I’m developing Little Tales, a fantasy game combining village building, exploration and turn-based combat. This is one of its island strongholds, with successive walls climbing the hillside towards the keep.

I like the contrast between the imposing stone walls and the forest surrounding them. The terraces give it a clear hierarchy, but the courtyards still feel quite bare. I’m imagining workshops and stores on the lower level, living quarters above, and the keep at the top.

What would you put inside the walls to make this feel like a place people actually inhabit?

I'm running a Lancer (a utopian mech TTRPG is awesome you should try it) campaign set in basically space olympics for the Dune-like faction in the setting, a heavily homebrewed version of the Karrakin Trade Barony Company Games. It will take place during the events of the first Games where the House of Promise (HoP), a fledgling "great house" have been allowed to send a team -- the players.

As such, I've had to do some good old fashioned world-building around the HoP and it's home world, San Simeon. I came up with a pretty stong set of House Words based on their rising sun symbology, "After Night, Always Dawn." But I needed somewhere from them to come from diegetically.

Then I thought about the name of HoP's home world. San is Spanish for saint or holy. In our real world, cities like San Francisco, San Diego and San Antonio are literally named after respective saints. There's even a Saint Simeon!

Unfortunately, Saint Simeon is pretty much known for being a hermit -- which does kinda line up with the distance San Simeon is from the rest of Karrakin space. But I felt and still feel that its quite strange for a planet thousands of years in the future and hundreds of lightyears away to be named after a niche, largely unknown Chrisitan saint. It'd be like if we named a new country today after a Babylonian king.

So I made my own Saint Simeon. One who represents HoP's fighting spirit and republican temperament. And wrote his story into an anthem/poem, one which neatly includes what would become the HoP's House words; "After Night, Always Dawn."