Junkyard Necromancy

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
 -Inception

I see it every day.  An excitable game master runs straight to the internet, carrying TNT and a plunger, to blow up their existing campaign because they absolutely *must* run that new game system or bring their players to a new setting.  You can't run a long term campaign without effective coping strategies for the gamer attention deficit disorder.  This is a serious problem, my friends, I know it well.  Ideas are a two-edged sword yielding creativity and madness.  How's that expression go, "I'm not just the president of the hair club for men, I'm also a client…"

My name is Beedo, and I have a problem with gamer attention deficit disorder.

My own coping strategy involves classic project risk management - Gamer ADD is the risk, and you either need to mitigate, accept it, avoid it, or transfer the problem.  I created a section on the blog called The Junkyard to park ideas that are exciting, but I don't want them to take up too much time and capsize the boat.  Getting them down in print is a coping strategy - I just tell myself I'll get back to them, someday.  Here's the Junkyard's mission statement:  This is the place where I put campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

Sometimes though, one section of the junkyard gets pretty full, and a towering mound of discarded ideas threatens to topple into the orderly little campaign next door and introduce some real collateral damage.  I had an epiphany this weekend that a half dozen or more ideas I've been circumnavigating are all about the same type of campaign - in fact, one campaign could include them all!

It's alive!

Arise, you dead ideas consigned to the junkyard, arise, and live again as a stitched together frankenstein campaign!

I've been sketching out a small horror sandbox adventure.  The initial launch of the campaign involves the players acting as marines on a small merchant vessel or privateer in the mid-17th century.  It could start in Jamestown, Bermuda, or somewhere in the Caribbean (Port Royal, or New Providence), but takes the group to the Carolina coast to investigate a derelict Spanish galleon adrift in colonial waters.  An abandoned, derelict ship is such a classic horror locale.  Before all is done, there are French pirates, hostile natives, and a reawakened heathen blood god of the Aztec world.  Assuming the players survive or flee, there's a good chance they'll have their own sloop and be free to start cruising around a Caribbean saltbox breaking things.  Yo ho, me hearties.

The back story of the galleon involves a Spanish witch hunter escorting a dangerous artifact back to Castile (and ultimately the Vatican).  As these things are wont to do, the wrong person messes with the artifact and madness, bloodshed, and death ensue, turning the ship into a floating abattoir.  I've often mused that a cool way to kick off a horror sandbox would be to inherit the library of a retired or recently vanished monster hunter like Solomon Kane.  The journals detailing his exploits and unfinished investigations allow a group to follow in his footsteps.  So why not put the guy's journal and library right on board the derelict ship?  The players can come out of this first adventure with a ship and a long list of journal entries describing eldritch horrors and lost treasures discovered by this Catholic witch hunter across the Spanish Main.  Time to raise the colors and set sail.

I mentioned that a number of my recurring campaign ideas have coalesced around this particular adventure, it's nice to realize the convergence.  Pirates, guns, ships, and weird horror.  Here are some of the many older posts littering the Lich House involving the theme of a 17th century sandbox for the Age of Sail:

• The Library of de la Torre
• Goblins of the Spanish Main
• Colonial Hex Crawl
• Mythos Expeditions as a D&D Campaign
• The Wide Area Sandbox

The discussion of Gamer ADD and risk management was here:  Winter is Coming, and so is Gamer ADD.  Now I just need a name for the new campaign (although Goblins of the Spanish Main is kind of catchy, even if there are no actual goblins…)

Mythos Expeditions as a D&D Campaign

See the world, visit interesting places, and loot them.

One of Pelgrane's upcoming books is called Mythos Expeditions, and it involves a central organization (in this case, Miskatonic University) sponsoring expeditions to far flung places, where a group of intrepid scholars and professors can ostensibly encounter Lovecraftian horrors.  I'm struck by how well this would work as a campaign style for an early modern D&D campaign - horror themed or otherwise.

Some of the challenges running a quasi-historical game is the need to make magic, monsters, and eldritch horrors rare and unusual - just like if you're running a Cthulhu game, whether it's modern day or 1920's.  So you push the horror to the fringes, and draw a strong demarcation between the civilized world and the realm of nightmares that exists hidden just below the surface.  There might still be monsters hiding in plain sight, but adventures involving lost cultures and ancient secrets are frequently pushed out to the fringe - rugged frontiers, where primitive cults and sleeping gods still hold sway, archaeological marvels wait to be discovered, and ancient ruins have escaped plunder.

I love the idea of putting together a similar 17th century investigative organization - scholars, academics, hermetic investigators, perhaps even the church - and letting the players act as agents and soldiers that plan and carry out the field operations of such a group in the D&D context.  It could be a mercantile venture, interested in looting ancient places and recovering lost treasures and artifacts.  The Age of Sail allows you to surface rumors all over the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as introducing ruins throughout North Africa and the mid-East, not forgetting all of the great opportunities for crumbling European castles dating back a few hundred years.

D&D is mostly about kicking down doors, stabbing monsters in the face, and getting paid.  But instead of wandering outside the local village and mugging a bunch of goblins in the woods for their coppers, the quest becomes a multi-staged voyage to the deserts of North Africa to discover the lost tomb of the Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka.  Exotic locales, isolation, and mythic grandeur make all the difference.  Let's put some lipstick on that pig.

This isn't exactly a new idea for me; many of my undeveloped ideas have involved one campaign or another in the early modern - the Colonial Hex Crawl, Harrow Home Manor, Library of De La Torre, the Wide Area Sandbox, and so on (all labeled somewhere here on the blog).  Ultimately, the reason I haven't fully moved forward with one is that I'm still enamored with the pure hex crawl and site-based exploration that works so well in D&D's typical micro-setting.  Providing the players absolute freedom to go anywhere is much simpler when 'anywhere' is constrained to how far the characters can walk in a day.  I haven't gotten my head around finding the balance between detail and scope in a large macro setting. The tools used for Sci Fi gaming sandboxes must have the answer.  Traveller or Stars Without Number is pretty much the Age of Sail, In Spaaaaace...

If the players buy into the premise that the game is more akin to a Cthulhu game, with stronger elements of investigation and exploration, the question of agency shifts from "Which plot hook or idea do we prosecute?" to "We’re prosecuting this idea, and now we have great freedom to find the approach that works best for us."  That seems very manageable indeed, and frees the game master up to developing one intricate site-based location at a time, akin to a classic TSR 'module'.

Picking the Next Setting

I've had a setting project on and off for over a year now called the Black City - most long time readers have come across Black City posts, I'm sure - and I'm expecting to send some adventurers into the Black City sometime in the next few weeks, hopefully after we wrap up the current Cthulhu scenario.  The Black City is a mix of Vikings and science-fantasy and Lovecraftian aliens in the frozen north.  It's got plenty of weird stuff, but one thing I miss is the classic gothic horror elements that don't quite fit.  Furthermore, I've been searching for something that would work well in the 17th century (1620's or so) as an early modern setting for D&D style adventures, but with a splash of guns and rapiers instead of heavy plate and battle axes.  So while the Black City moves into active play, I'm about ready to add a second project to the queue where ideas that don't fit into the Black City campaign have a place to go.  If my Black City pace is any indication, this next setting will be ready to play around 2014 (kidding, I hope).

The early modern  has a different set of challenges than the microcosmic "points of light" trope in a purely fantastic setting.  It's a populous age with more long distance travel and potentially less space for monsters; depending on the approach, it likely requires more than hastily sketching out the home town village and the local dungeon filled with orcs and goblins.  I'm going to step through some of the ideas I've been considering and point out my view of the challenges.  Maybe even the dear readers can help me choose.

Library of De La Torre
The idea here was that a famous adventurer in the mold of Solomon Kane has recently passed away, bequeathing a library or journal to the party at the start of the campaign.  During his career, this adventurer had explored dungeons and tombs and combated horrors in the dark corners of Europe, but much of the treasure was still left behind.

Opportunity:
The library is a platform to do an info-dump, seeding a target rich environment, since the players would get leads to various adventuring sites right at the campaign start and could engage in a highly player-driven campaign.  Contrasted to the typical micro-sandbox, I was calling it a "wide area sandbox".

Issues:
Would require wide-area maps of 17th century Europe created, high level background on many areas of Europe during the 30 years war, and systems to facilitate mundane travel, staying at inns, and so on, including how to keep travel interesting.  Too much historical research is a risk.  A dozen or so one-page dungeons for distant adventuring sites would be needed.

Colonial Hex Crawl
Reading some accounts of Dutch New York and French-Canadian fur traders from Montreal got me thinking how early 17th century America was basically a dangerous hex crawl to the European explorers.  The concept here would be to sketch out a few Dutch settlements and trading posts as home bases, and build a sprawling hex crawl that covers New York through the Great Lakes - a blend of wilderness and Iroquois and Algonquin territory and competing nations and traders.

Opportunity:
American folklore and mythology is underrepresented in gaming materials and there's a great chance here to build out a horror mythology in the new world similar to Lovecraft or Stephen King, just placed much earlier in the country's history.  Plus I live right in the area these days.

Issues:
Hex crawling can be inherently dull.  The exploration challenges of traveling by canoe, portaging from river to river or past waterfalls, camping, seeking out new settlements for trade and negotiation, seem much more exciting in my head than I think they would play out on the table; there's great risk here in building a campaign solely around such a hex crawl.  Meanwhile, traditional dungeons would be unusual in the new world - although I can envision some strange cave complexes like in the story, The Mound.

Telecanter has been putting up a lot of interesting travel "mini-games" for creating resource challenges during a hex crawl, and small systems like that could be created to make basic travel by canoe a little more interesting than purely narrative.

Goblins of the Spanish Main
This idea started as an example of how a non-standard setting (in this case, island hopping during the age of piracy) could be adjusted to fit the tropes of D&D despite the assumptions of the game.  It got some interest in the comments and ways were identified to manage a few of the problems with being part of a ship's crew, so I'm bringing it back here for more discussion.

Opportunity:
D&D never has enough pirates.  Or ninjas.

Issues:
I've given zero thought to placing a megadungeon in the Caribbean, although going with a 'lost Atlantis' angle might be interesting, or making it related to the fantastic ruins and mythology of Mesoamerica (or both).  Systems to support the swashbuckling flavor could be developed - shipboard combat and swinging on ropes, fighting in the rigging, that kind of stuff.

Harrow Home Manor
Harrow Home is a crumbling manse on the Yorkshire moors, on a remote heath of northeast England.  It's the center of a small gothic sandbox in England (as opposed to placing it in Transylvania or central Europe) and the dungeons would be home to factions of treacherous wizards and undead sorcerers competing over arcane lore.  An ancient sleeping god akin to one of Lovecraft's "great old ones" slumbers beneath the moors, awaiting the time it's reawakened by the cultists to spread death and madness across the world.

Opportunity:
This is the closest to the traditional D&D sandbox - a limited sized region, a small set of villages, abbeys, and coastal towns, and a rugged interior surrounding the titular megadungeon ruin.  What makes this megadungeon "different" is the number of treacherous, insane, wizards and cultists that haunt the cavern depths beneath the old ruins, drawing inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft, CAS, and similar authors.

Issues:
D&D is fairly well-suited for this type of setting, I don't see any major issues.

So there you have it - those are the different ideas bouncing around Beedo's head.  The funny thing is, none of these are exclusive - I could develop my own vision of a "Gothic 17th Century" and place all four of these campaign ideas in the same world over time - so it's really just a question of what to develop first.  Someone on the LOTFP message board mentioned that War Hammer Fantasy uses a dark/fantastic version of early modern Europe, so I'm thinking I should check that out some time for ideas as well - they recommended WFRP 1E.

Seems like a good time for a poll, too - which of these settings would be interesting to read about?  Or drop a note in the comments.  Thanks!

Target Rich Horror Gaming

Blogthulhu continues!  I've been looking at how to structure a Cthulhu campaign and enable some of the free-form sandbox play we enjoy so much in old school D&D and avoid the linear rail road.  The sandbox style is one where the players have a high degree of choice and agency, there's no formulated story, and the events of the game unfold primarily through player interaction with the setting.  Sandbox is far from the only successful style of play in horror gaming; at some point I'll take a look at some of the pros and cons of the famous published rail road campaigns in the genre, but for us, sandbox is the style we prefer.  For the D&Ders, most of this idea should also carry over into weird horror gaming in any historical setting.

Previous installments of the series have declared an overarching metaphor for horror gaming (points of darkness), discussed the difference between active and passive plot hooks, and then argued for the importance of an investigative organization to provide a campaign framework.  A framework solves common problems in Cthulhu gaming, like access to plot hooks, replacement characters and continuity, and a lightweight approach to getting new characters in the game without a ton of back story.

Now let's look at how choice defines sandbox play.  There are two scales of choice that are important to me when enabling player agency - at the campaign level and at the adventure level.  On the larger scale, there's the question of which adventure the characters are going to pursue; when they've made an adventure choice, I then want to make sure it's structured to support player planning, different strategies and roads to victory, and variability of outcomes.

Let's use a simple example from the D&D space.  The ubiquitous elf, dwarf and a cleric, at the local tavern, learn there are bandits in the nearby woods, a weird hermit stalks the north woods, a dangerous swamp lies nearby with rumors of reptilian marauders, and beyond the nearby hills, the legendary Caves of Chaos await.  This is that top level of choice - what will they do?  Once the party makes the decision on which rumor to investigate, the actual adventure site offers many different approaches to how the group resolves their exploration.

In horror gaming that first level choice emerges via the plot hook.  The first hurdle in porting a similar sandbox approach to Cthulhu gaming is to provide a "target rich plot hook" environment - the equivalent of deciding between stopping the goblins in the woods or heading out to the ruined moat house.

The nice thing about the organizational frameworks from the last post is that the Keeper has a venue for introducing options to the players and giving them the same kind of experience.  "According to these news bits from our clipping service, there's an art gallery in New York City displaying a series of paintings from that notorious artist, and there was a ritual murder in Central Park last week.  It could be nothing.  The other item that's come in off the wire is this announcement of a new fraternal order recruiting in Boston - anyone care to join the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight?"

A risk with an organizational frame work is to provide real choice, and not make these plot hooks directives from an NPC boss in the hierarchy.  One criticism I have with Delta Green is that "missions" tend to be presented as immediate orders from superiors - pretty much the opposite of what makes player planning in a sandbox fun.  The default setting in Delta Green assumed the players are rank and file agents that take orders; in my preferred style of play, that would be adjusted.  There would still be some reactive, urgent missions, but players would also be able evaluate intelligence and make decisions on longer term cases to pursue.  It's a simple but important switch to flip.

A nice opportunity emerges regarding plot hooks that are passed over; other NPCs in the organization may investigate those plot hooks instead, and that can add some interesting verisimilitude later on.  "Remember how we sent Doctor Horton to investigate that Hermetic Order in Boston?  He's stopped phoning in reports… we may have a situation."

So one key component to this style of campaign is to have an input funnel that regularly presents plot hooks to the player characters to create that target rich environment.  Looking at some of the sample organizations from the previous article, it could be projects or expeditions presented by the Miskatonic faculty - "Should we outfit a voyage to the Yucatan seeking the legendary crystal skull, or pursue this rumor that the tomb of Nephren Ka might have been found in Giza?"  It could take the form of intelligence briefings gathered by Project Covenant, Delta Green, or The Laundry.  The Gilchrist Trust might use a news clipping service as they try to find positive evidence of the supernatural on their globe trotting search.  The Bookhounds scour auctions and estate sale posts seeking forbidden tomes.

One interesting variant to the plot hook funnel is a true info-dump.  When I was thinking about a similar campaign in the D&D space last summer (The Library of de la Torre), the idea was that the characters could inherit the journal or library of a recently deceased adventurer who had made a career of exploring occult mysteries and fighting monsters.  I saw this character as an analog to Howard's Solomon Kane, but you could port this type of idea into Cthulhu gaming just as easily.  I hear there's a famous Lovecraft story that used the same technique… it's on the tip of my tongue… Call of… Cthul-something or other.  Kidding aside, don't lose sight that The Call of Cthulhu story is essentially an info-dump of the memoirs of a deceased Lovecraftian investigator, and the protagonist sifts through the material and then launches his own investigations.  It's the epitome of the target rich investigative setting.

A published adventure following this approach is The Armitage Files; the campaign dumps a lot of information into the player's hands at discrete intervals, giving them massive freedom to determine how to proceed.  Masks of Nyarlathotep does this as well.

You may be thinking, Beedo, are you out of your mind?  If I give the group multiple plot hooks every time we start a new adventure, doesn't that mean I need to generate all those adventures?  I have a life outside of gaming, you mad monkey!  I'm well aware of balancing sandbox constraints, and I've referred to it in the past as the sandbox triangle.

It's a fair criticism, and I have a few suggestions.  The first one is a really simple Pro Tip:  Don’t present plot hooks at the beginning of a gaming session!  Present the next briefing or opportunity to review leads at the end of a session, or in between sessions, so the group can discuss the pros and cons of different leads and make their choice ahead of time, giving you ample time to prepare for the following week without having to over prepare.  It's a fair trade-off for giving them so much freedom to pick their adventures.

Another recommendation is to leverage the massive back catalog of published adventures for Call of Cthulhu.  Chaosium has been producing collections of short adventures for 30 years, they're all compatible with the current rules, and most are available in PDF.  Couple that with short adventures from Miskatonic River Press, Pelgrane Press, and The Unspeakable Oath, and you've got a ton of material to intersperse with your own creations - just file off the plot hooks, which are typically passive plot hooks, and add your own that would bring them to the attention of an active investigative unit.  There were some additional magazine publishers as well - The Black Seal and Worlds of Cthulhu - but I never collected them.  The Black Seal was focused on the modern UK and I wasn't collecting when Worlds of Cthulhu was printed.  I'm hoping Worlds gets converted to PDF some time.  If you read those, let me know what you think of them.

Alright, that's enough for now.  I'll see where the Cthulhu muse takes me next, either a review of The Armitage Files (since I've mentioned it a few times now) or on towards open-ended adventure structures.  Ciao!

Threat Analysis in the Weird Setting

The traditional sandbox structures- the multi-level dungeon and the wilderness hex crawl - both support a degree of transparency in the player-driven game; when formulating their plans, the players know that the deeper dungeon levels are more dangerous, and the further one goes into the wilderness is also more dangerous.  There's a geographic correlation between distance and danger.

The use of standard Monster Manuals enhances that transparency; players learn that goblins live in the woods over here, but an ogre was seen beyond the river; perhaps the orcs on dungeon level 2 warn about the bugbears on level 3.  The Monster Manual provides a common yardstick, both for the players and the NPC inhabitants of the world, when sharing knowledge and describing the dangers that are out there.

With that foundation established, let's toss out a caveat:  transparency and threat analysis is really only necessary in the player-driven game.  A fairly standard style of play is where the DM determines the upcoming adventures:  when the players are 4th level, the DM builds adventures that threaten 4th level characters; the players don't hear about those 1st level opportunities anymore.  When they're 9th level, they're hearing about plot hooks that lead to challenges for 9th level guys.  The world conforms to the needs of the player party and the DM provides appropriate adventures for the point in time.

The player-driven game postulates a different approach; the world exists, and there are opportunities appropriate to both low level and high level characters at the same time; it's up to the players to gather information and plan appropriately. It's a bit like putting The Tomb of Horrors in the swamp outside the home base right from the beginning of the campaign; it's a legendary location the group will hear about early on, but they'll also know appropriate warnings about going there, too.

Let's turn our attention to the Weird Setting sandbox and how threat analysis is different in a campaign where neither geography nor a traditional Monster Manual provide threat transparency.  I've been musing about an approach I'm calling The Library of de la Torre; the character of Luis Diaz de la Torre is like a Spanish version of Solomon Kane, a wily adventurer priest that traversed Europe during the Thirty Years War, building a large occult library and a field journal of notes.  At the beginning of the campaign, the group gets access to de la Torre's journal, giving them possession of wide-ranging plot hooks around Europe.  So the question becomes, how does the group determine which plot hooks lead to In Search of the Unknown (a classic starter adventure) and which plot hooks lead to The Tomb of Horrors (a legendary killer dungeon)?  Ideas follow.

Flatten the Power Curve
The first thought is to build adventures that are less about combat and more about problem solving; fighting is possible, but still avoidable by low level characters if they'd be overmatched.  A rules system like LOTFP works well for this style, since all of the armor classes are in a narrow range and the combat engine doesn't require increasing to-hit rolls and increasing AC across all character classes.

Embellish the Hooks
The idea here is to provide enough information directly in the plot hook, or allow research, such that a group can rank the threat level of a given opportunity.  For instance, first level characters might read about a legendary vyrkolakas ruling over a remote Greek island; a modicum of research would identify that the vyrkolakas is a Greek version of the vampire; as such they might decide it's not a good fit as their first caper.

Use a Bestiary, Anyway
I can't help but think that adventures in and around a fantastic Europe would use some monster names common to folklore - ghosts, specters, vampires, werewolves, bogeys, goblins, and trolls; even if you're not using previously existing versions of these creatures from the Monster Manual, the "weird" versions can maintain a similar power level so a group can plan a sequence for their investigations.

Balance is Overrated
The simplest idea is to toss concerns about balance out the window; who cares if the group tackles the 10th level necromancer right from the beginning?  Once they see what the opponent is capable of doing, let's hope they run and plan to circle back later in their careers when they're better prepared.

*    *    *

By blending the previous techniques, I'm confident a series of plot hooks could be presented that would still let the players evaluate the risk versus reward of the different opportunities and develop a plan.  The traditional approaches to running a small area sandbox - either as hex crawl or dungeon - make the DM's job a little easier, but nothing worth doing is ever truly easy.

Why the Monster Manual is Important

Picking up from yesterday's post on D&D's competitive advantages, to wit:  players have a clear mission (finding treasure), and simple accessible archetypes for character classes.  The level progression encourages campaign play.  The classic adventure structures push decision making on the players; the class roles encourage group tactics and cohesion.

Just an aside:  Through the years, I've seen folks here and there run story-heavy D&D games, where the players go off performing quests and dealing with villains.  Note how the first thing that gets overhauled and house-ruled in such a regime is the XP system, because the objectives of that quest-oriented story-game are no longer the same as Dungeons & Dragons as written.

Learning to love it again...

Aesthetically, I like the idea of unique monsters or re-envisioning D&D without the use of a published bestiary, but it misses an important point:  the Monster Manuals are part of the secret sauce.  There are two sides to using the hierarchical creatures, with their bundles of hit dice and special abilities loosely translating into a "challenge level":  first the manuals give the DM ready-made creatures for populating dungeons and wilderness, according the right level of danger the DM wants for that locale; secondarily, they give the players enough information to calculate their relative risk and reward due to meta game knowledge.

If you've been with me a few weeks, you know I've been posting here and there about a campaign idea (the Library of de la Torre) where the players inherit an occult library with field notes; the previous owner's journal is full of adventure hooks and the players have a number of adventure choices right from day one.  It's a way of front loading a lot of plot hooks (like a rumor table) and super-charging the player driven game.  Note the difference between the following two sets of facts and how they offer different opportunities for a group just starting out:

First Version
After reading the journal, the group learns that the mine outside the old town was haunted by tommy knockers, also called kobolds; there's a lot of silver left in the mine if it could be made safe.  The peasants near the old wood are afraid of losing livestock to goblin fairies that creep out of the woods at night.  Further north, it's said travelers between two towns often disappear along a stretch of road passing through the marshland, because an ogre lives somewhere across the swamps.  And just last week a giant was seen striding back towards Snake Head mountain after stealing a cow.

Second Version
After reading the journal, the group learns that the mine outside the old town was haunted by a foul demon from beyond; there's a lot of silver left in the mine if it could be made safe.  The peasants near the old wood are afraid of losing livestock to a witch that creeps out of the woods at night, stealing animals for unknown purposes.  Further north, it's said travelers between two towns often disappear along a stretch of road passing through the marshland, because a necromancer lives somewhere across the swamps.  And just last week a "dead thing" was seen striding back towards Snake Head mountain after slaughtering a cow.

My idea behind the Library of de la Torre is for a "weird horror" style campaign in the 17th century, so a set of facts similar to the second version is more in line with what I'm thinking.  But surely you see a flaw?  If you want the agenda to be determined by the players, the rumors need to be embellished with enough information to allow a meaningful analysis of danger.  On a larger scale, this is a critique of the whole line of thinking "monsters should always be unique and unknowable".

DM's with a strong hand on the steering wheel will ensure the adventure opportunities for the low-level group are appropriate for low-level characters; the danger scales with the capabilities of the group.  That's not the approach I want to take with the wide area sandbox - I'm still recovering from my time with 4E and the dictates of balance, thank you very much.

My platonic ideal these days is with sandbox play, and a lot of my recent posts have focused on pushing the boundaries of the sandbox to test the limits - whether it's been concerns with illusionism and moving content (the Shell game post that instigated the whole 'Quantum Ogre' discussion), the use of plot hooks as "leading the players", or now looking at how we can break out of the micro-setting and build a larger wide area sandbox without hex-by-hex minutiae.

I'll return with thoughts on whether D&D sans bestiary and the sandbox are reconcilable; the key takeaway for me was the revelation that published bestiaries are as important to players in the player driven game as they are to DMs, as they provide a means for gauging challenges.

A Survey of Travel Rules, Land and Sea

I had the chance to compare different editions of D&D and compare how they advised the DM to handle travel.  The system in the BX / Rules Cyclopedia / Labyrinth Lord chain seems like it will work just fine, and was clearer than the 1E DMG.  Encumbrance amounts yield overland movement rates of 6, 12, 18, or 24 miles per day, for unencumbered people; on a riding horse it becomes 48 miles per day.  If I can get a 24 mile per hex scale to work for area maps of Europe, hex counting becomes easy for distance travel; I'm just not sure how well it breaks down into subhexes.

A typical day of travel can be reduced to a series of rolls; a daily chance to become lost if not following roads; a daytime encounter chance (1 out of 6) and a nighttime encounter chance (1 out of 12).  Note:  the Cyclopedia recommends using a d12 for the nighttime roll instead of a d6; the assumption is a camped party is less likely to run into trouble.

Does an average of 1 encounter every 6 days through settled areas make sense?  Here's how I look at it; every day, the group is passing through cleared lands, farms, through cross roads and little hamlets, into woods, and so on.  Lots and lots of mundane encounters occur as the group passes farmers, peddlers, merchants, goodwives and other ordinary folk; that 1 out of 6 chance per day just represents the opportunity to have an interesting or violent encounter with a potentially hostile force.  It seems like it will work, I just need to put together appropriate tables for settled lands.

Nighttime encounters are a bit different; villages and towns should be common in the Europe of 1650 so most of the time a traveling group would be staying at inns.  I’ll use the 1 out of 12 chance when the group is camping outside, and the nighttime encounter would use the standard outdoor tables.  Inns and taverns present excellent role playing opportunities and involve a concentration of similar travelers, so I'll need to come up with some kind of carousing / complications table for staying at inns.  There's a balance between keeping long distance travel colorful but not bogging it down with too much minutiae, either.

I've been scanning A Mighty Fortress for ideas; it's an AD&D 2E supplement for the Elizabethan and early 17th century, and has lots of ideas worth borrowing (including an approach to firearms). That book suggests using monthly living expenses and requiring all period characters to gamble; it's an interesting idea, but maybe it no longer fits in the 17th century once Calvinism and the Puritans have had an effect on European culture?

Moving on to the sea, all the BX series of games have similar rules for ocean travel; each day also begins with a handful of rolls - figuring out the wind and weather conditions and the wind direction, the chance for a random encounter, and a chance to be lost.  It seems to me like both ocean and land travel could be handled by a spreadsheet like my calendar and weather sheet, so days or weeks of rolls could be generated in advance, speeding the presentation of the narrative at the table.

I don't know how much wind direction actually varies over the ocean; would wind in the real world reverse 180 degrees from one day to the next?  I understand the importance of the trade winds, Coriolis force, and how ocean currents and the westerly's affected travel to and from the New World; trips that took 2 months to reach New England could be done in a few weeks catching the westerly wind and the gulf stream back to northern Europe.  Absolutely random wind directions don't make a lot of sense when seasonal winds are known, so maybe wind direction should only be a deviation from the norm.

Charlatan over on Mule Abides has posted a bit on play testing his saltbox; one of the proposed  rules he's calling "Blood in the Water"; on the open ocean, having one ocean encounter creates another encounter check.  The other idea was to have a chance for something else to happen; I'm thinking this includes all sorts of nutsy stuff you'd expect to happen on a long journey - ship damage, torn sails, broken masts, risks of scurvy, chances of mutiny, fire, all sorts of hazards.  So a sailing hazard table is in order, or some other way to loosely handle wear and tear on the ship; bad weather would increase the chance of a hazard or the severity of the hazard roll.

More things that go on the do-list:

• Settled area encounter tables
• Nighttime carousing encounters
• Guidelines for monthly living expenses
• Updated wind and weather rules
• Ocean encounters
• Ship hazards table

I had a funny thought for area maps - I'm wondering if a European atlas would work?  I'm not a fan of using hex overlays on transparency, but it would save a ton of time trying to track down maps; some atlases even have relief.  Anyway, it would pretty much eliminate area maps from the do-list and get me working on all these random tables right away.  I'd just make an assumption that major towns and cities were occupied since the 17th century, and highways and major roads were roads and trails, respectively.  I'd just need to use a highlighter or something and redraw various borders.

An Approach to Building the Wide Area Sandbox

I'm thinking about what it would take to build the foundation for the wide area sandbox.  Let's say I'm going forward with the idea to build out  a campaign based on the Library of de la Torre idea from the other day; here's the recap of the idea:  at the beginning of the game, the players or a patron inherit the library of a dead priest, who was an investigator into things evil and malign; between the books in the library and the priest's journal and notes, the group gets access to dozens and dozens of plot hooks scattered around Europe, the Mediterranean, and even overseas.

Here's how a typical plot hook could be presented:

Journal Entry, December 1620:  After our army defeated the Bohemians at White Mountain, the sorcerer Cernobog quit Prague and was forced to leave his ill-gotten treasures behind.  I investigated the salt mine briefly to see if I could recover his infamous grimoire, but a guardian thing was left behind along with traps for the unwary; the army moved on before I could return.  After the war, the Order needs to revisit this place, recover Cernobog's treasure, and ensure the servants of the evil one don't regain the grimoire.  (DM's note:  the battle of White Mountain would have been 30 years ago; there's a reference later in the journal that de la Torre never made it back to the salt mine before his death.)

For purposes of the rest of this post, let's assume that many of the leads are of a similar nature to that journal entry; they hint towards opportunities that may or may not still exist, but will require quite a bit of travel to properly investigate.

What I hope to do in this post is identify the types of tools, tables, and documents that one would need to run the wide area sandbox; hopefully it will highlight some of the challenges vis a vis the typical micro-sandbox, and some kindly readers will offer good suggestions as well.

Maps & Travel Systems
Where are the players starting?  Spain, France or England?  I can see good arguments for making the home base near Paris, London, or Cordoba.  Regardless, most plot hooks will require long distance travel.

Europe is settled and travel is common, but many areas are depopulated after the Thirty Years war, and there are still the risks of bandits, highwaymen, plague, and so on.   Because of the distances, I'm going to examine if overland travel should be more abstract than the typical micro-sandbox requiring a hex-by-hex crawl - it calls for a strategic scale.

I'm going to spend some time comparing the various long distance travel systems presented across My Favorite Editions(tm) of D&D to compare ideas.  I'm expecting a workable campaign map scale would be 30 mile hexes or 24 mile hexes, but I know I've seen some continent maps that have used 72 miles per hex - Mystara stuff, maybe.  Still, there's a strong argument to have detailed (real maps) behind the scenes just to know where everything is - an atlas of Europe would seem pretty useful, along with lists of 17th century settlements.

I'll also want to come up with some simple systems for determining encounter chances and encounter types when traversing mundane, settled areas, and adjudicating complications depending on whether the group stays in inns, camps, or seeks private lodgings as they crisscross Europe.

Local areas that require exploration will get the tactical map treatment - dungeon site maps, 6 miles per hex wilderness, or small area maps.

Settlements
There are probably tens of thousands of settlements across 17th century Europe, and I have no interest in detailing all of them.

The Sine Nomine approach in Red Tide and Stars Without Number really showed me the way here; to build settlement tags (customized for 1650's Europe) to facilitate the presentation of interesting settlements, and to  use similar systems for cities and courts.  (I have a post describing the Red Tide sandbox approach; reading that book really helped move me along this path of considering the wide area sandbox).

For major settlements or important places, it won't be hard to lift some historical details from the real world; I just don't want to get too caught up in endless research (too much historical accuracy is a rabbit hole in this type of campaign).

Encounters
Most encounters on the road will be mundane; the D&D world of 1650 still has it's monsters and magic, but they exist outside of the spotlight, in the margins.  The biggest need for customizing encounters (and this applies to settlements, too) is coming up with cultural notes to help drape local color over encounters and settlements as the group crosses regions.

Kevin of Sine Nomine posted some good advice the other day; make sure to have cultural specific Name list, Dress, Language, Cuisine, Laws and Customs to transform a generic encounter of "brigands or bandits" into Bavarian deserters, Turkish raiders, or French highwaymen.

Maritime Challenges
A big draw for placing the campaign in the 17th century is the New World and the age of piracy; I'll be making sure some of the more lucrative plot hooks involve the Spanish possessions in the New World.

Similar to doing a "textual analysis" of the old school stuff around long distance travel, I'll do the same thing for maritime travel and encounters; I know various bloggers have tackled running 'saltbox games', so I'll want to see what kinds of techniques have been developed out in the community already.  Down the road, I'd love to detail the Caribbean as a large scale saltbox.

Firearms
I'll include rules for firearms; they're mundane armaments in the world of 1650 and will be encountered quite a bit, even if the players realize that hand weapons are still the most effective for "dungeons".

Arcane magic will either be extremely rare or toned down; actual cannons will be the battlefield artillery, instead of say, fireballs.

Fun Stuff
Of course, the whole point of the campaign setting is to build out the creative, fun stuff - the contents of de la Torre's library, including a couple of dozen initial plot hooks, arcane tomes, perhaps some new spells, maybe even an unusable artifact or two.  There's all sorts of stuff you can put into the players hands right from the start, knowing they can't access it until they have the right knowledge or do the research - hopefully requiring an adventure along the way.  One nice benefit of doing that September challenge of short adventures - I know I won't have any problem coming up with dozens of interesting things for the library.

I'll develop some organizations and NPCs moving in the same space as the players - things like secretive groups within the major churches seeking these places for themselves; cabals of arcane practitioners after lost knowledge; rival mercenaries and treasure hunters seeking the loot; dark cultists looking to recover their own lost artifacts.

Although the campaign anticipates a lot of far flung travel, I still think I'd start with a more detailed home base area, with some local adventure opportunities to get things started (and trust the veracity of de la Torre's observations).  Travel costs money, and unless the group gets funded by a patron or organization, they'll need treasure before hitting the road.

Optional Stuff
With all of the long distance travel opportunities, it's quite likely trade and arbitrage will come into play - either on land or sea.  The upcoming ACKS rules I've play tested a few times have basic rules to support trade economics in a D&D setting; I'd probably start by seeing if ACKS economics could be adapted to the post-Renaissance.

I'll also need to decide if the rules as written do a good enough job for resolving duels and rapier fighting.

Objectives
Initially, the campaign would be about exploring some of these leads to see what kind of looting or scavenging could happen, while the group avoids the problems of post-war Europe.   As the characters learn about some of the threats out there, maybe the motivation changes, but it's safe to assume a degree of avarice when starting out and let it evolve from there.

The List
Here's what the do list currently looks like:

• Continental maps
• Travel system
• Settlement generation tables
• Cultural research
• Encounter tables
• Maritime rules / saltbox stuff
• Firearm rules
• Detailed home base
• Library contents
• Books, artifacts, journal and more
• Plot hooks - dozens!
• Organizations and NPCs, Beneficial and Malign
• Optional Stuff
• Economics, duels

What kind of stuff am I missing?  How would you approach making the continental maps, and where would you place the home base - I'm mainly considering England, France and Spain (because of the overseas opportunities) but should consider the Netherlands for the same reasons.

Other things where I could use suggestions - good sources for 17th century culture (it's clear I'm off to the library); also - recommendations on whether travel should be more abstract and played out day-by-day. 

The Library of de la Torre: A Weird Fantasy Campaign Idea

Now that the September short adventures are almost behind me, it's time to start thinking about the next thing - if I were going to implement a wide area sandbox, what would the campaign be about?  The elevator pitch goes like this:

It's the mid 17th century.  The infamous witch hunter Luis Diaz de la Torre is dead, but his notes describe the existence of secret cults, blasphemous books, evil artifacts, and crazed wizards, working dire magic in remote places.  What will you do with the information contained in the dead priest's library?

The idea here is that at the beginning of the campaign, one of the characters, or perhaps a patron, inherits the library of this priest who was once part of the Inquisition.  In an alternate version of earth, those investigators carrying out the Inquisition do indeed come across evidence of sorcery and dark practices.  The characters inheriting the dead priest's library would come into possession of dozens of potential plot hooks right at the beginning of the campaign, and many of them could be local, allowing the group to plan their own expeditions and test the veracity of the priest's scrawls right away:

I fear the Bishop of Zaragoza is secretly a vampire - why does he shun the daylight?
Must investigate the coastal village of Braga - rumors of sea devils and gold trinkets from Atlantis.
They live beneath the streets of Cordoba, and they eat the corpses of the dead.  I will not go back down there.

Perhaps the priest's journal hints at a widespread conspiracy, or alludes to a global cult that links demon worship in the Levant with the sea gods of the Greek isles and horrible golden statues brought back from the conquests of Central America.  Many of the books in his library wouldn't be accessible at first, at least until the characters learn languages like Greek and Arabic, or fantastic languages like Hyperborean (or develop the right spells).  The plot hooks gained by reading the books, over time, would be more detailed, and would hint at larger places like the Nameless City, the sleeping god beneath a Teutonic Knight's castle in Poland, or how to find the entrance to the underground Serpent Men kingdoms in old Pictland (now northern Scotland).

The early modern period provides a lot of mobility with the advent of navigation techniques and good ships, and these plot hooks provide reasons for the group to travel across post-war Europe, into the Ottoman territories, or to see the New World for themselves.  The stories could be very modular, and many of the hooks could be developed as one-page "dungeons".

This campaign approach supports a strong aesthetic for weird horror; the human world is predominantly mundane - the waxing power of the church has marginalized arcane magic, and demi-humans (if they exist at all) live on the fringes of the human world.  Travel will have the usual hazards - bandits, pirates, religious intolerance, the risks of war, and plague; there will be banal challenges of duels, honor, social standing, and the law.  But when the characters explore the ruined tombs in the necropolis, the ancient catacombs beneath Paris, or the remote mountain fastness, they cross over into a place where the monsters are real.

If I go forward with this, where's that leave the Black City?  I'll just roll the timeline forward and use the idea of a ruined alien city on the island of Thule as is, except instead of a Viking camp up there, perhaps it's whalers that discover the city in the north.  I wasn't satisfied with how the vibe was developing; a little too much like a zoo for the weird horror aesthetic I originally wanted (unless I just embrace the gonzo and go 100% megadungeon with it).

I don't know that I'll definitely do the Library campaign framework - next up would be an overview of what the toolbox might look like if I were going to build this out, so I can get a better sense of the effort.  But once the basics of the sandbox are in place, the fact that the adventures themselves could be small and modular is very appealing.

Paying for Effort

On its face, my concern around plot hooks in the sandbox from the other day has a fairly simple solution; treat plot hooks as just another piece of "sandbox information".  Like anything else encountered in the sandbox, the players can act on the information (or not); but like any other choice, there are consequences.  Choosing to ignore the Baron's summons and ditching the court page by slipping out the back of the tavern is perfectly valid; the Baron may have a problem with it, so the players should expect complications.

Upon further reflection, the real underlying concern began to come into focus for me, and it involves DM investment in a situation.  The moment the DM is invested in seeing the players undertake a certain action, the more likely it is that the consequences of declining those plot hooks for an alternate choice will become onerous and the game slides into rail road.  It's human nature; if a DM has spent a considerable amount of time preparing a detailed lair or new dungeon or similar piece of game content, it's understandable they'll want to see it used.

Choice is expensive, and the DM pays the bill.  You can have an area loosely detailed for low effort, but detail is costly.

This seems like a good topic to get feedback from folks that run their own sandboxes - how do you manage your own sandbox triangles - balancing player freedom of choice versus DM effort and the level of detail in the sandbox?

The simple answer is avoid investment in any given situation or outcome; easier to do if you haven't spent a lot of effort on developing one area too much.  To me, this implies a loosely detailed sandbox - sparse notes for the hex crawl or dungeon, heavy use of improvisation and random tables.  The concern is lack of depth.

If the DM is invested in developing detail, how to ensure the work isn't wasted while supporting freedom of choice?  I'm wondering how many of you discuss with the players at the end of the game session where they're going next, what will they do next game session, as a way of hedging before investing too much time?  How often are there out-of-character discussions about the direction of the game, and ensuring alignment between the DM's effort and what the players will actually choose in-game?

My approach in Gothic Greyhawk, the current campaign, was something I called the sandbox of modules - building a series of hex crawls and seeding it heavily with published adventure modules.  Someone else (the module writer) did all the heavy lifting on the detail, and I have no investment if the players choose to act on one set of information or another.  However, as I look ahead to a more ambitious campaign setting, I want to explicitly get away from the modules, especially as I think of a campaign world to house an incarnation of the Black City.

Another option is the illusionist's trick - the DM is heavily invested in a situation, and will do a bit of the shell game behind the scenes to re-skin or shuffle it around, ensuring the content gets encountered regardless of player choice.  Illusionism is quickly dismissed here in the OSR blogosphere, but I hear it discussed as a valid tactic in other contexts.

Plot Hooks and the Sandbox

One thing I've been mulling is the limiting factor "plot hooks" place on player agency in the sandbox.  There's a common sense element at work here; if a person is given limitless choices, it can be hard to make *any* choices.  But give someone three interesting options, now there's something to weigh and analyze and make a decision.

I kicked off a discussion about illusionism (The Shell Game in the Sandbox) a few weeks ago to work through how far a DM could go in having premade content to drop into the sandbox, before crossing over into illusionism and railroading.  There are similar pitfalls with "plot hooks".  There seems to be a slippery slope between a plot hook and being led along the DM's "story".

To establish a common lexicon, let's say that plot hooks are a subset of information about the game world.  Players can gather information Actively or Passively.  Active information gathering involves creating a plan to find information - it's a pull model; passive information gathering is pushed by the DM.  A "plot hook" is passive information pushed on to the players that provides a definitive chance to have an adventure - the classic plot hook is a job offer or similar patron encounter.   A plot hook is not a predefined story; it is a way of delivering specific, actionable information about the entry point to an adventure.  However, I'd be glad for folks to chime in on refining these views on presenting sandbox information - these definitions were off the cuff to help frame the discussion on plot hooks.

One of the biggest criticisms regarding the free form sandbox is identified in that very first paragraph; the players start in a tavern, with no idea what to do next, GO.  And they just sit there, mouth agape.  They could get jobs as dishwashers, or they could plan to rob the bank. They could walk in a straight line north-north-east out of town, for as long as they wanted.  They could start a bar fight.  If they have too many options, there's a good chance they'll seize up with the analysis paralysis.  The complaint "nothing happens in a sandbox campaign" really just means that the players are unprepared for the responsibility of active information gathering.

But my interest here lies in passive information:  the plot hook.  Plot hooks are practical, because they promise direct routes to adventures.  That's why players show up, to do something interesting, and not for living out their lives as fantasy dishwashers or scullions.  But how far can you go down the road of using plot hooks before it crosses into illusionism or railroad - ie, you have total freedom of choice, as long as you make my choice?  It clearly seems to be a type of railroad if there's only one plot hook offered; how about if there are only two plot hooks? Three?

I don't see much discussion regarding the use of plot hooks and patrons and job offers, and their intersection with a player-driven game.  If there are multiple (distinct) opportunities to pursue at any give time, I can see an argument that a game using plot hooks is still player driven; it's up to the players to pick which opportunity to pursue, and an open-ended plot hook should let them create their own plan on how to go about exploiting the opportunity.  But don't lose sight that the players have allowed their nearly limitless choices (in the active scheme) to collapse to a much smaller number of options when using plot hooks.

Megadungeons present an interesting problem; the DM has made the biggest choice for the players in the campaign - "This is a megadungeon campaign, if you show up to play, you're expected to explore the megadungeon".  It's the smaller choices within that larger decision where the players can execute the player-driven game  - preparing for each dungeon incursion, gathering information, deciding which entrance do they use, where do they explore.  This seems to cross over into a "social contract" area - they accept the game's gigantic plot hook and premise up front, out-of-character - it's a game about a megadungeon.  We certainly would consider these players bad sports if they showed up to the DM's new megadungeon campaign's first session, and promptly decided to leave town and head for the mountains, ignoring the detailed dungeon for the loosely defined wilds.

Thus, there's a question of fairness and equity in the sandbox, and it's related to the sandbox triangle (player freedom versus the DM's level of effort versus the amount of detail).  Imagine these two situations:  the DM prepares the next level of the megadungeon ahead of the game, the players show up, start planning the night's adventure, and decide to head north, into the wilds, to find the island of Avalon.  In the second situation, the players show up, continue their exploration of the dungeon, but at the end of the session, they mention to the DM that next week, they plan to head north and find the island of Avalon.

As DM's, we keep tools handy for generating content on the fly, so perhaps the first DM could improvise the overland journey to Avalon.  It's likely Avalon is just a name on the map, loosely detailed if at all; how well can the DM wing it?  And the DM's work on the megadungeon was a bit wasted.  Is there a duty on behalf of the players not to waste the DM's time and effort?  In the second situation, the journey to Avalon and the situation on the island will be more detailed before next game - more detail should also make it more interesting.

I've been thinking about these problems around plot hooks as I work through how a "wide area sandbox" would be structured.  In this case, the wide area sandbox would be the size of the Western Hemisphere - imagine Europe, the New World, the Spanish Main, the Mediterranean.  Quite a bit larger than a micro sandbox (the Keep on the Borderlands) or a regular sandbox laid out as a hex crawl.

In a micro sandbox or even a regular sandbox, I don't see why the DM needs any prepared plot hooks at all; those sandboxes can be so well documented up front that player choice is only limited by their active information gathering skills.  Plot hooks are only necessary to bail out players that fail Sandbox 101 - when the DM needs to light up the big neon sign that says, "Adventure is Here -->", via a patron, quest, or similar info dump.

In order to run a game that covers a much larger geographic scale, the plot hook seems to be a pragmatic necessity.  For instance, it's possible the players might randomly choose to outfit a ship and an overland expedition to the distant jungle colony on their own, but if that's where the DM has developed a number of future adventure sites, he might want to tip off the players a bit more directly - through a patron, rumors, a job offer, any number of approaches to make it clear, "there's gold in them hills".  My experience has been that most players don't mind following plot hooks to interesting adventure sites as long as they still have complete freedom in the execution - including the freedom to leave.

I don't know that I'm totally ready to reduce this to any game mastering principles, yet.  For now, it's enough to establish that there are different approaches to information gathering, which I'm calling active and passive; the size and detail of the sandbox defines the utility of the different information gathering approaches; the use of passive information gathering (plot hooks) constrains choice; however, plot hooks might be acceptable due to equitable factors (not wasting the DM's time) and fun - the players get to places that are more detailed and interesting to explore.

If I develop these ideas further it would be around that last sentence - acceptable use of plot hooks, and the trade offs between detailed content and freedom.

Adventure versus Setting

I'm going to give this whole "Wide Area Sandbox" thing some thought and plot out how I'd build one.  By way of recap - the problem behind a Wide Area Sandbox concerns how to run a free-form campaign in a world where the players have a lot of mobility, and the traditional sandbox approaches don't cover enough real estate.  I'm going to look for ideas from games like Traveler, or Stars Without Number, and see what techniques in the Sci Fi RPG genre can be ported back into a game using sailing ships.

But a preliminary problem is that of setting.  Is the game mostly about exploring the setting, or exploring the adventures within the setting?  For instance, a Swords & Planet game is as much about discovering the new world in all its strangeness, as it is about any adventures there.

I have a specific tone I mean to establish, between the mundane civilized areas (which don't need the hex-by-hex sandbox treatment), and the distant areas where hex-by-hex exploration is warranted.  It's an evolution of an idea from last March, where I mused how wild frontier settings could be distinct from points of light - Wild Frontiers Part 1 and Wild Frontiers Part 2.  It's funny how older ideas don't die, they just wait for the right time to be expressed.

I find myself firmly in the camp of using a real-world model for the Wide Area Sandbox; I want the "Known World" to be familiar and mundane; adventures with monsters mostly happen in wild, out of place areas, and the frontiers.

And that brings me to the point where I'm having some questions:  For those of you that use the real earth as the model for your fantasy campaign, do you use actual earth places and names, or do you create that stuff whole cloth, only using the earth for inspiration?  I'm leaning towards using the real world, with a touch of magic and fantasy woven into history, and using real places, events and names.

If the characters find a magic sword in a tomb, and they learn it once belonged to the grandfather of the current king, it seems more sensible to be able to flip open a history book and see that it was made for Blah Blah Blah, the King of France, instead of making up false histories.  Time would be better spent on crafting excellent adventures.

The two candidate time periods for the wide area sandbox are the mid-17th century, and the Roman period.

The 17th century provides a backdrop of war and chaos in Europe, as well as frontiers across the ocean in the New World and early explorations of Africa.  The dark heart of Europe can still serve as a setting for classic monsters in the Gothic horror tradition; Dracula is timeless.

The Roman world is very cosmopolitan across the Mediterranean, but offers wild frontiers on all sides, just beyond the camps of the Legions.  It's ideal for a D&D game with a bit more armor and traditional weaponry because of the lower technology, but I'm not ignoring the fact that the Roman mindset is more removed; the past is a foreign country, after all.

The Wide Area Sandbox

There's an idea I can't get out of my head - it keeps rattling around in there since I got exposed to Stars Without Number and the idea of generating a sector of space as a sandbox - how can we take the standard D&D sandbox, blow it up in size, and let the players cut loose with serious mobility?

For purposes of scale, I'll say something like Keep on the Borderlands, with its limited wilderness area, town and cave complex, is a micro-sandbox; a regular sized sandbox is in the 6 miles per hex range, covering 2-4 hex crawl sized maps.  The regular sandbox is a good size if your group is trudging around or even traveling by horse; journeys are measured in hours and days, but rarely weeks.

The Wide Area Sandbox
Mobility defines the scale of the Wide Area Sandbox.  Consider the idea of the "Saltbox" I'm seeing the cool bloggers talk about; the group is traveling from place to place on ships and time is measured in days, weeks, maybe even months.

I'll use a historical setting like the Spanish Main as an example; it covered an area roughly 2,000 miles by 2,000 miles; it would be one of my first inspirations for a Saltbox.  You've got excellent home bases like Port Royale, Havana, Tortuga, Charleston, or Porto Bello, international competition between privateers and ships flying national colors, pirates, tons of uncharted islands, dangerous jungles laden with gold.

It seems to me that the current state of the art could handle such a setting quite well - larger and smaller scale hex maps could be created, random tables for island stocking, one could even adapt the Stars Without Number style of tags for islands, and tools for generating a wide range of ships, crews, and missions on the fly.  The DM could have some prebuilt ruins and similar encounters ready to go for when the results called for it.  I've got to fool with Vornheim some more, too, and see if some of the loose ideas on presenting an undefined city could be extrapolated into the wilderness.

The Macro Sandbox
Let's talk about going bigger.  Let's start the group back in the homeland - I'll use the early modern period as an example, and the group is considering hiring on with the West Araby Trading company after asking around for exciting opportunities - they learn that the following high risk jobs are available:

Travel to an exotic port near the desert lands, where the company is outfitting caravans to head into the desert and conduct searches for lost tombs, from which they hope to recover artifacts that could be thousands of years old.

The church is sending missionaries to a distant jungle land to preach the faith; dangers include pirates, privateers, and hostile natives.  There's the chance to stop on uncharted islands, recover lost pirate treasures, and discover civilizations and lands untouched by the "civilized nations".

So this is one of the things I'm thinking about - what kind of tools would support a macro-sandbox?  Is there a way to take the current state of the art - the techniques we use for sandboxes and saltboxes, and configure them to support play that supports an even grander scale of travel?

I'm also kicking around the idea of what something akin to an early modern D&D game would be like for me - there would be highly civilized lands, where adventures would be necessarily mundane and magic would be rare.  Monsters would be fairly rare in downtown London, for instance.  So the plot hooks would involve traveling extraordinary distances to remote frontiers where the possibilities would still be wide open - the Spanish Main, African continent, the gothic heart of old Europe, the frozen areas near the arctic circle.  Here there be dragons.

Maybe I've answered the question by repeatedly pulling in real-world analogues - that such a far flung campaign would have to draw heavily from the real world so the DM could shortcut a lot of the creation of the mundane cultures and just focus on sandboxing the frontiers - and then whatever techniques would be used for the Wide Area Sandbox would be extended to the frontiers (each frontier is basically a Wide Area Sandbox).

Just thinking out loud at this point.  What's the most ambitious geographic scale you've seen in someone's home fantasy campaign?