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 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?

Challenges of the Saltbox

The archetypal D&D game, where a beginning group of adventurers meet in a tavern and head out to the local ruins, doesn't necessitate skills beyond those inherent in the class descriptions; fighters are already good at fighting, magic users cast spells, clerics can affect undead, and so forth.

Not so when you consider staging a maritime adventure.  The roles on a ship demand specialized skills - navigators need to read charts, calculate dead reckoning, mark soundings, and take latitude measurements; crewmen need to know the proper rigging of the sails and ship maintenance; gun crews need to know the elevation and targeting of cannons and the measurement of charges based on range and shot.  The captain is perhaps the most knowledgeable and experienced sailor on the ship, as well as requiring a strong personality and commanding presence.

Old school (rules-light) D&D doesn't provide much support in the rules for adjudicating these situations.  Which is fine, the game is Dungeons & Dragons, not Sloops & Sailors.  I imagine one reason many campaigns don't feature significant ocean travel is precisely due to discomfort by the DM.  If you're going to run the saltbox, you need a plan.

Hiring Experts
The by-the-book answer is to require adventurers to hire navigators, a captain, gunnery crew and sailors; there's no real provision for player characters to have said skills (unless perhaps the DM is using background professions or something like the 1E DMG).  This is fine if the ocean travel is a means to an end, like getting to the Isle of Dread; not so much if most of the campaign will revolve around the sea.

How would you handle this in an old school game?  Hybrid systems that split the new/old school line (like ACKS) have a proficiency based skill system, so player characters could add specific skills over time.  Alternatively, the DM could rule that characters spending enough time ship-board could learn these professions after a sufficient period as on-the-job-training.

Hack n Slash pointed readers towards an old post on A Rod of Lordly Might that broke professional skills down into categories of unskilled, skilled, expert, and master, and provided ideas on costs and times to pick them up (outside of the class and level system).  I like the idea of requiring experts initially, but letting the players add the skills as professions if they really want to allocate time and effort in game to pick them up for their characters, too.

Adjudicating Skill-Based Situations
In the dungeon environment, rules-light skill decisions on the fly are handled through a negotiation; the player describes what they want to do, the DM comes up with a success chance, the players think of ways to enhance success, and we either agree on a ruling or a roll that needs to be made and move on.

In a situation where specialized knowledge affects frequent encounters and combat, I'd like to push more of this resolution towards a defined system of rolls.  Can the crew get more speed out of the ship in a pursuit and evasion situation; can the captain's maneuver to get into a broadside position succeed; was the grappling and boarding attempt successful; did the navigator succeed in guiding the vessel to that remote island across the trackless ocean?

Looking through the BX rules, there are some guidelines for adjudicating these types of maneuvers, but they don't have a variable element for individual skill.  So one approach is to elaborate these generic guidelines for solving common situations, like pursuit, maneuvering, boarding, and navigation, and then apply modifiers based on player choices at the table.

An alternate approach is to add appropriate individual skills to the mix - use something like ACKS's proficiencies, extend the LOTFP d6-based skills to include some nautical skills, or use professional descriptions like unskilled, skilled, expert, or master to provide some common modifiers.

Agency and Autonomy
I've talked about this in the past, that playing crewmen on someone else's ship doesn't provide a lot of agency and authority to the players - they take orders, they don't give them.  As such, maritime adventures are postponed until the group has sufficient wealth to hire and outfit their own ship.

For a low-level campaign, I like the idea of the group starting with vessels small enough for them to afford, or ensuring one of the earliest adventures puts them in ownership of a suitable vessel.  Lots of real-world pirate careers started with canoes and pinnaces, trading up over time to progressively bigger vessels.  I've been working on a kick-off adventure for such a campaign, where the characters start as conventional adventurers, and gain an opportunity to seize an appropriate vessel and become privateers by the end of the adventure.  I'd use privateers because  I tend to think my players would rather be 'legal pirates' with patriotic targets, rather than murderous, indiscriminate raiders.

A useful thing about the 16th and 17th century colonial waters, the Spanish Empire of the time can be portrayed as universal, unsympathetic villains, the way early 20th century films frequently demonize Germany.  The destruction wreaked by the conquistadors was widespread and massive, dimmed only by 5 centuries.  But that's grist for another mill.

Anyway, that's where I'm at - gathering ideas for resolving common maritime problems, consulting what's been done in BX and AD&D 1E while looking at other game systems (currently looking at how Flashing Blades: High Seas handles similar situations).  James at LOTFP threatened to develop a maritime supplement at some point, but I don't see it on the near horizon (though hopefully the LOTFP guns supplement is inching closer...)

I'm also considering how player characters can gain some professional expertise in these non-dungeoneering professions, if desired.  Not only would this stuff be necessary for a Spanish Main setting, it'd be useful in the Black City - in another couple of months, the Spitsberg Pirates will be ready to buy their own longship or knarr and going where they will.

Game masters that have run a heavy nautical campaign seem few and far between; it's an idea that's occasionally discussed, but infrequently executed.  But if readers have suggestions on these issues, I'm thankful for any insights!

D&D Professional Skills

From time to time the DM might need to determine if a NPC professional succeeds at a difficult technical skill or craft - does the blacksmith make a suitable masterwork weapon on the first try, can the sage answer an obscure question, that kind of stuff.  As I collate notes for my future (Caribbean-based) saltbox setting, this extends to solving for skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery.

I've seen the simple 2d6 reaction chart from classic D&D turned into a skill resolution chart.  It assumes a modifier scale of -3 to +3 using ability scores.  (Historical note: Charisma was capped at +2 in the Moldvay rules, but this was changed for Mentzer and the Rules Cyclopedia).  For professional skills, I'm using the following descriptors to determine appropriate "ability modifiers":

Professional Experience:
Skilled:  +1
Expert:  +2
Master:  +3
Unskilled:  -2

Unskilled characters may not even get a roll in some cases.  The basic reaction chart goes like this:

Skill Resolution (roll 2d6):
2  serious failure
3-5 failure
6-8 partial success
9-11 success
12 great success

An example usage: if the players hire a skilled navigator instead of a master navigator for their ship, they'll pay less in salary or shares, but there's a higher chance of getting lost on the way to that hidden island.  As I develop the nautical rules, I'll work on specific guidelines when hired experts would make checks and how the dice results translate into specific outcomes.

For basic D&D, I like decoupling professional skills from the class and level system and treating them as background skills for NPCs; it keeps the major emphasis for class advancement on adventuring and developing adventurer capabilities.  Nonetheless, I can see the players asking if they can develop any degree of professional skill (especially these nautical skills) if they spend enough time on a boat.

This post from an older blog (Skills: The Middle Road) provided some recommendations for education around professional skills, so I'll use those values as a starting point and will see how it goes:

Learning a Profession:
Skilled - 1 month, 1000gp
Expert - 3 months, 3000gp
Master - 6 months, 10,000gp

If a player character commits to spending time in the rigging, learning how to furl and unfurl the sails, close-haul a ship, tie the right knots, swab the deck, and so on, they can be a skilled sailor after a month of effort and a bit of money on the side.  (For sailing, assume the money goes to gambling, carousing, repairs, clothes, basic gear, dues, and so on; ordinary folks pick up the same skills at a slower pace without all the money spent).

Alternatively, I can look at a hybrid game like ACKS, that bolts a new-school inspired feat and proficiency system onto the old school chassis.  Navigation and Seamanship are already represented as choices in ACKS, and Gunnery is easy to add.  ACKS also addresses when someone would be qualified as a "master" by stacking extra picks on a proficiency.  I'm not sure the high-fantasy tone of ACKS is what I'm going for, so the actual decision on rules flavor is for sometime down the road.

The Twilight Zone Sandbox… with Pirates

Earlier in the week, Talysman over at the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms mused how the old Twilight Zone episodes were like mini weird tales, featuring a strange or horrific twist at the end.  It got me to thinking how easy it would be to 'file off the serial numbers' and use the weird element from the episodes for a short game situation.

I've been spending a lot of time here thinking out loud about Arthur, and Britain, and Feudal Japan, but I never really stopped kicking around ideas for a Colonial or Caribbean themed game (Goblins of the Spanish Main?) with privateers or buccaneers in the 1600's, and I'm slowly building out notes for using it for a setting - I have a kick-off adventure for the campaign already outlined.  If I were to build a Caribbean saltbox/sandbox area, could some of the encounters use weird twists inspired by the excellent writing from The Twilight Zone?

So that was the experiment - I scanned only the first 10 or so episodes of The Twilight Zone season 1 (which I had watched earlier this year) and picked out a few where I got an immediate hit on an adventure hook to see if the idea would work as a weird vignette in a nautical sandbox.  Consider there are over 150 episodes to mine for inspiration!

Here are some ideas:

Mr Denton on Doomsday
This is the episode where the two gunfighters confront each other, and realize they're both using the same steady-hand / speed elixir from the snake oil salesman; there's also a theme of fate intervening.

Sandbox:  A patron is obsessed with finding an old hermit in the mountains of Hispaniola to learn the secret of finding the legendary crystal skull, lost oracle of the Maya.  The one-armed hermit offers dire warnings about seeking the relic and receiving its visions, but the group sets off for the Yucatan coast, avoiding Spanish forts to land on the deserted coast and hunt for the crumbling Mayan ruin.  The group guides the patron to the chamber of the skull, and the patron loses his hand in a gruesome way, just like the old hermit, a heavy price for consulting the pagan oracle.

Escape Clause
This one involved a hypochondriac guy who makes a deal with the devil for immortality, but then gets life in prison for the murder of his wife.

Sandbox:  A timid man who became immortal and then turns into a daredevil / thrill seeker makes for an interesting recurring character - he's long since bored and his death-wishes constantly endanger everyone around him.  He may start out like a 'normal man' sailor who always seems to come out of scrapes okay, no matter how dangerous the assignment for which he volunteered.  The only thing that frightens him is the prospect of captivity - life in jail, in fact.

The Lonely
A convict consigned to a distant planet falls in love with an android.  His rescuers shoot the android in the head when they come to get him.

Sandbox:  Marooning and madness are fantastic pirate themes.  This vignette involves finding a castaway that doesn't want to leave the island without his "wife", although the players can't find any evidence of her during the day.  Wifey only shows up in the dark of night, when it's time for her to feed - and she doesn't want her "husband" taken away from her, either.

Time Enough At Last
Poor Burgess Meredith is finally left alone with all those books, only his glasses break.

Sandbox:  This one made me think of the The Curse of the Black Pearl, that first Jack Sparrow movie - the theme involves wanting something really bad, paying a heavy price to get it, and then not being able to enjoy it once you have it through irony - like the pirates claiming the cursed Aztec gold.  I could riff off a similar theme around wish fulfillment.

Judgment Night
This was the u-boat captain who wakes up on board a merchant ship, and keeps relieving a u-boat attack from the other perspective.

Sandbox:  My first thought was to have an exploring group discover a careened ship, and a broad trail leading to a nearby fort where the crew has set up defenses; they urge the party to join them in the defense, because some horrible pirates will be attacking soon.  As clues pile up, the party realizes their fellow defenders were all vicious pirates themselves, now strangely humbled; perhaps only the pirates can see and experience the ghostly attackers?  I don’t know yet, just thinking out loud, but I like the thought of simulating what it would be like to get pulled into someone else's nightmare.  In fact, all of the defenders are phantoms.  The party spent the evening in the company of ghosts consigned to relive the hellish horrors they themselves inflicted on others, after they were cursed by a powerful Obeah woman murdered on their last raid.

Goblins of the Spanish Main

Yesterday, I was suggesting some elements that are core to D&D that need to be addressed by the campaign setting.  The more of these elements that work in the setting "as is", the better is the fit between the setting idea and D&D; the closer it is to a core D&D experience.  Just to try it out, I thought I'd come up with a random half-baked idea and see how it tests as a D&D setting.

Yo Ho, me hearties!  Let's set sail for a fantastic version of the Gulf of Mexico and trawl the waters of the Spanish Main during the golden age of piracy - buried treasure, bottles of rum, and 15 men on a dead man's chest.  And monsters.

First up, dungeons and adventure sites.  How could you handle dungeons in a "saltbox"?  Exploring a wild stretch of sea, it's got to be sprinkled with islands.  Each island could be a simple hex crawl.  You could arrange the islands by distance, such that the furthest islands are more dangerous - a bit like dungeon levels.  Some of the islands themselves could have a few simple ruins on them, or basic sea caves.  You're not going to have anything quite like a traditional dungeon, though you could have ancient Atlantean ruins or something similar.

I don't see any problems using the following D&D tropes on the Spanish Main - classes, levels, alignment, high magic, and XP for gold.  One could even place demi-humans back in folkloric Europe and have the odd halfling, dwarf or elf in a crew.

It's not hard to imagine populating the mythic Caribbean with various monsters from the bestiaries, both sea monsters of nautical lore and monsters appropriate for the tropics.  A dinosaur-filled "lost world" like the Isle of Dread seems de rigueur.  What about two-legged opponents?  There'd be no end of foreign nationals, opposing pirates and buccaneers, or hostile natives that could be found on the islands - assuming you want to stay away from using traditional D&D-style humanoids.

If you cared about "domain level play", what would the end-game be like here?  Maybe mid-level to high-level characters buy their own ships instead of building castles.  I seem to recall Pirate Lords are like 11th level fighters in the Expert set, so you could adapt the end-game to a maritime milieu.

Actually, the biggest issue I see in adapting the tropes of the D&D campaign to such a setting is the fact that those NPC ships are commanded by high level characters!

The party is the unit of autonomy and exploration in the dungeon, and the idea behind the setting needs to support these small groups of picaresque adventurers setting out to scrabble for loot.  It's a bit hard to plan your own capers when you're on board a ship commanded by someone else.  This could be a fatal flaw.

Maybe the adventuring "unit" in such a campaign would be the longboat - just large enough for the players, their gear, and retainers, and once they get to shore they're on their own to plan and explore.  From that perspective, the ship becomes the local "town", the place the adventurers return to drink some rum, hear rumors, and plan their next expedition.  A tidy sum of loot is "taxed" back to the captain.

That's a potential solution - still doesn't provide a satisfactory solution for piloting the ship and crew from place to place, or how combat on the high seas would work when the players are a small group of pirates on a much larger ship.  I've got to think about it some more - the list was skewed towards mechanical elements and adherence to a core D&D experience, but there clearly needs to be some things on the list that address these non-mechanical concerns, like the importance of planning, autonomy, and small group play in the setting.  Playing the role of minions at the whim of a high level NPC is not a great recipe for D&D.


*Picture is NC Wyeth Treasure Island

Buccaneers in the Time of Dragons

Lately my reading into colonial history has taken me to the 17th century Caribbean basin, and the rise of buccaneers, and later pirates.  One striking component, as you read about the life stories of notorious buccaneers and pirates, is how their rise to glory or infamy parallels the murder hobo career of characters from D&D or your favorite retro clone™.  They start out as poor fighting men, usually ex-hunters or military, who turn to raiding to earn a better life.  Early success wins them a ship, and as their name grows, more and more men flock to their banner and they become capable of launching larger raids - sometimes with multiple ships or small armies of buccaneers, eventually sacking major towns and forts.  In the twilight of their career, they take their fortunes and retire to governorships,  plantations, or high stations in the military - or they're killed in action.  It's a 50-50 proposition.

The issue I see with such a campaign arc in D&D is that it doesn't handle large scale combats very well, and certainly not if characters are just low level participants.  I imagine smaller raiding and boarding actions can be handled tactically, using the standard rules, but it would become unwieldy once more than 50 or so combatants per side are engaged.

If you were to go outside of D&D to borrow ideas from a system that handled ship-to-ship combat, chases, boarding actions, and similar aspects of high seas action, what would it be?  I also think it beneficial to shift the scale as appropriate; perhaps the distance-based combat ship-to-ship starts abstract, but when the ships reach boarding range, play moves from a strategic scale to a tactical scale and the players resolve the remainder of the combat using standard rules.

I'm not averse to looking at Sci Fi either, I imagine a starship-based game could have similar issues where the combat needs to shift from ship-to-ship combat to personal combat.  Not everyone can be the captain, after all.  I might be missing some game approaches that handled transitions and troupe play.

Incidentally, following the muse a bit, I've been sketching notes for a short horror scenario in colonial waters that involves a derelict Spanish vessel drifting along the coast.  Was it part of one of the famed treasure fleets, lost in a storm, or is something else at play?  The adventure hook is being asked to join a merchant's expedition, either out of Jamestown (to the north) or up from the Bahamas, to find and recover the derelict after it was spotted by a vessel just making port; adventurers are needed for the kind of fighting and exploration of which the regular sailors are ill-prepared.  Although it's free form, some of the potential encounters involves French pirates, native villages along the coast, and a dark horror from the Mesoamerican hinterland.  It's shaping up to be great fun. But it's got me thinking again how an actual saltbox type campaign might be played out.

The Best of Both Worlds - Revisiting D&D and the Horror

D&D and horror should go together like chocolate and peanut butter.  It should.  But the two types of game experiences don't usually share the same objectives.

The objective of the D&D style game is to explore and gain treasure.  Ruins and abandoned habitations filled with treasure are the default adventure sites.  The monsters are incidental.  The horror game is about uncovering a mystery that puts the protagonists in contact with the monsters.  The cooler and more horrific the monsters, the better.  The objective is to survive and resolve the situation (assuming that's possible).

Horror serials reveal the difficulty in rationally explaining why the same set of protagonists keeps running into monsters, and so their structures tend to revolve around two basic forms.  The most common approach is to make the group investigative - monster hunters like the agents on The X-Files, or the two guys on Supernatural; relic hunters like Warehouse 13 or Friday the 13th.  Some horror serials are locale-based, where the recurring horror situations involve a common nexus, like the house and sanitarium locations of American Horror Story, the village of Sleepy Hollow, or the mansion in Dark Shadows.

My ongoing quest is around reconciling the two game structures - exploration and investigation.  My platonic ideal for D&D involves ruins and wealth to recover.  I love the D&D sandbox style because the players are placed firmly in charge of planning their excursions.  Unfortunately, this mostly precludes the monster-hunter style of campaign, reserving that for games that embrace the 'save the world mentality' like Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu.  For combining genres, I feel like the ground is firmer by taking a 'relic-hunter' approach, where the players either get a list of potential ruined adventuring sites to target or a list of artifacts to recover.  Pursuing their own pecuniary goals is what motivates them to explore and interact with the supernatural world.

Anyway, it seems reasonable that you should be able to build a campaign around a series of ruined locales, each rumored to possess lost wealth, but when investigated, thrusts the players into opposition with eldritch horrors - letting you  implement the best of both gaming styles.  A bigger challenge for me is whether to place such a game in a historical setting and make it amenable to the traditional 30 x 40 hex map.  For myself, one locale where I've done some work is 'Gothic Yorkshire', an interesting area in northern England where there's a density of old ruined abbeys and crumbling castles - it even fits on a standard hex sheet.  I'm also perennially drawn to the Mesoamerican ruins of the Yucatan and the world of the Caribbean; sadly, that area is a tad large for a traditional hex crawl, although a 'saltbox' would work just fine.

The LOTFP rules seem to be fairly popular out here in the OSR blogosphere - how are you running your D&D\horror hybrid game?  I don't see a lot of discussion around campaign structures so I'm presuming a lot of folks go with the tried and true "plot hook of the week, leads to adventure of the week" style of campaign.

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.

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…)

Towards Simple Naval Combat

There are already RPG games that focus on swashbuckling campaigns.  They're lighter in tone, and feature the cinematic action, or perhaps a bit of politics and intrigue.  I'm coming at the pirate genre from the perspective of horror fantasy; ghost-haunted ruined Spanish castles on lonely promontories; dank swamps with zombie masters, jade idols, and mindless undead hulks; fallen jungle ruins with blasphemous temples and a fortune in gems.  The idea is to make a large wilderness hex crawl, a "saltbox" instead of a sandbox, with the sailing vessel as the primary conveyance.  The mode is D&D style play, exploration seeking  after treasure, but with the chance for a bit of opportunistic piracy on the high seas (both for and against the players), and some rowdy carousing back in Port Royal or Tortuga.

The challenge is to build simple, abstract, flavorful nautical rules that capture situations during the Age of Sail without requiring a lot of nautical interest to enjoy the style.  So far, the ship combat rules in Flashing Blades: High Seas (FBHS) strike a good tone of abstraction and flavor when compared to the fiddly bits in competing rules sets, but there are a few things to change and/or add, to adapt them to D&D style play.

Skills
First thing to add is some basic skill resolution for professional skills - unskilled, skilled, expert, master - for specialized (non-adventuring) skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery where resolution is going to matter.  Plenty of OSR types have adopted 2d6 skill systems modeled after the reaction roll chart.  Player characters can gain knowledge of professions over time, but the system is mainly for determining how hired experts contribute during a conflict.

Evasion
An important segment of a nautical encounter is when sails are spotted on the horizon, quickly followed by a decision to evade or give chase; the zoom level of FBHS is a little too tactical (yards instead of miles), skipping the whole dynamic of evading until night fall to escape the pursuer after dark, or using fog and foul weather, for the same.  Should be simple to extend the FBHS process a bit.

Maneuvers
When a ship has successfully overtaken another, there's the opportunity to maneuver.  FBHS has solid maneuvering rules, covering positioning for broadsides, chasers and stern guns, crossing the T, etc, and suggesting how to use ship handling and a bit of piloting skill; players don't need to know about the wind gage or leeward approaches, it's abstracted into fairly simple skill rolls once they decide on a broad strategy.

Combat
I'm a big fan of the humble d6 when you need to roll a ton of dice - too many years of Axis & Allies.  Batteries of cannons should be resolved with a handful of d6's.  Some of the rule sets involve calculating a ton of d20 modifiers and rolling dozens of times for a broadside on the d20 scale.  Meanwhile, FBHS has a single die roll for an entire battery, which isn't ideal to me either, so I'll adjust to include chucking handfuls of d6's and adding up hits.

Regardless, the strength of historical buccaneers was their crack shots with the musket, so there need to be adjustments to the combat approach to account for actual historical strategies like picking off helmsman, suppressing gun ports with withering fire, and otherwise clearing the deck with small arms while closing the gap to board.  The type of buccaneer ships in the game are typically lightly armed (unlike the 3-4 mast monsters used by pirates in the later age).

Reactions
There are a number of points at which a merchant ship's reactions (or morale checks) are critical; when spotted (to determine if they lay to, evade, or come about); when they’re overtaken - do they fight or roll over; when they're boarded, do they surrender, defend the decks, or set traps and retreat to closed quarters.  Reputation for the buccaneers and pirates will be a factor influencing morale checks.

Boarding
FBHS has fast, abstract rules for handling the boarding - although, like I mentioned above, the assumption seems to be two heavily armed ships slugging it out with broadsides, movie-style, and not fast rovers raking the decks with small arms and then quickly overwhelming with a boarding action.  It also omits grenades, a practical weapon, albeit one you usually don't see in the swashbuckling movies, either.  Otherwise, the FBHS rules feature a simple d6 system that would work well with the Axis & Allies style mass d6 rolls.

Ship Stats
It'll be important to define some standard ship "types" that make sense to me, by my understanding of the ships of the period; number and types of guns are important, structural hit points, handling ability (for maneuvering), typical crew sizes, and I'll even have to solve the cargo management problem (without having to micro-manage every single item loaded onto the ship).

I plan on yoinking some firearm rules from AD&D's A Mighty Fortress (although I assume the LOTFP gun book will be available long before this campaign is ready) and I'll be scanning Backswords & Bucklers again for ideas as well.  I also need to pick up Flashing Blades sometime, I really like the approach in the nautical supplement.

So that's a statement of purpose.  More to come.

A Visit to the Mule

Last weekend I had the chance to head up to the city with one of my players and visit some of the folks behind The Mule Abides blog, Tavis and Charlatan.  A pair of kiddos came with, so we ended up with a group of 3 kids and 4 adults (plus the DM) for a nice 3-4 hour game.  It was a chance to see a bit how Tavis's approach to the Saltbox works, play some ACKS (Adventurer Conquer King), use an alternate type of 0-level funnel, and then get in some general RPG discussion.

As is the case with most games with kids, it ended with death and violence in the classic tradition; by borrowing tactics from cartoons.  After being marooned on an island by a dislikable captain, the party excavated an entrance to some caves beneath the island.  Confronted by a long, slime-filled tunnel deeper in the cave complex, the adult players puzzled over how to safely navigate the treacherous length of cave - walk carefully and probe with poles, tie ropes and rappel down?  Cutting the proverbial Gordian knot, two of the kids quickly fashioned a toboggan out of wooden planks and went zooming down the tunnel through the slime, hooting and hollering.   It seemed like so much fun at the time, but then there was the giant slug, and the guys that slipped and slid down the tunnel after them, and then the screaming and the dying.  (In other words, a successful D&D game).

Other observations:

Gaming with Kids
I've run a bunch of mixed games with kids and dads, and we've used two approaches - running a kid's game that happened to have dads in attendance, or running a regular game that happened to have kids.  The difference is focus.  For the kid's game approach, the dads are like silent partners; the dads can offer suggestions on strategy, but the kids make all the major decisions and have to discuss amongst themselves (come what may).  That approach tends to keep the kids really engaged.

However, sitting amongst the players in a mixed group of kids and dads in a regular game session, I noticed that the conversation has a tendency to go beyond what 9 and 10 year olds can process; it's a good practice to slow down at key decision points, explain the issues simply, and make sure the kids get a chance to offer their opinions and vote.  It seems like common sense that you should expend some effort making sure everyone is engaged, but it's easy to get out of the habit without an occasional reminder.

The ACKS Funnel
We were heartily encouraged to have retainers; to that end, a number of stat lines were generated up front (3d6 in order, yeah baby!) and the best chosen as the PC; retainers were selected from amongst the other rolled stats and paid like mercenaries (zero level men).  The party easily had 30+ guys - plenty of fodder, and replacement guys that could receive a promotion if a PC died.  Not all 30 guys went into the dungeon.

Playing ACKS
When ACKS is released, folks will notice there's almost no learning curve.  AC and to-hit rolls are calculated slightly differently, but it's otherwise all very familiar.  Proficiencies - a basic skill system - were unobtrusive and didn't change the table experience - we were still pushing, pulling, prodding and cajoling in an old school way (nary a spot check or diplomacy roll in sight).

One thing I found interesting - Individual Initiative!  Okay, I know this has been an optional rule in many variants (and LOTFP used a version of it), but I've used the Moldvay BX style of Initiative by Side for as long as I can remember, with different combat actions happening in sequence - movement, missile, magic and melee, and then the other side goes.

Initiative by Side lends itself to detailed group strategies; the players are forced to coordinate their tactics closely as actions happen in sequence.  I found Individual Initiative to be much more chaotic; it could also have been because this was a one-shot (more like a convention game, since we weren't Tavis's regular group).  Do other folks have similar observations - group initiative leads to more strategic coordination across the party, whereas individual initiative creates a more free form, chaotic muddle during the battle?  The experiences were very different and I can see pros and cons to each - group initiative is explicitly a game mechanic, individual initiative throws more "fog of war" and "din of battle" into the mix.

The other big difference is zero hit points and dying. It's been a hot topic for me lately in the home game as we're switching from using the death at -10 hp AD&D rule to the Swords & Wizardry approach.  ACKS has a much different death at zero rule; it's interesting enough that its worth its own post.

The other thing I'll save for another post is the idea of using Troupe-Style Play in D&D; the campaign roles and domain rules in ACKs make you want to try out the mid-range and high level stuff sooner than waiting 2-3 years to get there organically, so I think it's worth considering if there are sensible ways to structure a campaign to support multiple ranges of character levels.