What's the deal with this town?
1: It’s a secret recruiting and training ground for a sect of assassin-fanatics.
2: Its inhabitants are being eaten by a {mind flayer|false hydra*|anthropophagous fairy|vampire} but the creature’s power prevents them from realizing this is happening.
3: Its inhabitants moonlight as bandits.
4: The town leaders perpetuate view of the outside world as pitiably benighted and barbarous to maintain their power. Travellers who they believe challenge that view will be reprimanded and then eliminated if they continue.
5: Everyone in it is secretly a ghost. They were killed by {a recent disaster|the one remaining living person in the town|a rampaging monster}. The ghosts are not aware they are dead but will subconsciously try to warn travellers of the thing that killed them.
6: They’re exiled political extremists from another land.
7: Their drink of choice is a potent deliriant brewed from local weeds. Drinkers who haven’t built up a tolerance will be detached from reality for 1d6 hours after drinking it.
8: Its population have been mutated by the unclean radiance of a fallen asteroid. Those with mutations too heavy to hide have been exiled, and grow in resentment with every passing day.
9: It's dealing with a tickleboy** infestation.
10: A psychic child forces the town and its inhabitants into compliance with their pre-empathetic whims.
11: A pack of were{wolves|toads|cassowaries|scorpions} have infiltrated the town, covertly converting people and murdering witnesses.
12: There are no adults. The children won't speak of what's become of them.
13: A revenant plagues it, seeking vengeance for their lynching.
14: Nobody who dies there stays dead, but rises ever-rotting. Families keep relatives locked away in basements dug out into crypts.
15: It was flung forward from the distant past. Its inhabitants speak a nearly incomprehensible dialect, and their technology is anachronistic.
16: Its prize hogs being fattened for the fair are actually giant mind-controlling larvae, growing close to their terrible metamorphosis.
17: Polite requests made within the town act as a suggestion spell. Its inhabitants are either unfailingly rude, or else awful people.
18: It's stuck in a time loop.
19: It's a vital processing node in the supply chain of an extremely illegal drug. The town presents a polite exterior but will quickly turn ruthless if one pries.
20: Its inhabitants make sacrifices to a nature spirit (which may just be an opportunistic monster) to ensure a good harvest.
21: It is in league with a nearby clan of {sahuagin|bullywugs|woses|trolls}. Many of its inhabitants are hybrids with odd features.
22: The recently-activated influence of ancient ruins beneath the town is slowly transforming its inhabitants into the ruins' {insectoid|molluscoid|crustacean} original builders.
23: Its inhabitants are being extorted by a bandit gang, which has made them desperate for protection and training.
24: It's home to a cult that worships {a seven-armed maiden|a bottomless pit rimmed with teeth|a boulder with a remarkable resemblance to a petrified giant}, and is {eccentric but ultimately harmless|violently intolerant of non-believers|fond of human sacrifice}
25: A clandestine warfare unit is testing sanity-eroding drugs on the town's population.
26: Its people are crazed by insomnia, dogged by nightmares of the town's destruction by {fire|darkness|verminous hordes|flood}.
27: People have been disappearing only to show up days later with strange scars and no memory of where they've been.
28: It's experiencing a mounting spree of inexplicable phenomena, all connected to the idea of {spirals|ladders|trinities|stars}.
29: An infamous cynic philosopher has taken up residence in its streets. Residents are furious with the philsopher's shenanigans and the students they've attracted.
30: Everyone in it's being puppeted by strings that can be traced to the basement of the town's central hall.
31: Many from the town have been kidnapped by a clan of cannibal troglodytes living in a nearby cave network.
32: Mirrors in the town act as portals to a reversed world of envious doppelgangers.
33: It was built on the back of a sleeping giant its founders thought was a hill, and now that giant's woken up and is crawling around with the town stuck on top of it.
34: Everyone falls asleep at the same time at night, and wake up at the same time in the morning. While they're sleeping a cloaked creature creeps into their homes and harvests something from them.
35: The richest part of the town has fallen to plague and been quarantined. Wealth unknown remains within.
36: By some curse or blessing, all its inhabitants have reincarnated as each others' offspring for generations. They relish the opportunity to interact with anyone they don't have centuries of complicated history with (which is everyone else in town).
37: Its meager wealth is dwindling as a monster has laired just off the road to market.
38: Its economy centers around a legendary, ailing swordsmith. Everyone in town is an apprentice of theirs, a charcoal burner, a bellows pumper, or suchlike.
39: The town has been cursed to become a illusion, and can exist only in the minds of its observers. Its people will go to any lengths to maintain their existence.
40: The town was overgrown in a night, and its inhabitants have lost their minds to animalistic madness, regaining lucidity only for a short while after eating raw meat.
41: The townsfolks' minds have been infected by a grimoire. They mutter its words in their sleep, its glyphs appear in alleyway graffiti, and sections are scratched into distracted arms.
42: It has been conquered by amazons. The men have been enslaved, the women forcibly recruited.
43: Its inhabitants were absorbed by a shoggoth, but their combined minds were enough to overpower it. Now they make do extruding pseudopod-bodies from its slimy mass, fighting to maintain their individuality.
44: It's an anarcho-syndicalist commune that's rejected hierarchy.
45: Its families share a telepathic bond between their own members. They're terribly mistrusting of those they're not related to, and spill outsiders' blood in their fields to feed the leech-gods that stir deep in the soil and maintain its fertility.
46: Its a company town owned by an exploitative megacorporation to rival the Dutch East India Company.
47: Within it, literally everything can be bought and sold for the right price. Everything. This mercantile metaphysics has bled over into the attitudes of its inhabitants.
48: Just about every object and structure in it is a tamed mimic. The abnormal disappearance rate in the town suggests that not all of the mimics in it are as tamed as its inhabitants might hope.
49: The town elders jealously hoard a fragile and depleting source of extended life, and have done so since the town's founding. Their descendants scheme against them, but are reluctant to let outsiders in on the anagathic.
50: Someone in town has offended a sky spirit, and the weather is worsening by the day to apocalyptic levels. The townsfolk are ready to snap and start sacrificing the least popular members of the community in the hopes that one of them was the one who offended the spirit.
51: The town doesn't have enough food stocked to last through winter, and people are eyeing their neighbours enviously.
52: A spiteful old man has befriended the town's rats, and they whisper the other townsfolks' secrets in his ear, which he uses to enrich himself and weave discord among them.
53: The people have been shrunk down by some arcane catastrophe, and without a cure are doomed to a losing war against common pests.
54: The town's priest is subverting their flock to a diabolic heresy.
55: Inquisitors convinced that blasphemous evil is afoot in the town are cultivating a paranoid atmosphere. The inquisitors {are impostors abusing their stolen authority for kicks|are delusional, and have already tortured several innocents. However, they have the backing of the church and king behind them|are in fact correct about there being an eldritch cult operating in the town}.
56: The animals have disappeared from the nearby woods, the fish have disappeared from the river, and people are very worried.
57: Its inhabitants possess the evil eye, and can hex people by staring hatefully at them. This ability has stirred up tremendous tension with their neighbours, who suspect the town of all manner of vileness.
58: A swarm of {locusts|gremlins|langoliers|pixies} is descending on the town.
59: When one of the townsfolk becomes close to death, they dissolve themselves in the well at the center of town. Thereafter, anyone drinking from the well gains a bit of their memory, or the memory of anyone else who's been dissolved in it.
60: A spate of bizarre murders has struck the town, traceable back to the town's butcher, who's been infected by mind-controlling parasites and is spreading them to other victims through tainted meat.
61: A questing beast has been seen on the edge of town the past few nights, luring more and more people after it in a chase from which they haven't returned.
62: The baron's heir's hand was promised to a fairy-prince in return for certain boons, but the heir has gotten cold feet and fled. The suitor and their wedding guests grow impatient, minacious as bored tigers.
63: The town itself seems to have come alive, and is expanding itself into an inhospitable architectural hive.
64: Its inhabitants have been kidnapped by goblins, who now imitate them poorly.
65: Wild magic abilities are appearing with exponentially increasing frequency and potency among its inhabitants.
66: The town is prosperous, but its prosperity depends on the continued degradation of an imprisoned child.
67: The town's been surrounded by an illusion that makes the world outside appear to be an apocalyptic wasteland. Order has collapsed within, and power lies with feuding gangs that have taken up bizarre gimmicks and leaders with names like "Pogo Shank-'em-up" and "Liver Licker".
68: Ancient and unbreakable legal decree has made the town an absolute sanctuary for fugitives.
69: The town is run by a gang of sapient bears, who gained their intellect in a wizard's ill-advised bear-baiting experiment, which instilled in them no love for humanity.
70: It's a Potemkin village built for the edification of some empress, since shored up by squatters turned to settlers.
71: Several slightly differentiated versions of the same town have been fractured from parallel timelines and abutted against one another. Neighbourhoods, relationships, and the foundation of reality itself have become unstable.
72: An earthquake has torn the town open, revealing a labryrinthian cave complex beneath. Monsters have crept out from the crevasse and adventurers flock from all around.
73: A fiend has set up shop in town, selling cursed objects that grant peoples' twisted desires.
74: A stunted aboleth lurks in the town's water supply, acting as an often-incomprehensible patron of its people, dispensing healing, warped flesh, and the callous wisdom of the lightless depths.
75: At semi-random moments the town and its populace are replaced by gruesome counterparts.
76: The town is ruled by an oracle who demands strict routines from its population to maxmize predictability. Outside influences are removed or assimilated wherever possible.
77: It's said that once every hundred years a ladder to heaven appears in the center of town. The centennial is approaching, and people are getting antsy.
78: Its people have been overcome with religious mania, and compete in cathedral-building. In addition to the danger from exhaustion, their construction is dangerously unstable from insufficient materials and a lack of qualified architects.
79: Its fields are blighted and its people are getting skeletally thin.
80: Its population have a resolute disbelief in magic and monsters.
81: It's haunted by the ghosts of the original inhabitants of the region, slaughtered by the founders of the town.
82: They murdered a traveling merchant, distributed his wealth and swore to collective conspiracy.
83: Mercenaries have settled in and made the place their playground.
84: The town is experiencing a gold rush, and the population has boomed. Iniquities abound.
85: Drinking, pre-marital sex, dancing, music, and wearing bright colours on any day but a feast day are prohibited and brutally punished by self-appointed morality police.
86: The town is host to a poets' retreat, and also an eldritch force that's altering the town in accordance with their poetry. The poets {are unaware of this|are aware of this and using it to create a place where artists get the respect they believe they deserve|are aware of this and using it to murderously settle internal grudges}.
87: Every home is fortified, the cracks plugged with urine-soaked rags. Every four hours you spend in town there's a 1-in-6 chance that a fog full of monsters rolls through. Any monsters that leave the fog suffocate.
88: People have livestock have fallen sick because something poisonous has slithered into the cistern.
89: Due to ancient agreement every family's firstborn is traded with a changeling.
90: The place is home to a healing shrine. Desperate sorts and the sorts looking to take advantage of the desperate flock to it on pilgrimage.
91: The townsfolk are preparing a rebellion because of their lord's {crushing taxes|dubious enforcement of primae noctis|practice of necromancy}.
92: Everyone in the town has their minds swapped with each other when they sleep.
93: The circus has come to town, but {the circus-folk have been framed for a heinous crime|the circus is host to inhuman predators who've disguised themselves as clowns and tragic grotesques}.
94: A reculsive alchemist's lab nearby has polluted the groundwater, mutating normally minor pests into giant, partially-metallic monsters.
95: It's ruled by a coven of witches who masquerade as neighbourly old ladies.
96: A mad paladin has press-ganged its population into a bizarre crusade.
97: A wizard in a flying tower is using it as target practice for their new spells.
98: It's a research post for ultraterrestrial entities in skin-suit disguises to study human behaviour.
99: A charismatic preacher with strange teachings has recently come to town and gathered a fanatical following.
100: The village is an intermediary point between the surface and a secret underground city.
* http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html
** http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com/2016/11/tickle-boys.html
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