and useful for any and all DMs!
FilthyPeasant (verified owner) –
Just ordered this. I’m not the most adept at thinking up cities, towns, and the like at speed. This looks like it’ll be a huge help with my games. Art’s gorgeous, too.
vnavone (verified owner) –
Incredibly thorough! Not only does it contain great tables for creating random settlements, but it comes packed with loads of interesting pre-generated settlements. My favorite part is probably the cast of pre-generated NPCs – 100 of them! – broken up by occupation or social position. I look forward to using these resources in my campaign!
Denise Campbell (verified owner) –
I use this often when in need of settlements. It helps my games run more smoothly especially when my players finish earlier then I expected.
STEVEN KOHLER (verified owner) –
In Worldbuilding, having this type of resource removes the pain of creating from whole-cloth!
Russel miner (verified owner) –
This is awesome! I’ve already used this to build a few cities in my bard campaign world and plan on using this for a few more in the future. I like the option of having a PDF on my phone as i do a lot of my books in digital format – so handy!
Frederick Sexe (verified owner) –
This book has been revolutionary to my campaign. I tend to use preprinted campaign maps and change the locations (to keep players off guard) and used to spend a lot of time fleshing out towns. This book allows me to flesh out a town and have tons of plot hooks for my players in less than an hour (or I can do the bare minimum on 10 minutes or so and expand as I go along). I cannot recommend this book enough for DMs who love worldbuilding and want to save time developing each little settlement on their map.
GisselaB (verified owner) –
Love this book. Have yet to use any of the pre-made city, but it has made creating my own cities so much simpler. A great tool for any DM. I ordered the hard cover and impressed with the amount of detail and pictures and time and effort that has been put into it.
jgrayuw (verified owner) –
I bought this during Black Friday, and I’m very glad I did. I had read a few reviews that painted it in a very good light, and I’ve got to say it definitely lives up to the hype. This is so much more thorough than what you get from the DMG alone. It makes your world building really come together in a Spectacular (heh) way.
I purchased a physical copy of the book as well (since I generally like to be able to flip through by hand when I’m looking for specific information), but having the pdf to do screen captures with, and the digital sheets to print and fill out as needed, is incredibly handy to have for a book with this much content.
I’ve gotta say, this purchase has made me a huge fan of Nord Games content. I recently backed their Kickstarter project for their Oracle story builder cards, and I am super pumped to see how the final product turns out.
Starman1060 (verified owner) –
Great resource! Plenty of tables to flesh out nearly all aspects of a city.
Benny the Scribe (verified owner) –
Saw this ad on Facebook. I never click on those, but I had a good feeling about it… It was so worth it! Even if you don’t have trouble making settlements, you should consider getting this! It’s fantastic!
MadFergy (verified owner) –
This is just what I needed. I am returning to D&D after 30 yrs and as the DM, I need all the help I can get. This book just made my life so much easier. This has so much info and detail, that it even help in creating my own towns with little effort. Thanks, for this wonderful book.
Malidor (verified owner) –
I am utterly amazed by this product. This is an incredible tool that I’m sure I will use for years to come!
Angel Boned (verified owner) –
WOW! An excellent resource for world building. I highly recommend this book for any DM looking for a source of inspiration.
Dwayne Hartin (verified owner) –
AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING!!!!! This is the number 1 PDF every DM should have. You can make hamlets, villages, towns, different size cites and more. Each choice comes with a fillable PDF that you have to open and explain to your players the settlement they are in. Save the settlement as SAVE AS, to keep the original blank PDF and you are set. I have never seen any other way that is this easy. Simple explanations of each style of settlement you want with charts to roll on or use to accommodate your vison. Just get this trust me. Your players will enjoy it and you will have fun making locations with this PDF!!!!!
Colossus (verified owner) –
I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with this book and already it has provided excellent inspiration for locations in my setting. It has also helped me think about things that I otherwise wouldn’t have included in writing up places. Having the pre-generated settlements are also really useful. I’ve already found multiple that fit with rough concepts I already had for places and knowing that I have those ready on the back burner make me feel ready no matter which directions my players wander in. I would strongly recommend this book (and the fillable/printable PDFs you can find for free in the store).
nortonsapple (verified owner) –
I’m so excited about this. It’s a awesome resource for new world builders like my self and impressed the veterans that I’ve shown it to.
Joanna Villafane (verified owner) –
I am the WORST at world building, but this resource is such a lifesaver. I can just roll some dice and let the results inspire me like never before. Some of my best locations are designed from the charts, and my players can spot the difference in how in detail I can become when it helps me visualize the entire setting on such a detailed level.
This book is a whopper. It’s a massive one that probably can be used to drive off the hordes as well as make the settlements they raze. This heavy tome of power is packed full of pre-generated places, charts, and honestly I wouldn’t be nearly as confident as I am without it. And regardless of if you buy this beastly book of buildings or the pdf version, you can get the fillable sheets for free here too! (Unlike this idiot who made an entire document to do just that.) This book is expensive, but it’s truly worth the cost; doubly so if you struggle with making locations like me.
James Nichols (verified owner) –
This book is incredible. The size alone is worth the price but the material inside is great as well. I appreciate not only the tables to roll for but also the preconstructed areas as well. If you are home brewing, this is a must buy. Even if you are not, you can create cities and towns within a world.
Eric-John Tate (verified owner) –
This book makes generating settlements easy, encouraging, and quick. The text, tables, and appendixes help veteran and new game masters make communities that players can enjoy spending time in.
Magnus Carlsen (verified owner) –
Great book! I love the pre generated cities, towns tradingposts ect, I have not tried creating my own yet but reading thru the process, It looks like a great DM-ing tool. =) 10/10