A mark of true GMing skill is the ability to take a completely mundane, non-exotic...

A mark of true GMing skill is the ability to take a completely mundane, non-exotic, non-magical situation and make it extremely compelling, memorable, and hype.

A challenge for you individually, then:

Write up the details of a small hamlet of 60 people. It cannot have any non-human races, magic, supernatural phenomena, divine blessings, sci-fi technology, or similar things, nor can it stretch plausibility and probability like "Everyone here is conveniently a big-tiddy anime girl." Make it the most interesting hamlet and enthralling hamlet possible.

Do you have what it takes?

OP, we're not going to write up a collection of hamlets for you. On top of that, what tends to make things interesting are interactions. Everything has the potential to be interesting, you can't force something to BE interesting; you can't tell your players "I spent 10 hours straight making this hamlet, so that means you need to be interested in it and do stuff here." Well, you can, but chances are they'll do stuff out of a sense of OOC obligation, or they'll just try to get out ASAP.

A mark of true GMing skill is the ability to make things interesting when they should be.

Bandits attack. Come back with a real challenge.

No, the mark of the true GM is taking ANY situation and making it compelling and memorable.

You first.

A town founded after the discovery of silver nearby in 1950, the population boom reached a peak of 2800 people in 1977 before the mine closed.

High in the Serra Nevada mountains and reached only by a gravel road and an old train spur line, it's not unusual for the whole place to be snowbound for months in winter when the passes get closed. Most everyone has moved on, save only a few die hards that remain and the occasional visitor. Writers looking for isolation, hopeful fools thinking they might be able to find more gold or silver in the old mine tunnels,

We've got a general goods store, a post office that is also our city hall, jail and sherrif's office. May's bookstore serves coffee and her scones, it's the closest thing we have to a real restaurant.

Oh, and as of last night we have two murders. Snowed in hard for better then a week now, there's no way anyone got in or the killer got out.

This. Some of our best sessions involved coming up with some crazy, drunken shit and the DM able to roll with it. Drunkenly joining a race and then interrogating a spy during said race. We even invented a new warcrime!

No one's going to write-up an entire village for your shitty campaign, but plot / adventure hooks are easy enough.

>it's the end of winter
>the fords are overflowing
>the temporary dams that have been put in place are soon to burst
>it's up to the player characters to help figure out and enact a more permanent solution
>whether it be discovering the cause of the unusual flooding, to simply evacuating the hamlet's population to a safer location, among many other possibilities

I just gave you a simple hook that could branch off in so many directions that you and your players would literally have to be retarded to not make compelling in some way.

I already run a campaign in a highly magical setting. The game is almost exclusively set in a single city. A few hours ago, one of my players complained to me as follows:

>I really feel like [you are] using magic as a crutch to make things interesting.
>Because [you] can't imagine mundane things being interesting.

Which is something I find baffling, because apparently, the way I run everyday life in the city is a little too magical for them.

It's a shame the people who insist only the grounded and mundane are truly interesting don't realize they have the functionally same opinion as the people who can't enjoy a story unless it has magic flying robot wizards.

It doesn't matter if you have the "skill" to take something inherently uninteresting and make it "good". Nobody wants to play in a game like that, people want to play in games with monsters, magic, heroics, and interesting fantasy stuff.

The mark of a true GM is a low-intensity but constant hate for their players.

I love my players like brothers. I would take bullets for them. They're my niggas. But good god do I fucking seethe over the boneheaded shit they do and never admit was boneheaded. So yes, I know that pain.

Explain how you run the city then. We'll judge you.

It's because mundanity is coming back into vogue.

I concentrate most of the action around the richer districts of the city, where magic is most commonplace. Here are a few excerpts, with names sanitized:

1.
>Lantern Park is a well-tended expanse thick with carnations, hibiscus, roses, and the titular lantana, as well as dozens of foreign plants imported from around the world; such blossoms are magically augmented to grow to great heights, reaching a human's knees. A few spots in the park contain especially mystically-supercharged flowers the size of great trees, juxtaposed with tiny and bonsai-like trees encircling them. Explaining the area's name, floating magical lanterns slowly drift across the park, carrying motes of sorcerous light that look hypnotic in the nightly air.

2.
>The temple's magically-constructed nature is clear: its materials are a bizarre and eclectic blend of coral, seashells, starfishes, gigantic salt crystals, river-clay, and wood from driftwood and swamp-trees, all lashed together by oversized wetland-reeds that course with coiling blue spirals of fortifying sorcerous energy. Rather than two poles sporting gouts of flame, many saliferous obelisks encircle the shrine, topped by gouts of water that dance to the breeze and generally behave as if they were flame.
>Many saliferous obelisks encircle the shrine, topped by gouts of water that dance to the breeze and generally behave as if they were flame.

3.
>The manor's construction materials are are a mix of saliferous, crystalline structures; alchemically-hardened silver; and enough majicky-wajicky doodads that it could be mistaken for a mad arcanist's workshop. The interior is of roughly the same design; the furniture is color-coded in various hues of crystal and salt so as to stand out, and the paintings are abstract works that depict many a mystical circle and glyph.
>The salt here does not smell much like the sea. The fragrances are those of aromatic salts, like those one would find in a high-end alchemical supply store. The floor is all nice and carpeted with the fur of exotic beasts, save for a few open spots of salt and silver. Whenever someone steps on those, whether they are flat-soled or high-heeled, the floor's crystalline and argentate structures let loose soft chimes like those of bells, thanks to clever acoustic designs.

4.
>The carriage's three horses seem to have nightmare blood, judging from the subtle phantoms of flame and smoke at their equine hairtips. Even the horses' hooves leave phantasmic trails of fumes and cinders a few inches off the ground. The party has seen a few of these around the city; they are a breed popular for making nobles look awesome and snazzy as they ride along.
>The carriage is a spacious one. Two rows of chimera-leather seats face one another. Rich noblewomen all over the empire splurge on fiend-skin leather purses and shoes, [PC] knows well, but these seats are a single tier down: degenerate chimera leather in all its aesthetically pleasing, patchwork glory. The chimeras used to farm such leather are weaker than those of the wild, the highly-educated [PC] is aware.

Its a common human hubris that lies in the idealized concept of "maturity"

Its the same reason why some atheists are adamant on believing their existence is fundamentally richer than the one of those who believe in superstition

Personally, I have no problem admitting Im only creative when it comes to flashy stuff, Im no realist writer, to each their own

>I really feel like [you are] using magic as a crutch to make things interesting.

What does this even mean?, can you be a little more specific about what his problem was?

OP pls respond Im interested

This is a bit of a complicated situation. You see, the setting is Pathfinder's Golarion, but it does not actually use Pathfinder as a system. Additionally, I had stepped in as GM only after the game started.

The problem seems to be a disconnect in expectations. Even though we are not using Pathfinder as a system, this one player's expectations were that the world is set up as "Renaissance + a little magic," roughly how Golarion seems to be presented. However, I was running under the assumptions of Pathfinder's ruleset (particularly the settlement rules), which makes mid/high-level magic deliriously ubiquitous in cities to the point of a Tippyverse-like setting.

Essentially, the player's interpretation of the preestablished setting is much lower-magic than my high-magic interpretation of the setting.

It's a decent set of fantastic images, but without conflict, danger or opportunity such images aren't as exciting or interesting as they could be.

What is dangerous here? What is needed? How are the places you describe guarded, and what valuable things are there?

Most of the game's adventures involve investigation, conspiracy-hunting, and social intrigue, so there is little in the way of immediately obvious danger in each location.

This is not the kind of city where one would stroll into a building and come face-to-face with immediate conflict.

That or you're ironically looking too deep into this. The point is some people rely on those dramatic tropes too much and end up with a boring story overall.

Sounds like the OP.

Boop