Sandboxes & Dragons

Here's something that I found interesting as I've been working on the Blitzkrieg Peninsula of my World of Cinder: placing dragons. According to the chart on page 16 of OD&D volume 2, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, dragons can fly 24 five mile hexes per day. That's a 12 hex round trip. So assuming that dragons are territorial apex predators (which I do), that places a hard limit on how many flying dragons you can fit on any particular sandbox map. And looking over my particular map I can eyeball maybe three good places for dragon lairs. So from the moment this sandbox is put onto the table I'll be able to tell the players likely places they could hunt for dragon hoards. "Yeah, the Draco Mountains are called that for a reason." Stuff like that.

Of course those three lairs don't include long-hibernating wyrms forgotten by the races with shorter memories, dragons that have burrowed deep into the bowels of the earth or the Common Purple Land-dragon.

The Blitzkrieg Peninsula

So I've been doing some initial work on turning my old Blitzkrieg board into a sandbox wilderness. It's been slow so far because I'm trying to develop a method rather than simply diving in by slinging stuff onto hexes. The first step is simply a listing of what is already to be found in each hex and naming major physical features. Here's what a sample of the Southwest Region (pictured above) looks like right now:

B31 - coast (Duchy of Splitfang), rivermouth (Hurwood Seaway)
B32 - coast (Duchy of Splitfang), water (Western Sea)
B33 - water (Western Sea)
C17 - light terrain
C18 - light terrain
C19 - light terrain (Abbey of St. Jacob)
C20 - coast, cultivated (Abbey of St. Jacob), water (Kurtz Bay), St. Jacob Abbey

Hex C20 is the home of the Abbey of St. Jacob, while C19 contains farms and hamlets that are part of the Abbot's feudal territory. "Light terrain" is my term for an unmarked land hex, which can contain hills, forest, swamps, streams, etc., just not enough such terrain to amount to anything on the 5 mile/hex scale of the board. Each lone hex of cultivated land indicates a barony, probably with a village (100-900 people). Two adjacent cultivated hexes are a county, probably with a town (1,000-9,000 people). Three hexes indicates a duchy with a city (10,000-19,000), while the Red and Blue capitals are cities of at least 20,000.

The northern regions of the peninsula are mildly temperate, shading into semi-tropical in the south. Fashions in the north tend towards renaissance fair garb, while clothing can reach Hyborian levels of scantiness in the far south. Dress in the southwest tends to be less skimpy, as the Church of the Great Gold Dragon dominates religious life in the western regions. The central map regions feature an uneasy mixing of faiths, while the east is full of unrepentant pagans of the neutral and chaotic pantheons.

One neat thing about this top-down approach is that I'm slowly building a list of all the noble families in the region:

Counts of Burbiko
Barons of St. Hubbins
Barons of Finduncle
Counts Deathsinger
Barons of Amphert
Dukes of Auren
Thanes of Eterond
Thanes of Mno
Thanes Starchanger
Barons of Redlash
Barons of Gantar
Dukes of Splitfang
Thanes of Teresha
Counts of Donnan
Barons of Vostorra
Grand Dukes of Cerulea
Thanes of Heriwic
Thanes of Bearhammer
Thanes of Ernforth
Barons of Kertsam
Barons of Kishur

Barons of Swithoo

I made up some of the names for the places and families, others came from my big pile of randomly generated names, which features a vast quantity of print outs from Chris Pound's pages.

a place for some adventures

In case you haven't heard, the newest issue of Fight On! is out. Issue #6 has a lot of great stuff in it, but (egomaniac that I am) I'm particularly jazzed about my own Mutant Future contribution, "Welcome to Slimy Lake". It's a teeny sandbox setting for gonzo post-apoc adventuring. Even if you don't play MF, I think the stats are handled lightly enough you could get some play out of it with another system.

Christian de la Rosa did the map for me. The one inside the issue is black-&-white, but check out this color version.

The illos for the article really kick a lot of ass, too.

Get your own copy here.

Rebel Scum: not dead yet

In a previous post I was asked if my new sandbox OD&D campaign was replacing my Star Wars Saga Edition campaign. The short answer is no. Wednesday next week will be session 2 of Rebel Scum, wherein the crew of Green 13 rendezvous with the Tantive IV to deliver the crucial Death Star data. We had to put the campaign on hold as I packed up my game room for last weekend's big move to the new Rients family residence. Last month there was a two week period where I couldn't even tell you where my dice bag was. That was weird.

I'm seriously considering starting a second biweekly campaign for the all-new World of Cinder. Voting just closed and I'm sticking with the clear winner. Thanks to everyone who voted! I think by keeping the rules for Cinder light, I can keep up with running a game every week. But I'm still mulling that over.

As usual, I've also got a armful of other games I'd like to run soon. Right now the hot list consists of Forward... to Adventure!, In Harm's Way: Aces in Spades, and Aces & Eights. I'll maybe run one of those as a con game in February, but I'd really like to try Aces in Spades for at least a couple sessions before I review it. And Aces & Eights looks just too damn awesome to run merely as one-off.

a setting needs a system

I am seriously considering using Original Dungeons & Dragons, the three Little Beige Books, as the baseline for my new not-quit-named campaign setting. I definitely want a system in or near the direct line of D&D descent, with all the attendant clichés. The other primary contenders are BasicExpert D&D/Labyrinth Lord, 1st edition AD&D/OSRIC, Castles & Crusades/C&C Collector's edition, the Rules Cyclopedia, MERP/RoleMaster, and Holmes Basic/Advanced Holmes. Any of those games would work for what, at its heart, is just another DM's rearrangement of the familiar elements of orcs and swords and such. And I'm not ruling out running session set in the World of [insert name here] with those or any other systems that catch my fancy, like Forward... to Adventure! or Encounter Critical or some Palladium mishmash.


OD&D has my eye right now for several reasons. That's where all this dragoning and dungeoning nonsense began and if I'm going to build an old school sandbox from the ground up, why not start with the tools that my predecessors wielded back in the day? And unlike my beloved Moldvay Basic/Cook Expert combo, I can approach the rules without nostalgia. Seriously, I have trouble finding any flaws in the '81 Basic/Expert rules and that's an unhealthly attitude to have towards a system you actually intend to run. And the wide-open, not-ready-for-prime-time nature of the original books really appeals to me. I can tack stuff on from 1st edition Advanced or some old magazine article or another system entirely and not feel like I'm daring to disturb the universe. In fact, I want to add a bunch of other stuff. I'm not looking to be an OD&D purist.

Another reason why I want to go with OD&D is that chargen is super easy. 3d6 in order. No swapping stat points around. 3d6 x 10 gp and a short equipment list. 3 classes. 4 races. 3 alignments. That's about it. I want players to be able to bring a friend and start playing as quickly as possible. This ties into another reason to go with a lighter incarnation of D&D: for this project I'm not interested in the concept of "rules mastery", whereby dominance in the game is achieved through knowledge and deployment of intricate rules. I want players to succeed by judiciously and imaginatively interacting with the fantasy environment. I don't want the players to look for rules-based solutions, I want them to do cool stuff! For this campaign I'm working within the context that the rules are there primarily for when imagination fails. OD&D supports that approach. All-encompassing editions work against it, in my opinion.

More on a name

Now that I'm moved and can start serious work on this new sandbox campaign, I really need to pin down a name. The new poll has a shorter voting period.

Within the context of the campaign itself, I could really see myself using both names. The vaguely Gaelic folks who are native speakers of Common/Westron call the world Cinder. The Adelic-speaking invaders/occupiers/ruling class call the area Andrivøld, because even a generation or two later they still consider the place a whole different world from back home. Tolkien can do those linguistic bits with more aplomb, but seeing as how my whole setting will be more hamfisted than Middle Earth, I think I can get away with it. Whether the official name for the whole setting is Cinder or Andrivøld then takes on ethnic and social dimensions.

Blogger can do polls now.

Look to the right column and you should see the poll where you can vote for which campaign world name you like better for my new sandbox project. Please only select 'Other' if you come up with a variant not already described in the original post. Leave a comment here with your new suggestion.

The World of...

So my new made-from-scratch sandbox setting needs a frickin' name. Mythologically speaking, all the astronomical bodies of my universe are little bits of smoke floating up from the Three Fires of Creation. The Common Tongue name of the two suns are Ember and Spark. The three moons are Ash, Speck, and Mote. Ash and Ember are roughly the same size, as are Spark and Speck, to facilitate scary Double Eclipses of Doom. The world itself would be called Cinder in Common, but I'm not sure if that pops out enough. I'm not a big fan of the letter C in proper names as it leads to pronounciation confusion. And I just like playing around with words and letters, like this:

Sinder
Sindar
Sindro
Zindar
Zintar
Zinthar
Sinthar
Zinthro
Zindaria
Zindara

So far I like sticking with the original idea of Cinder, to keep it in line with the rest of the heavenly bodies, or Zindar, just because it sounds cool. The letter Z carries some weird weight to me, between Oz and the number zero.

The numbered hexmap in other genres

Still thinking about sandbox play over here. Besides D&D and Traveller, what other genres would the numbered hexmap work for? Off the top of my head:

Post-apocalyptic
Western
Pirates
Pulps focused on exploring Lost Worlds and distant continents

Basically, you need a genre where wandering the map and finding trouble would be a cool thing.

What is a campaign?

In the board wargamer/actual military sense, the term campaign describes a series of actions in the larger context of a war. A single campaign might be a series of related, sequential battles, like gaming out all the battles of Rommel in Northern Africa over the course of several sessions.

Figure 1: The red circle is a war, the dark red circle inside is a campaign.

In modern roleplaying terms, a campaign is basically the intersection of a group of players and a GM's setting. My copy of the World of Greyhawk plus the PCs equals the Bandit Kingdoms Campaign, or the Wild Times Campaign.Figure 2: The red circle is the GM's setting material or handful of modules or whatever. The blue circle is a group of PCs. Their interaction, the purple region, is the campaign

But at the start of the hobby, I don't think either of these definitions described what Gygax or Arneson was doing. I think the following diagram more accurately describes what was happening in those games.

Figure 3: Greyhawk/Blackmoor? The campaign is the ongoing GM sandbox, the red circle.

The red area is the GM's setting. Various groups would interact with the single campaign, all of which could thereby indirectly influence each other. If the green PC group slew the Dragon of Apple Hill and took all the loot, that monster and treasure would not be available to the blue group on a later visit to Apple Hill. I'm pretty sure I'm reading this right, as the section on campaign time in the DMG makes it clear that not all players necessarily come to all of his sessions because their PCs might be on a long journey not involving other players. This dovetails nicely with this line at the beginning of Men & Magic: "Number of Players: At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be 1:20 or thereabouts." That many players makes a hell of a lot more sense if you don't assume that every player comes to every session and they all act as a single party. That's how minis campaigns with multiple players work, right? Not every meeting of the campaign involves everyone putting their army down on one big board.

When you stop thinking about a campaign as these PCs in this setting and these players with this GM, then all those old stories of campaign hopping make a lot more sense.

Figure 4: The early hobby, before Runequest ruined it all. (Just kidding, folks.)

The green player(s) can operate the same PCs in both Gary Gygax's and Dave Hargrave's game (or whatever) because the effect on either GM's sandbox is negligible. Especially when you can just sic a rust monster on the laser pistols some player brought back from Arduin.

Am I reading the old style of campaign correctly? Is there something more here than semantic wankery? I think so. I think if you want to do a sandbox game like the old guard, then you need to give up the idea of equating the player group and the party. The player group is whoever from a large list of people happens to show up on D&D night. The party is the folks among those who attend that all agree on a single course of action. I think to do this sort of campaign, instead of taking my list of every cool gamer I know and whittling it down to four people, I need to invite everyone.

more Wilderlands musings

A couple weeks ago I blogged about how I was considering buying the Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set. I've decided to give the Wilderlands a pass. It looks awesome and I certainly wouldn't mind being a player in that setting, but it's not what I want to run. One of the reasons I decided that my unbelievably successful Wild Times campaign would be my last Greyhawk outing was because I felt I no longer needed to play in someone else's setting. Substituting Bob Bledsaw and crew for Gary Gygax and friends wasn't what I had in mind when I burned my Darlene maps. (Just kidding. I'm not that crazy. But I have considered selling all my Greyhawk stuff except my copy of Supplement I.)

But thoroughly investigating the Wilderlands has been extremely helpful, because the methods used to make that sandbox work are well worth imitation. Devin Parker said this in a comment on my earlier Wilderlands post:

I'm a huge cheapskate, so I always come back to the advice that Brian Gleichman gave on RPGnet many moons ago: look at the product you're salivating over, list the things you think are cool about it or imagine it contains, and then make your own version based on your perceptions of the product. Sure, you may miss out on some surprises, but you also don't get disappointed, and you save cash.

I think that's some pretty damn good advice. Which is not surprising, as Gleichman is one of the smartest cats I've met in the world of online RPG discourse. The biggest thing that caught my eye about the Wilderlands was the simple combination of a numbered hexmap and a key full of brief, punchy encounters. If the PCs happen to wander into hex 0312 or whatever, here in a nutshell is the adventure they can have. Many moons ago we did something like this in my Bandit Kingdoms campaign. The memory of exploring those little 1-mile hexes of the Bandit Kingdoms still sticks in my friend Pat's memory as a highlight of an overall pretty good campaign. (For my own part, I still fondly recall the time those pechs petrified his PC and he had to play his henchmen scrambling to get their stony boss out of the Dungeon of Doom. As a DM I live for moments like that, where the PCs plans all hilariously go to crap. But I'm getting off topic here.)

So I found that the good folks at Noble Knight Games would sell me some old Judges Guild numbered hexmaps and those babies are on the way to me as I type this. It's clear to me now that one of the reasons my poster-sized Wild Coast map and my recent Beyond Vinland map and my Brythunian Age map (Wow, anyone remember that project?) weren't working as I wanted was because the hexes weren't numbered for easy keying of encounters. I wouldn't have realized that was the problem without the Wilderlands.

This simple discovery, that I needed a numbered hexmap, has caused me to really dig into the Old Books once again. This time, I'm pouring over the Little Beige Books and the First Fantasy Campaign and the 1st edition DMG and my Arduin books and such looking for procedural advice. How did the old guys structure their campaigns, and how can that inform my play? I don't want to run Greyhawk or Blackmoor or Arduin or the Wilderlands, I want to use their methods to develop my own material. Just the same way that Ron Edwards, in Sorcerer & Sword, argues that we should stop running S&S games in Hyboria and instead look at how and why Howard constructed his world as a way of informing our own world-building.

The final piece of advice I can glean from the Wilderlands is to not be overly system-focused. Although the most recent incarnation of the Wilderlands is ostensibly a 3.5 product, you can use a crapload of the stuff in the Wilderlands for nearly any version of D&D, as well as many other systems. I want that. I want a campaign world where if I choose to once again run a campaign under an older version of D&D, it won't be much trouble for me. Or if I want to run some non-canonical MERP or something like that. And I really want to be able to use much of this same setting stuff for Encounter Critical. Will that mean Damnation Vans and Robodroid Warlocks in the same setting as clerics and beholders? You bet your ass it does.

More on this topic as my thoughts percolate more.