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View Full Version : A Sword & Sorcery Wilderness Sandbox Pointcrawl Series



Yora
2017-06-05, 12:13 PM
So many descriptors in the title... :smallwink: But they are all integral to my concept.

After a couple of somewhat short lived and overall just okay campaigns, I did a major overhaul of my setting (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?520882-Ancient-Lands-Sword-amp-Sorcery-with-Elves-on-Dinosaurs) since last summer with the plan to now do everything a lot simpler. Fun adventures of swashbuckling in exotic places with immediate payoff for the players now come before elaborate long-term conflicts in a deeply complex world that eventually grow into epic tales. More Conan than Game of Thrones, or more The Empire Strikes Back than Attack of the Clones. :smallamused: That's the Sword & Sorcery part.

I also want to run my next campaign with a semi-open group and since not all players will always be part of all adventures it really needs to be about the journey rather than the destination. But I also want to have some continuity for the regular players with recurring NPCs and revisiting old sites, so a Sandbox seems like the obvious way to go instead of running unconnected one-shots.

Wilderness as a setting is something that I simply really like. But it's also an environment where you can easily hide fantastic sites filled with treasure and monsters, and with fewer people around the social entanglements that grow over time should remain relatively simple so that irregular players can still get what's going on right from a two minute summary.

Since I want to focus on the most exciting parts and in reality almost all wilderness travel is from one known point to another mostly known point, I want to run the game as a Pointcrawl instead of a hexcrawl. Simply heading in a random direction until you find something that seems interesting enough to check out closer doesn't seem terribly exciting to me and when you know the location of a site in advance you will either go there in a straight line from a nearby known point or follow a road or river to reach it. With a pointcrawl you only create the settlements and dungeons and the paths that connect them and add some minor sites that those paths are passing through. This more or less eliminates any blind stumbling around for the players and greatly reduces the preparation work.

Finally, I've long been struggling with how to arrange the content covering the whole range of character levels over a single map in a way that doesn't have the players running into places where every second encounter can easily wipe them out. The idea I now have to solve this is to not make a whole "world" at once, but instead have the players explore a Series of sandboxes, one at a time. The first one has content aimed at groups of 1st to 3rd level and when the players decide that there's nothing left to do for them they pack up and the campaign transitions to the next small sandbox.
I see this having several advantages, aside from spreading out the preparation work for the GM over many months or years. One advantage is that a regular clear break from the known settlements and (most) NPCs keeps things from becoming too esoteric for irregular players to meaningfully contribute in social situations. (Some NPCs can show up again in later sandboxes as allies or enemies.) Another advantage is that it's not going to be any problem if the players start to lose interest in their current activities. In that case they just pack up their stuff and head for greener pastures a bit earlier rather than later. And thirdly this allows the campaign to wildly hop between completely different locations within the setting. Which is a pretty major element in the Sword & Sorcery genre. With a conventional sandbox players are more or less stuck within a single big area that slowly expands as they get closer to the edge. Even with considerable flexibility most GMs probably won't be too happy about players deciding to leave their arctic mountains sandbox to go to some tropical islands.

That's my idea behind running a Sword & Sorcery Wilderness Pointcrawl Series.

But now to the practical aspects, which this thread is about. What to prepare for such a campaign and how do you run it?

The biggest challenge, and apparently the one thing that most commonly makes sandbox campaign fail, is to ge the players going to make their own adventures. Dropping the players off in a world they know basically nothing about and telling them that they are now supposed to head out and do something fun generally works out very poorly. And that's what always had me hesitate to run a true sandbox campaign myself and try to run open-ended story adventures instead. But something that I really only understood this week is the importance of both default goals and player-initiated goals.
Default goals is a concept from megadungeons and also hexcrawls. Players can do whatever they want, but usually it's assumed that they will continue to explore the dungeon and checking out more blank hexes on their map. They are simple and generic motivations but at the start of each new session all players know that this is always an option unless there is something that they would rather do instead.
Player-initiated goals are what is generally regarded as the real meat of sandbox campaigns, but players only become able to actually set such goals once they already explored some of the world and have become familiar with it. And to get them to this point, falling back on the default goal of exploring dungeons really is just the way to go. The simple setup of the old D&D modules In Search of the Unknown and Keep on the Borderland. "There is a dungeon. Go there and interact with the things you find!" I don't find the prospect of running a complete campaign like this over several years in any way appealing, but it gives the players a direction while they are unfamiliar with the setting until they find their footing and form connections with NPCs and find the first traces of mysteries hidden around the sandbox. Then they can initiate their own goals to search the main camp of a gang of bandits, slay the chief of an orc tribe they keep running into as wandering monsters, or try to find who recently sacrificed people in a ruined temple. And if the players run out of specific things to do, they can always fall back on their default goal of going to an unexplored dungeon and looking for treasure.
This realization really had me getting excited again about trying out a proper sandbox.

One thing I am still undecided about is how big to make the initial sandbox. My hunch is to go with a single Point of Light to keep the social element simple. A single bastion of civilization and relative safety, mostly isolated from the rest of the world's population. Intuitively I would go with one primary village, three outlying clusters of farms, three mid-size dungeons, one really big dungeon (but not mega), and four smaller lairs for bandits, cults, or major monsters. It's relatively small and self-contained, but still big enough to always have several options what the players might do.
I also would make only two of the dungeon initially known, with the locations of the other two being revealed by inscriptions, maps, or NPCs the players will encounter in the first ones. Or they could get hints from encounters with wandering monsters.
What do you think of this? Too small or missing important elements?