The Wilderness is a Dungeon: Jaquaysing Your RPG Sandbox

Posted on August 30, 2022August 30, 2022 by Joel H

The dungeon is the primordial ooze that tabletop RPG’s wriggled out of. There is something elemental and powerful about a mysteriously connected location to explore with treasures and dangers hidden within. It’s just plain fun game design. Many of the layout and design elements that make a dungeon great can also be applied to the sandbox region around it in the form of a point crawl where paths connect locations just as hallways connect rooms in a dungeon.

The way we make a fun sandbox region can be the same way we make a fun dungeon.

What Makes a Good Wilderness Dungeon?

I’ll be using the Alexandrians’ article on Jaqauying the Dungeon as a template for the type of elements found in good dungeon layout. If you haven’t come across it yet, it’s well worth a read. The core thesis of the article is that open exploration focused sandbox design has a number of recurring features that allow for varied, alternative, and interesting routes while exploring a dungeon.
It’s not the only framework for quality dungeon layouts but it’s an excellent one.

The name of the blog post and design philosophy described is informed by his analysis of the designs of Jennell Jaquays- a legendary dungeon designer. She created naturalistic, non linear, and diverse dungeon spaces in the excellent adventure module The Caverns of Thracia (1979) and later as a level designer for the Quake and Halo Wars series of video games.

We can transfer these elements of design practice over to our overland sandbox point crawl to improve the layout of the region and take the engaging elements of dungeon navigation and apply them to a sandbox wilderness region.

For an example case of these Jaquaysing principles in action on I’m using the Cinderstrom sandbox region I’ve been designing using these design ideas. If you’re one of my Cinderstrom players this is going to spoil a whole lot so close the tab and leave this one for the internet strangers to read.

It’s dungeons all the way down (or up)!

Jaquaysing Elements of the Wilderness Dungeon with Example Region

Multiple Entrances

In a traditional dungeon this is a great feature to have because it allows players to approach the dungeon from wildly different angles and completely bypass something they want to avoid or hop into incredibly dangerous situations right away and skip some of the less perilous areas.

In a wilderness dungeon, multiple entrances allow you to have multiple answers to the question of and where your players enter into the sandbox region. Because the region is set in a broader world you can provide several potential means of entry that lead to different play experiences and paths to start your parties experience with the wilderness region to open a campaign. This can also give your players choices also gives them multiple ways of tackling entry into the region from the outside world if they don’t like the dangers or rewards present at one approach in an already running campaign.

Example: The trade road that threads along the region from 704 to 501 offers two points of entry if the party is visiting the Cinderstrom Basin region from a different area of a campaign setting to the North or West.
There’s no other formal paths from outside that I’ve created yet, but the possibilities for wandering in lost and dying of thirst from the Starglass Desert, being awoken with no memories of their past in one of the dungeons as tomb raiders accidently disturb their stasis, or starting in the drinking hall of the settlement in 0402 are all very different introductions to adventuring in the region.

Loops and Branching Paths:

When I run traditional dungeons from other creators this is one of my favorite parts of a well Jaquaysed design. Instead of a linear experience of rooms placed in a chain to be encountered in a certain order, introducing loops and branches allows players to explore in the order and fashion of their choosing as well as use their knowledge of looping paths to bypass areas they don’t want to travel through or ambush some foe from an unexpected direction.

I try to follow this this in the wilderness dungeon by aiming to by limiting the number of dead end paths to just 6 locations of the 49. Most locations have at least three obvious branching path connections to provide for freedom in navigation choices and stop the point crawl from turning into a railroad. I haven’t accurately counted the number of potential loops built into the path navigation but it’s more than 12. Maintaining this complexity of a navigable environment in a wilderness dungeon should keep exploration flexible and sandboxy.

Secret and Unusual Paths

In traditional dungeons these are important because they reward exploration with increased options for navigation and access to undiscovered areas and they work the same in a wilderness dungeon.

The purple line represents the ancient podway network, a relic infrastructure of crystal capsules shooting beneath the earth at great speeds. Upon discovering one of its stops and figuring out how to use the podway it can function as a secret passage to access and connect between the deep and perilous levels of several dungeons.

There are also a few areas that serve as natural chokepoints to funnel exploration through difficult to access paths. In particular the Gray Lake at 0303 and the river canyon block off connectivity to much of the North part of the map with only the Old Bridge over the island between 0402 and 0501 providing connectivity. These constraints on navigation place value and emphasis on exploration to discover these links and open large new areas of the map.

Sub Regions

**Red Grids**: Mist Haunted Hills
**Green Grids**: Mastodon Plains
**Purple** **Stripes**: Rib Peaks
**Gray Scribbles**: Sagebrush Steppe
**Yellow Grids:** Howling Crags
**Blue Lines**: Starglass Desert

This wilderness dungeon is divided into subregions by obvious biome- areas that are distinct environments and offer different challenges and rewards. This mirrors the different content, dangers, and random encounters found in levels or sublevels of a traditional dungeon.

The Sagebrush Steppe is the largest region and serves as a hub to connect each of the other regions. It’s also the least dangerous area and holds the keep of Nabtaar in 0402 that offers the quickest access to the megadungeon of Cinderstrom. The Mastodon Plains and Howling Crags also have smaller settlements, though they are significantly more dangerous areas. Finally the Mist Haunted Hills, Rib Peaks, and Starglass Desert offer the most danger and lie along the periphery and no “areas of civilization”. The regions were inspired by the West Marches campaign idea of increasing difficulty as one gets further from settlements though it’s not adhered to religiously.

This mirrors the press your luck gameplay of player characters knowing that traditional dungeons get more dangerous (but more lucrative) as you get to deeper and deeper levels but used here in the horizontal plane instead of vertical depth. PC’s know when they’re entering a new region as the terrain changes with the random encounters and they can decide how much risk they want to take as they’re exploring a region.

Landmarks

In a traditional dungeon environment these could be fountains, statues, gaping sinkholes, imposing silver doors, or other features that let PC’s recognize the area when they return. It’s not much different for a wilderness dungeon. Each fork in the point crawl has a location of note. This makes each area where a navigational choice is made, more distinct and easier to remember again. These include curiosities like an ever spouting geyser, a standing stone carved with hawk glyphs, a derelict landship, or bubbling mud pots with giant footprints around them that don’t require too many words to describe and only a few kinds of hidden interactivities. There are also 16 full mini dungeons spread out throughout the region as locations that provide more complex landmarks for players to discover and delve into for traditional dungeoneering in the wilderness region outside the tentpole volcano dungeon of Cinderstrom.

Detailed Paths

“It’s also important to realize that there really can be too much of a good thing: There is a point at which endless loops and countless connections within the dungeon result in meaningless choice instead of meaningful choice. In jaquaying your dungeon it’s important to beware this featureless sprawl of ever-looping corridors.”
Justin Alexander “Jaquay(s)ing the Dungeon”

I think that a limited number of interesting and detailed paths to choose from leads to more interesting gameplay then a vast number of abstracted paths.

I initially wanted to make all my sandbox modules as classic hex crawls due to the liberty of players being able to explore in any direction. My issue with point crawls was a perceived linearity and lack of freedom. What about the spaces in between?

But as I’ve discussed in my last post- a hexcrawl is still a point crawl but one in which there are 6 possible and abstract paths from each point to the adjacent. Why does it matter if I go North or Northwest in the same hex terrain type other than one being a more direct line to my objective? Even if the six paths are actually described (A heap of extra GM prep) then you’re still interconnected to the point of overdose, a surfeit of freedom that turns the navigation of a complex natural environment of a region into a flattened abstraction flavored primarily by noting the dominant terrain type. In the sandbox design so far I’ve trimmed the obvious path options from an abstract and ever-present 6 to a distinct maximum of 4 with 3 apparent path options being more common.

Again I need to emphasize I really do still enjoy hex crawls.
I just also really like detailed paths and how they bring the fun of dungeon style path based navigation into the wilderness.

Examples:

Bandit Villa Connections:
NW: A narrow boulder shaded dirt lip along the ravine holds the prints of large cats and hurried goats, water rushes along cataracts far below
SW: A murky stream that smells of vinegar dribbles down a gully into a fetid and murky pond. Dead quail and rabbits lie sparsely scattered along its banks.
S: A dusty rut on a valley floor pitted with the impressions of horseshoes and crushed brush meanders towards a distant trade road on the horizon.

Hunters Camp Connections:
NW: A goat trail is matted through the dry grasses and sage along the riverside towards a towering jumble of boulders and marked with cloven prints and the occasional large feline paw.
NE: The new trade road bends along the floor of a small valley, near a grey silted river. Plumes of cooking smoke can be seen in the distance beyond the valley.
S: The new trade road continues straight along a wide plain studded with sagebrush.

Nabtaar:
NE: Outside the Gate of The Stranger the trade road forking left is poorly maintained. To the left it heads straight towards the river and an incredibly wide span of an ancient crumbling bridge spanning the ravine on the horizon.
SE: To the right fork the well maintained trade road curves into a small valley and is soon lost from sight.
S: Outside the ornate Gate of the Lady, a time worn highway composed of exact cut granite blocks leads straight through the slagged remements of a city and to the sage steppe beyond, dry grass protruding between the stones.

Okay But What if the PC’s Really Want to Make Their Own Path?

Unlike a traditional dungeon, a party can go through the “walls”. Wandering away from paths and easy topographic routes like mountain ridges, valleys, or rivers gets a lot more difficult to make progress.

While following a path I’ve been trying out each route spanning roughly 3 miles or one league.
I prefer this scale of hex or path for exploring detailed but smaller sandbox regions without needing to resort to breaking broad 6 mile areas into sub hexes. Travel times range from 1 hour Watch on open plains to 3 Watches on a plateau of fractured glass. A Wandering Encounter check is made each Watch using the sub regions encounter table.

For “off path” travel folks have worked on a number of cool more complex rules but I’d just say that it takes at least 2x the time following a path to get to the closest location would unless they can fly or something (Try to keep limitless flying abilities out of your sandbox regions if you want to keep time and distance choices important.)

I keep keep a hex overlay on the map for ease of concrete distance measuring if needed by the GM. You could use procedural generation for subregion based locations along the way while rolling encounters. I don’t use any rules for getting lost when I run sandbox games because they’ve never seemed fun for me and the players seem to get plenty turned around on their own, especially if they’re required to map the region paths as they might exploring a dungeon instead of provided an absolutely accurate path map.

Wilderness Jaquaysing Case Study #1: Slumbering Ursine Dunes

Slumbering Ursine Dunes is one of my favorite classic point crawls and the author invented the term “point crawl” back in 2012 to describe this type of map and exploration format.

Scale: 150-300 yards between locations.
Number of Locations: 25
Multiple Entrances: Yes, two great staircases ascend the high dune ridge.
Midpoint Entry: Possible, access or egress from the river is possible
Loops and Branching Paths: Yes
Secret and Unusual Paths: A boat in a dungeon can be pooled into the Cosmic Void, The docked Barge of the Eld allows for dangerous travel to strange locales, and a pit leads to the Cold Hell. Most of these secret paths lead to locations outside of the Dunes.
Sub Regions: Mostly no, though the content within locations 23,24, 25 is linked by being adjacent to the ancient reservoir.
Landmarks: Yes
Detailed Paths: Yes. Routes are given descriptions that are succinct while giving players enough information to inform their navigation choices.
“13. Ironwood Grove. The trail broadens out and cuts through a 50-foot-long ironwood grove to a central four-way intersection . Fine delicate human bones are tied with silk rib-bons on a tree just off the intersection. A well-maintained trail with a split-log fence on its sides runs south from the intersection. Two narrow, unremarkable trails head north and southwest while the path to the east is faint and weed-choked.”

Wilderness Jaquaysing Case Study #2: Desert Moon of Karth

Desert Moon of Karth was my first published work and was inspired by modules like Hot Springs Island, A Pound of Flesh, Ultraviolet Grasslands, and Slumbering Ursine Dunes. It was my attempt at doing a sandbox space western crawl in Mothership and I think it holds up fairly well. But through the lens of Jaquaysing a wilderness, it has some weak areas.

Scale: 246 mile circumference tiny moon region, travel time measured in number of 6 hour Watches.
Number of Locations: 8
Multiple Entrances: No, unless the ancient orbital defenses are deactivated or destroyed somehow, then every site is a potential entrance landing a spaceship.
Midpoint Entry: Yes, the lone entry point at the space elevator to Larstown is located in a central location surrounded by other points of interest.
Loops and Branching Paths: Yes
Secret and Unusual Paths: No, present only inside dungeon/detailed locations.
Sub Regions: No, it’s all in a big desert- though the map provides some visual inspiration for coral strewn valleys and narrow passes.
Landmarks: Yes, each point has a notable landmark ranging from a fallen monument head to a calcified organic hive tower that will inform party of where they are on repeat visits.
Detailed Paths: No. I think this is something I’d tweak if I ever do an updated version of Karth. It’s up to the GM/Warden to describe the paths and give the players meaningful information towards what they’re interested in which would have been nice for me to include.

On Effort

In one of the Discord servers I shared another of my blog posts in, someone pointed out that my sandbox production process was a big heap of work. They’re absolutely right, I wouldn’t recommend this as the default method of starting a sandbox region. For the average sandbox game, procedural generation and improvisation can take a larger role in exploration while creating just a starting town, an initial dungeon, and the immediate surrounding area help to minimize DM burnout. For me this high prep prior, minimal prep during the campaign makes sense because I’m working on RPG material for published region as a pickup sandbox that’s useable at the table for other GM’s.

As Playful Void’s response and several others pointed out- this strategy of creating bespoke paths for a point crawl is prep heavy and doesn’t allow for using pure random generation at the table. This method is ideal if you have the energy and time to do a good deal of front ended prep instead of improvising most area contents.. Though I will say, if you who have the time for and enjoys creating a bespoke dungeon of 50 rooms, I think it’s a comparable amount of effort to make a sandbox wilderness dungeon with 49 locations of interest for a lot of reward on detailing the wilderness region.

However I don’t think this method of prep is only useful to people publishing for others. Unlike spending time prepping plots and overarching narrative arcs that rely on railroading players to follow a preset story fleshing out the connections in a sandbox provides long term returns to your time investment.

Once you have a detailed wilderness dungeon region that you’ve at least roughed in you now have a trademark locale- a place that you can pull out and run with minimal effort for players at the drop of a hat. The method should help create a fleshed out and interconnected sandbox you can pull out and run quickly for years to come.

What are your thoughts on the merits of drawbacks of creating a wilderness dungeon this way?

Why I Use Point Crawls More Than Hex Crawls

Posted on June 28, 2022June 28, 2022 by Joel H

Hex crawl sandbox settings can suffer from an overdose of non meaningful choice without enough information to make informed decisions. I think using a point crawl makes choices more interesting by constraining them to detailed specific choices.

You wouldn’t run a dungeon of rooms with six entrances connected to each other in a large grid because the complete openness without sufficient information doesn’t lend itself to meaningful and fun decisions.

I love hex crawls but the more times I’ve run them the more I think that they’re best saved for certain use cases. Specifically they’re best for campaign that covers huge distances and is concerned with surveying the unknown expanding outwards from a point as opposed to making decisions about which route to take. They also are great for low prep pick up games that rely on procedural content over planned description and pre-connected areas pe of game where you’re surveying an expanse of land to eventually catalogue what’s inside each sector of a region and for a feeling of completion as your explore each hex. Because the way things are connected and the nature of the paths in between nodes of a point crawl matters it’s preferable to prepare the connections between locations ahead of time. A hex crawl is path neutral and abstracted so it does have the benefit of being quick to randomly generate the connecting hex, random encounters, and other content at the table and then improvise connections. If I need to play a quick pick up game. But if I’m buying a prepared module for my use or making one for someone else, it seems nice to have the detailed paths and connections done ahead of time.

I’ve grown to be a big fan of point crawls and prefer them in most of my sandbox games for increasing interconnection.

Hex crawls give the illusion of complete exploration and offer a level of top down abstraction that makes navigation choices less compelling then they could be.

When people talk about the value of a good dungeon as a quintessential play structure of old school inspired play they’re usually talk about how it can be designed in a way that maximizes and increases player navigation choices. Strange interactive objects you can mess around with. Verticality. Loops. Multiple paths. Secret entrances. Shortcuts to much deeper levels.

However the other thing about a dungeon that makes it such a strong structure is the constraint it places on choices. Because there’s only so many routes and rooms a GM can create a lot of interesting specific content in the area descriptions that makes these choices fun by spending some prep time providing meaningful information for each of the choices.

There’s a reason that dungeons aren’t designed in one huge cavern with no walls and sightlines for miles, it’s too much to parse and run effectively. Like a computer’s memory a GM only has so much brain power to render encounters and location details. Breaking things into rooms allows the rooms to be described in more detail and for specific connections between rooms to be meaningful. This means that you can improve your sandbox setting by using the same principles used in good dungeon design. I’ve attempted to follow these principles in designing the sandbox region surrounding my Cinderstrom megadungeon.

Some psychological studies have shown people with more options are more likely to be unsatisfied with their eventual decision then those with a limited amount as they suffer from analysis paralysis . When I was a kid growing up in Nevada I didn’t get the concept of the casino buffet right away. I discovered to both mine and the nearby buffet patrons horror that there is an upper limit to how many plates of chicken alfredo a 9 year old can devour. You can spare your players this unpleasant experience by giving them a cultivated set of path options instead of an endless void.

A dungeon of 50 rooms laid out in a grid with all with doors leading to six other rooms wouldn’t be the most satisfactory for exploration. The overload of choices makes navigation a series of random choices with minor information.
Why are so many hex crawl sandboxes formatted this way then? The same joys of making travel choices based on relevant information and limitation shouldn’t be left at the dungeon exit.

Now generally in a hex crawl you’ll be able to tell the party what terrain is in each cardinal direction but if you’re in a great desert that extends all around their location, what meaningful choice do the players have in their choice of direction between South and Southwest? If they know the direction of their objective they can just always head in that direction, cutting through the “walls” and forgoing having to consider the terrain around them. You can have a “getting lost” rule but frankly I’ve never talked to players who enjoyed this, nor do they tend to reflect reality as someone that’s done a good deal of off trail wilderness hiking (I’ll cover this in a future post). Now a good GM can provide more meaningful landmarks and cues to make navigating more of a meaningful and interesting gameplay, a lightly used game path to the east, a towering iron spire that stretches to the heavens to the south, a mirror like glimmering to the south east. But they’ve just effectively created a point crawl on top of their hex crawl off the top of their head. The other three cardinal directions are vestigial organs if not given some kind of more interesting clue to what the direction holds. I say hack them off!

I had originally planned on creating a hex crawl for my megadungeon region but realized that if there was 49 hexes in the region and I wanted to provide details for each of the I would have to create 294 different path descriptions. This didn’t seem worth the effort to me, along with the delay in play of describing each of the 6 exits to the hex to the PC’s each time without being an overcomplicated bore. Some WOTC designers visited Gen Con undercover in 2005 and found that DM’s get about 2-3 sentences of describing a location in a monologue without player responses before eyes glaze over and people stopped paying close attention. Initial node descriptions in a point crawl need to be just as pithy as a dungeon room description.

Switching to a point crawl based sandbox most human navigation in fiction or real life adventure is a point crawl. People follow paths of some kind to get to destinations. Look at Lord of the Rings, the Dying Earth, or Conan and the very specific and fascinating paths they had to decide during in their adventures. The Fellowship of the Ring were on a point crawl to reach their destination to the East when they had to choose between climbing the snowy Redhorn Pass and braving the path through the feared Mines of Moria. It was only when the snows proved too thick on the Redhorn Pass that they felt they had to chance the darkness of Moria (which could be run as a point crawl connecting different dungeon areas itself to give the sense of megadungeon scale but that’s for another post).

On a hex crawl all of these atmospheric and interesting environmental decision points could be summed up within one six mile “Steep Mountains” terrain hex.

Even in an open desert or rolling plains trekkers follow ridges, saddles, gulley, and other preexisting paths of less resistance. In my experience the very specific path is the interesting play space between the points of interest not the abstracted general terrain type surrounding around them.
“Should we take the skull and ruby strewn arroyo through or the crumbling remnant of a black marble highway around?”

Again, all this said I think the freedom of the hex crawl structure is still a swell and serviceable sandbox campaign structure and has been used in many of favorite sandbox books like Hot Springs Island and Neverland. I’ve just become a bigger fan of point crawls lately and think all the sweet hex resources out there like these sweet wilderness hexes can also be used for populating nodes and path connections to make a sweet point crawl.

P.S You can always layer a point crawl on top of a hex crawl as I’ve done in the header image and use your hex crawl procedure to adjudicate what happens if players decide to go through the natural “walls” and just pick a direction where there’s no terrain to make it easier. It should take a lot longer then following an occurring path like a road, or stream, or dune ridge though.

The View from Lake Geneva: A Visit to Gary Con XIV

Posted on April 9, 2022April 9, 2022 by Joel H

“Are you playing in the tournament?”
I’m in the back of my Uber to the Grand Geneva Lodge on the last day of GaryCon and making conversation with my very nice Uber driver who’s familiar with the yearly RPG convention. I say I’m not signed up for it, but mention I stopped by Gary Gygax’s house for a picture. She notes that he’s a big deal in town and when D&D was first coming out she was never allowed to play by her parents.
I say “Oh yeah, that was when they were worried about kids summoning demons and stuff.”
She doesn’t smile at this. She politely lets me know she thinks there’s at least a bit of real evil mixed up in the game.

My propaganda attempts to describe D&D as improv and math, make believe with rules that could be a wholesome family activity like her Sunday parcheesi and Monopoly nights she’d talked about meet with mixed results.

“I suppose it’s good for lonely people that can’t meet anyone to have some kind of social outlet.”
“Yeah it can help kids develop social skills!”
“Oh no, never for kids!”

After a bit of conversation I attempt to search for fantasy common ground.

“Well, do you like Lord of the Rings?”
“No, it has occult magic.”
“Ah gotcha, how about C.S Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia?”
“Well that’s borderline, I see what he was trying to do and it’s a fun story for kids, we read it in 5th grade and I really liked it- I just don’t see why he needed to make stuff up instead of just using the word of God.”

We pull up to the doors of the lodge and exchange pleasant goodbyes. I am very grateful to not have been a nerdy kid in the 80’s. Walking into the Grand Geneva Lodge and knowing I’m surrounded by 2,500 people that saw personnel value in throwing dice, escapism to fantastic worlds, and writing adventures for a job- is affirming and comforting.

I really had a blast at GaryCon.

This is only the second gaming convention I’ve ever been to and I plan on coming back next year.

After the passing of Gary Gygax in 2008, his family started the convention as a celebration of life for relatives and friends to gather together and play some games and. The event has since grown beyond to a couple thousand attendees and is on it’s 14th year, but still has an intimate and friendly feel compared to the Times Square over stimulus of my fun but tiring visit to GenCon, an event itself originally based in Lake Geneva during the TSR days before migrating to its current home in Indianapolis.

The games include the groggiest of grognards playing AD&D and sometimes Chainmail or Braunstein and also plenty of D&D 5E tables . The ages of convention goers varied a lot and there was plenty of families and younger folks along with older people. Between the 5E and 1E there’s a blend of indie and Old School Renaissance RPG’s and a number of personnel passion project or niche systems that I hadn’t discovered before the convention. Plenty of board games as well. There’s even an event called RPEX that’s a live action dungeon crawl with props similar to a more affordable True Dungeon. I’m interested in checking that out next year. There’s also seminars on game design and RPG history that I didn’t make this year that sounded interesting.

My first event was an Old School Essentials Game using the Palace of Unquiet Repose adventure.

I’d heard of a couple folks in my party including Ray Otus who made the Gygax 75 campaign sandbox building guide and Vasili Kaliman who wrote the Night Land and Xanadu modules for OSE (who said he’d enjoyed my work with Desert Moon of Karth!)
We delved into the ancient ruins of a shattered city that captured the ominous feeling with minimal combat but a creeping sense of dread and wonder as we negotiated with a mercenary company next to an underground lake of liquid mercury. Our GM Brandon did a swell job and I definitely am interested in picking up the module for my own use and dissection.

Afterwards I went to the dealer hall where I caught up with the World of Game Design folks who were stocking Karth at their booth where they’d had at Gen Con before and chatted with a number of friendly and passionate dealers about their products.

At one booth I snagged a $16 slightly stained Advanced Dungeon Master’s Guide that had the name ‘Dirty Dale’ and a bunch of hectic scribbles on the inside cover with some marginalia inside in a blue pen. I think the book has more charm this way with evidence of actually being used and loved.

It’s neat seeing the huge range of different interests and products on the dealer floor. They even had the cover artist Larry Elmore hanging out at a table in the corner with no line.
I checked out the Beadle and Grimm booth and looked out at their very fancy editions of D&D 5e modules with physical props. I didn’t run into the company’s co-owner Matthew Lillard at the con. As a fan of his work playing Shaggy from Scooby Doo and in Scream, I hope to say hi next time.

I got back to the banquet room where I was hosting my first game of the con, Mothership 1E set on my own Desert Moon of Karth. The crew were members of a struggling news station that was going through cuts and to keep their jobs they needed to shoot a sufficiently clickbaity holodoc in the “cursed” Seahorse Mine on the edge of the galaxy to stay hip! I found this framing device really helped give the players a direction and reason to push forward and the two games I ran for it had a nice feeling that felt like Ghost Hunters on History Channel, combined with TMZ, and Aliens. Trying to film a sensationalistic ghost program to keep your jobs is a useful reason to get into risky horror movie situations..

I had a crew of 4 including Vasili again and Ahimsa Kerp of Knight Owl Publishing (known for Scourge of the Scorn Lords, Meatlandia, and with a Kickstarter for OSE Aquatic Adventures right now! I had a blast running the game and several of the players had never been in any Mothership games before. In both this and the other two games of Mothership 1E I ran I found that new players were able to pick it up and grok the game within less then 10 minutes and have their characters created and then completely master the system within 30. While I think I’m a decent Warden I think the system is to thank for this easy pick up as opposed to solely my abilities.

As my time running my own module has been primarily in the form of one shots, I’ve spent a lot of time in the boomtown of Larstown where karaoke bar fights break out, burger franchises are started, cults get joined, and in one memorable instance the governor assassinated and put into a hagfish patty grinder.

It’s great to see that there’s plenty to do but as a GM I like to get out into the wilderness of the sandbox moon too and pushed more aggressively forward to get to the mine to better fit the one shot format. This time I summarized the arrival to the moon and descent down the ancient space elevator and gave them a contact in the form of a contracted cowboy guide Sandsquid Slim to lead the party to the Seahorse Mine. They had no wandering encounters on their camel ride over the dunes and rested for the night at the huge crumbling bust of the Shattered Visage where I had rolled up a tropical shirt clad tourist that had been taken out on a game safari by Sandsquid Slim’s competing brother guide. After some back and fourth and the tourist complaining about being promised a private campsite they bedded down for the night uneventfully. In the morning the crew headed to the mouth of the mine where they got the cameras rolling and went into the collapsed mine shaft.

The hapless tourist ran off ahead past the gas mask filled locker room and jumped out from hiding to scare the crew and causing everyone some stress. The discovery of a heap of boneless miner bodies stressed the party further and their sweaty tourist companion vomited in shock. After checking out a number of side rooms and noting the vents had been pried open the news crew saw a beeping biosignature towards the end of the mine main tunnel where the track ended. The biosignature but the trusty security officer crept upwards towards the chamber with the large ore crusher. Wisely noting he specifically looked up on the ceiling after leading the crew to the end of the tracks he had time to take some shotgun rounds when he saw this pale form clinging upside down to the ceiling.

Things devolved rapidly from there and a series of organic harpoon shots missed though the marine was badly injured. The rest of the crew took a few shots but fled where the bioscanner revealed another one that screeched and mimicked “Hey Jenkins there’s something blocking the vents- you should check it out.” as it charged. The scientist absolutely demolished this one with a tranquilizer dart and some vibechete chops as I continued to roll poorly for these beasts.This cleared the way for the party to flee through the vents, choosing the right direction to pop out into sunlight covered in detritus and goo. On death’s door and now out of ammo the marine faced down death as the original pale creature that had also sustained heavy damage from a flamethrower, shotgun blasts, and a vibecheted off limb while hemorrhaging blue goo. Bloody and with 3 hit points left the marine took their ammo-less shotgun and swung it like a baseball bat, rolling a critical success and doing enough damage to splatter the head of the thing and showered with cardamom scented blue fluid. The crew waiting outside had their weapons trained on the vent and were relieved when the blue covered creature that crawled out was their friend. Shaken and scarred but all alive, they definitely had gotten the shots they needed for their holodoc. Credits roll and we see the words “Space Vampires from Space!” pasted over the screen along with the producing names of each of the now promoted news crew.

After the game wrapped we had all gotten along well and decided to grab dinner or drinks at the Steakhouse across the hallway from the game. We talked about favorite niche RPG’s, thoughts on if WOTC can legally trademark a stat block (I lean towards no), niche scene drama, what RPG projects people were working on and a whole range of other tings. It was a really cool experience to have the type of conversations I’d only had impersonally online with some great people around tasty food.

Drunk on nerd camaraderie and the festive spirit of a carousing table I purchased a $48 lamb dinner- a mad, debaucherous, and ill advised purchase for my current budget and station in life. Luckily the dealers hall sold out of the Dark of Hot Springs Island book I’d been planning on picking up the next day so I’ll call it a wash.

I caught a ride back with my roommate and crashed back at the hotel with both alarms set to get us up for the fair to middling continental breakfast and ride the several minutes over to the Grand Geneva the next morning..

The second day I kicked things off with a game I was running using my current favorite published dungeon- The Caverns of Thracia by Jennell Jaquays. The gimmick was all the players were playing Level 10 magic users (I used these flavorful pregen spell lists from Alex Schroeder’s Hex Describe) that have gotten sick of sending in parties to grab treasure that just kept dying and decided to roll up their robe sleeves and adventure themselves. Befitting haughty overconfident wizards they only got to pick two pieces of mundane adventuring equipment each (not including 3 torches and a dagger each). The dungeon is supposed to be for levels 1-5 but includes heaps of isolated much greater dangers that pushed the crew of hard wizards hard at points, though they did absolutely demolish most threats. Giving players a crazy arsenal of spells to wreak havoc with will never lead to a boring game.

In the first game the party decided to after roping down and figuring that if everyone kept dying that they were sent in, the front door was likely not the way to go.
The necromancer talked with dead on the skull found in the gelatinous cube he’d dissolved with a finger of death and found that the skull belonged to Grognar the Blade, an adventurer. They use this interrogation to get a map of the upper level of the temple complex where the death cult lived. Taking note of the room with the idol and the bowl full of treasure offerings they snuck past the giant sized gnome living on the bridge on the 2nd level and decided to follow the marble hallway clean where they paid the resident sphinxes toll and a bit more to ask for mystic knowledge to tell them where the nearest huge treasure was located. Turns out it was behind the huge red curtain at the back of the room and down a shaft a few hundred feet. After falling into a sneaky portable hole reverse gravity trick in the wall and popping out the party descended down on ropes.

The weakness of the original Caverns of Thracia map is that its intricate vertical connections aren’t called out in a user friendly manner so I don’t think I’ve ever run it “accurately” without fudging a room connecting to a room it wasn’t originally meant to. I’ll just call it my spin on my version of the dungeon and plopped the crypt of the lich lizard king at the bottom of the vertical shaft instead of the other treasure room that actually is. I also threw in a dogman barracks halfway down the shaft that they absolutely demolished 20 of with a Cloudkill after they sent reinforcements to attempt to ambush the dastardly wizards. The party didn’t decide to mess with the gold encrusted sarcophagus that obviously contained some kind of powerful sorcerer king and just looted the room of the rest of the horde before calling it while they were ahead and decamping with the loot and a teleport out of there.

Right afterwards I played a session called The Wheel of Blame with Tim Kask. Kask was the first full time employee hired by TSR and did the editing on all the OD&D supplements, helped create AD&D with Gygax and is responsible for why magic missile always hits.

He runs a light version of OD&D The is that he improvises a linear series of encounters based on two prompts written on index cards by each player and reveals who wrote the prompts for each encounter. The party explores each encounter and fights or interacts with the contents, poking an prodigy random bits until a magical coin (represented by an actual coin marked with Tim Kask’s face) is acquired by a player. Then the party teleports to the next encounter and the wacky contents inside. My words were ‘zeppelin’ and ‘devil pig.’

The novelty of having the person running your game casually say things like“I invented the bulette in D&D to eat all the dwarf ponies because there were too many of them running around.” is definitely a strange feeling.

This surreal quality of GaryCon kept on cropping up. The historical and personnel run together in the same waters. The future of the hobby, its present, and past intermingle and blend.

The best vantage point I had on this was sitting in between events preparing for games in the GM Lounge. I spent an hour or two each day in the GM Lounge preparing for my games, devouring the free snacks and beverages, and making conversation. There was a real Casablanca feeling to that room in the variety of people passing through and their different outlooks they had on role playing games. I talked to people who had only played 5e before, folks who were creating unique systems of their own design, 2nd Edition die-hards, and people running and enthusiastic about everything in between.

I had a great chat with the historian Ben Riggs who’s about to publish a fascinating sounding book called Slaying the Dragon on the rise and fall of TSR. The same event that he’s researching and writing about are personnel past for a good number of people at Gary Con that walk the halls of GaryCon, not all who agree on the same facts or interpretations of the history of D&D.

While prepping for one of my games a couple of guys sat down across my table and were having a very detailed conversation on the history of war games. I didn’t want to interrupt but I googled the name badge and saw, huh, that was David Wesley, who invented Braunstein, the role playing wargame that inspired Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, that in turn led to Dungeons and Dragons. Moments of casual bumping into RPG figures I’d heard of kept cropping up. Like Col. Louis Zocchi checking out my GameScience dice to see if they were genuine (They were).

I think what’s cool about the hobby is that most people who are historically significant to its development aren’t famous in the general widespread celebrity sense. For the most part they’re not on the cover of magazines or hassled by paparazzi, it’s just folks attending the convention like you are. There isn’t this sense of separation at this small scale event and I think it lends itself to the comfortable community atmosphere. Everyone is on a level playing field and most niche RPG famous folks seemed friendly and welcoming and excited to be there. It’s neat!

I also overheard funny takes like-

“D&D 5E just doesn’t have the same feeling to it, it’s not really D&D anymore. Young people these days are too self centered to play and work together, it has to be all about them and their half elf dragon cat person instead of engaging with challenges and playing a game that focuses on exploring a world.”

And-

“Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants.”

Okay, the second quote is from Socrates 2,490 years before GaryCon, but curmudgeons are eternal.

I also had an interesting conversation with a big World of Darkness fan and story arch centric GM that really made it clear how people can value entirely different things from RPG’s. We disagreed on our most core assumptions about what makes a good game. As the conversation went on and we talked past each other a little bit I realized that universalizing good game advice is really impossible as I think we both were sort of proselytizing for our style of game when we pitched the type of games we liked. While I still believe there’s heaps of value in the playstyle that many players of different systems and backgrounds would enjoy, old school inspired games and their philosophy don’t need everyone’s cup of tea, just like I really would prefer to not play in a game with predetermined outcomes.

Now this is pretty obvious stuff That there’s no bad wrong way to have fun with RPG’s is clear and I’ve said I believe that in the past. But I think our shared mutual initial surprise at the diametrically opposed philosophies really speaks to the benefit of not being siloed into the same circles and influences but to have situations where you casually bump into diametrically opposed ideas to shake the cobwebs off of assumptions. I think online groups around RPGs are really useful and inspirational, allowing folks to share ideas and group up around common interests and refine these to more and more tailored tastes.

However as with so many other areas of a life lived more and more through online conversations the separation of people by interest and preference into increasingly specific groups has a good deal of downside.

The diversity of backgrounds of the folks I ran into and the conversations I had really speaks to the serendipity of meatspace. I felt very fortunate to make it to a real world convention. For the last couple years I think the majority of my general social and hobby community interaction has been online and I’ve been fortunate to get more in person socialization than many during this pandemic. I’ve formed a lot of my RPG through reading blogs and hanging out in Discords and Reddit and it’s been the source of so much inspiration and collaboration with people.

But I know that I know what I like from a game design perspective. I’m likely to spend more time exploring those areas and adjacent ideas, not digging elsewhere to bump into entirely new ones or things I don’t like. I think this hyper specialization of hobby interests might make us less accepting of things that fall outside of these niches when we do bump into them.

We are not meant to exist as purely digital persons or in virtual “communities”. Having actual humans in front of you to discuss ideas about things you both care about is engaging and far more creatively satisfying than messages to or from a Discord handles or Reddit commenter that I’ve never actually met. In person gathering of nerds arounds a loosely shared hobby is amazing for cross pollination and networking, it feeds those human social needs and I dug that

That evening I played my second game of Desert Moon of Karth where I had a cheery android camera person, greasy mechanic and roadie, washed out ex marine security detail, and sketchy professor of mysticism that they brought to interview like the Aliens! Guy on History Channel as “subject matter expert”

Unlike the first crew, when they got to the Shattered Visage they decided to investigate what was behind the blackened sheet metal blocking off the head cavity from the neck of the giant statue. Using the teamster’s handy spanner to unscrew the bolts they found a charred corpse, a recording of the events leading to the fateful end before burning, and a brass locket containing a picture of a red haired young woman and the governor of Larstown looking happy together.

The teamster decided to keep the locket. Oh boy.

As he awoke he saw a transparent red headed face with empty eyes the color of a bottomless pit. It grabbed him and his life energy drained fourth. After taking a wound from all of that, he rolled that there was a limb loss and his arm touched shriveled and necrotized at the unearthly touch. The team swung physical weapons fruitlessly through the appertion though the android did notice the stun baton seemed to disturb it’s form and crackle more effectively. Thinking quickly the marine tossed the locket as far out as possible into the desert and the floating figure followed. With a painful shockwave scream that harmed the party and knocked many of them over it disappeared. Their cowboy guide Sandsquid Slim was Sandsquid shook for the rest of the game and mumbled under his breath incessantly as he led them to the mouth of the mine the next day.

Approaching the mine they had the bioscanner going nonstop. I used a soundboard of an Aliens style motion tracker to great effect, making it ping without describing it first and waiting for them to pick up on the sound and hurriedly asking to check what it was reading. This time they explored the mine more leisurely and broke into the computer room and used the password they’d found on a sticky note to access the controls, flicker on all the mine lights, and use the cameras. Hacking together an extension cable from the android’s severed hand after the ghostly incident. They had a feed of all the cameras running into their blurry screened studio camcorder for 50 feet.

Intrigued by the glowing blue light behind the ore crusher, they opened it up and saw a series of anemone like blue glowing growths on the wall with the tunnel turning to the right. At this point they saw a biosignature and heard a human sounding voice say “Hello? Is someone there?” after they responded, hearing “Oh god help me!”

The android asked if it was possible to figure out if this was a genuine human voice or some kind of recording or fake through closely listening. I had her roll but it was very poor. Sounds exactly like a human to me! Slowly entering the chamber the crew caught footage of huge blue tendrils bunched up like shrubs reaching to the ceiling. The voice came again from behind the furthest. “I’m stuck and it’s coming!!” The marine rounded the corner to see the bleached creature again. Fear Saves all around.

In the pitched battle that followed the disarmed teamster was paralyzed by the harpoons and nearly killed after they were ripped out. The android picked him up on her back and booked it while the marine opened fire with his smart gun, missing initially. The panicked professor caught another beep on the motiontion sensor… back the way they came! Waiting in the ore crusher chamber the blip moved into the vicinity of the computer room. Then the lights cut out. The combat suit clad marine backed up and opened up with the heavy machine gun again and blasted the first with some good rolls and took some dire hits but blew it to kingdom come. At this point the crew sprinted past the computer room towards the exit and the android flicked her one rusty grenade running past the broken window inside as they heard rapid scrabbling in their direction.

Boom! The creature in there was annihilated and I rolled for additional cave in or debris falling but none did, bursting out into sunlight they had their clips- minus a few limbs. It was another really great group of players for this group and a blast to Warden.

On the third day I played DCC with Micheal Curtis (Director of Product Development at Goodman Games and author of Stonehell, and a huge number of great DCC modules like Frozen in Time, and the Chained Coffin) in a playtest of a module called Spire of Salt. The room we had been put in was a bit small and noisy so folks struggled to hear well, but it was still a fun romp.
I think the addition of a solid theme really makes for a stronger adventure. The Salt Lich, brine fountains, and crystalized skulls filled with maggots are much more evocative than a Kroger brand generic fantasy version.

After taking a breather and swinging through the convention hall to talk with folks until that evening I played a game called “In Search of the Brazen Head of Zenopus” by Zach Howard of the Zenopus Archive. I don’t think there is anyone more passionate about that Holmes Basic D&D Set and the Zenopus dungeon that comes with it. The enthusiasm and zest for the material Zach had for the game really brought it to life. We were playing characters from the designer J. Eric Holmes adventure novels which were revisiting the famous dungeon now changed as the game was set 40 years after the original Holmes Basic Set dungeon with the town having grown over the complex and paved over its secrets.

I think this is the game I played in that best captured the charming weirdness and sense of retro mystery and exploration of the wonderous that characterizes the creative adventure possibilities of the original games along with a great crew of team players with solid raport as well. While I had to take off before the epic conclusion of the game, I played a wizard named Murray that cast fireball to scare off a purple worm oozing down a hallway, broke into the bricked over basement of a very surprised sages house from the city above that had covered the dungeon, and drank a potion of control undead to wrest control of some fishman cultists giant snake mummy as we prepared to do battle with a huge animated idol and the attendant cultists.

Late evening I set up last minute late night game of Mothership with some folks and ran the Screaming of the Alexa from Dead Planet for loads of fun. I really dig how science fiction allows modern player handouts to be part of the diegetic experience, at one point just having the players take a picture of the ship’s blueprints from my screen with their phone for a personal map and referring to it as their personnel data pad. I just had two players, a teamster and an uncanny android who were both scavengers that had been set adrift. I think horror games actually work best in smaller groups and the two player party really led to a fun dynamic duo tension. Laser cutters breached hulls, androids were bisected, and unearthly psychic screams echoed through the rapidly depressurizing hull. The players had also never played Mothership before and picked it up within minutes, at 11 pm with tired convention brains.

While I’m obviously biased as I’ve primarily published third party Mothership material so far but I think there’s a huge opportunity for it to take off as a more popular convention game with organized play or just lots of tables running it in the same way Dungeon Crawl Classics has a strong convention presence and energetic appeal to in person players. With the success of the recent 1E Kickstarter, Mothership is clearly growing but it seems like its fanbase and discussion is primarily online compared to having a physical footprint in gaming spaces and events. I’d say 75% of people I talked to about the game at Gary Con had heard of it from the chatter in a heap of RPG spaces online but only a much smaller fraction had actually played the game or read it. From a financial standpoint, that’s not that big a deal because conventions represent a relatively small demographic of folks and cash. But as one booth owner told me, going to conventions isn’t so much just about event sales, but about meeting other people in the industry and having them know and recognize you and building recognition and legitimacy with big fans and introducing new people to your work by being present. Networking basically.
Tangential point being I want to run lots of Mothership at conventions and see other people run it as well to get more people playing because I find it to be a really fun and accessible game.

The next and last morning I drove over with the anti-D&D Uber driver and ran my final game of the Wizards Take Thracia. It was even more wild than the first round and I don’t have space to cover all of the crazy shenanigans the party got up to but one highlight was when the party ran into the sphinx and one member cut it off two words into monologuing to establish an empathetic bond where they shared all thoughts and feelings. The outraged sphinx knew it couldn’t target the mage without harming itself so threatened to slay his friends and pounced on one before the wizard used another spell to swap bodies with the sphinx and kill his invisible old body someone else had dumped a bag of flour they brought with them now occupied by the sphinx. Lots of wild stuff in this vein though the final fight with the magically armored immortal sorcerer king killed off two of mages with a finger of death and a disintegrate and had a third charmed before finally succumbing to a time stopped critical hit with a cultist dagger, being webbed, those webs lit on magical fire and hit with six swords on six newly sprouted limbs from another wizard also coated in the same magical fire. A great note to end my convention on.

Afterwards I made the ride back to Chicago to fly out, lost my debit card right before flying out of the country, found it at the last minute, and ate some deep dish pizza to celebrate the recovery.

While significant figures in any field’s past are mythologized by traditionalists and knocked from these idealized plinths by iconoclasts, GaryCon seems like a living event that bridges the past and future to exist very much in the present moment. It is more than just the legacy of a famous namesake. There’s a buzzing passion and energy about the event and all the varied people it attracts and the ideas they bring and I can’t wait to head back to Wisconsin.

Anyways, my Uber Driver got 5 stars.

A Web of Hooks: Quest Connections in a Sandbox Megadungeon Region

Posted on March 3, 2022March 3, 2022 by Joel H

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir

In order for a sandbox RPG region to have a sense of verisimilitude it’s important for many of the locations in the area to be actually connected to each other instead of existing as a series of unrelated vignettes. The dynamism of considering how two areas affect each other creates more immersive and creative settings that increase conceptual density and packing more interesting ideas into the available space of your sandbox region.

One way to achieve this interconnection creates a web of hooks that pulls players from location to location and unites the patchwork quilt of locations into a unified whole. In game design terms all rumors, jobs, quests, and lore are hooks that exist to help create a call to adventure by telling the player something about a location or something at a location and provide context for the setting. They should be linked to specific locations instead of something abstract or unactionable. This location could be anywhere from a settlement, a dungeon, an area within a dungeon or settlement, or a desolate bluff in the desert wilderness.

At their core adventure hooks break down into some fairly simple formats.

For example:
I’ve heard there’s something valuable over there.
Here’s how you can avoid the dangerous thing over there.
Go there and get this thing and you’ll get something in return.
Bring this thing there and you’ll get something.
Go here and kill this person or monster.
Go here and rescue this person or monster.

This excellent table from Hex Crawl blog for inspiration is great when you’re stuck coming up with types of hooks that connect locations.

This is a simple process. We can make these hooks more engaging by applying the therefore or but principle to the hooks and adding complications. The more of these hooks between locations we create, the more interconnected and dynamic our sandbox is.

One type of hook that’s worth discussing in more detail is the rumor. I prefer adding a good number of diegetic rumors spoken and known directly by specific NPC’s or found on specific documents rather than always rolling on a random rumor table and hearing the rumor mysteriously bestowed from a general entity “They say…”.

Is That What They Say Oh Really GIF - Is That What They Say Oh Really Is That So - Descubre & Comparte GIFs

Multiple people might know the same rumor or have similar quest hooks, though their versions could be widely different. And if rumors are false or misleading, the PC’s know who to blame! Specific information can be a reward for seeking out and talking with specific people in the world.

I still think there’s still a big place for rolling on a Random Rumor Table. It would take way too much work and page space to specify what general information every single NPC knows about the region. Instead it’s better to roll to procedurally generate rumors on the fly that NPC may be likely to know, just once for establishing the background information a PC starts with, or if the PC’s hit the tavern and do some socializing.

I really like how The Halls of Arden Vul divides adventuring rumors (adventurers, people with practical experience with the locations, or people who talk to them) and historical rumors (sages, researchers, and ancient beings). The tables are broken down into Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Legendary rumors that have varying odds of the person knowing them. I’ll probably adopt something similar.

Getting back to the process of laying out the hook connections while planning a region my attempts to use a Google Sheets document to note all the location interconnections using a format similar to the Colossal Wastes of Zhaar crowdsourced hex crawl was difficult for me to wrap my head around. I’ve discovered I’m a bit more of a visual person and decided to use Scapple to take each of my hex locations from my map and create a diagram showing arrows designating hook linkages.

quest hook connections — Becomes this web of hooks.

Each arrow represents a specific hook leading from one location to another.
Yellow locations are dungeon sites, Blue locations are settlements, and the brown one is the Cinderstrom volcano megadungeon.

I have lots to add and tweak but you can see some patterns emerging.

There are hubs that are both popular end points and starting points. Some hooks just lead directly to one location while other hooks lead to the next in a series of them. A couple desolate locations don’t have any hooks leading to them and can only be investigated by stumbling upon them. I haven’t finalized all of the quests or come with an equation for connection over just eyeballing it.

Every settlement has at least 3 hooks leading to other places with up to 7. Cinderstrom has 8 different hooks leading to it and in turn leads to 3 different locations outside of it. These numbers should increase for all locations as I build up higher interconnectivity by adding more hooks. Here’s a quick example of a segment of these hooks from the Bandit Ruined Villa.

Hooks in the Bandit Ruined Villa:
Jorgan the Hammer: “There’s a floating rock with a silver pool under it just to the north! I heard if you submerge your body you can whisper a wish to be granted. (F- Jorgan has a fell bargain with the hungry Tarn Demon.)
To Tiny Tarn (pg.xx)
Lobster Jacques: Secret “Headwoman Lana of Ulark hasn’t been paying the whole protection tax, find some leverage to get her to pay up and I’ll make it worth your while.” (T-2000 gold each and command of squad of bandits)
To Ulark (pg.xx)
Doctor Cathero , drunk: “Tunnels in that mesha to the west are crawling with shpitwurms! If I could get my hands on their glands, what a rich harvesht! (T-can be made into expensive and unstable explosives)
To Spitwurm Caverns (pg.xx)
Graculous Clay the Prisoner: “Ol’ Jailor Jean needs an escort to the Mud Pots to rest his bones in their healing muck. Poor man can’t make the journey anymore.” (T- he’ll die in one week without their healing properties)
To Mudpots (pg. xx)

Following this process of hook connection building can take a sandbox from a weightless series of random encounters and strange locales to a more cohesive overarching adventure.

With a video game like Fallout New Vegas or the Witcher III, side quest hooks are included to add variety and interest to the expansive world instead of demanding the player follows only one main plot bearing quest. While in a tabletop RPG sandbox region everything is a side quest!

However in a region with a tentpole megadungeon there’s a center of gravity to the sandbox and a nexus around which a hurricane of potential energy and plots swirl. Just as the megadungeon volcano Cinderstrom looms over the basin, its shadow and influence should touch a good number of the other hooks in the region. I’m looking to accomplish this by having all the major factions care about the megadungeon, having a lot of hooks that lead there seeded throughout the region map (8 so far), and putting the most valuable, weird, and powerful stuff inside of the megadungeon.

Nothing stops me from flipping the script and placing hooks and important items or people within the megadungeon itself that connect outwards istead. This replicates the organic feeling of interconnectedness found between rooms within a good dungeon and supports adventures outside of the megadungeon that remain linked.

One unformatted example of this in action:

Within a side passage of the black marble Grand Halls on Level 1 of Cinderstrom there is a great brass door with three evenly spaced slots the size of a dagger’s blade. The magically sealed door seems impervious to physical damage or mechanical lock picking. A bas relief on the door above the slots shows the outline of a jeweled dagger with odd serrations above each slot.

The moldering tomes found elsewhere in the Forbidden Archives of Cinderstrom note that the Thrice Locked Door of Thrones requires certain jeweled dagger keys to enter-last seen in the tower villa of Sorcerer Lord Polgath. One of the dagger keys has been looted by Lobster Jacques, the bandit leader squatting in the ruins of the tower villa.

Of course if a different hook brough them to the tower villa they could still find two oddly serrated jeweled dagger in the treasure hoard of the bandit company that now occupies the villa and recognize a matching one on Lobster Jaques Belt.

I probably should add at least one more connection hook here from elsewhere to increase player’s odds of figuring out how to access the Thricelocked Door of Thrones in keeping with The Alexandrian’s Three Clue Rule This type of content gating behind specific access requirements shouldn’t be required to access the majority of locations. Instead these hooks are for an optional hidden bonus and danger for those who venture to investigate off the beaten path.

The thicker woven these web of hooks are the more likely your PC’s are to get stuck fast and cause impacts that ripple throughout the region while the organic story that’s generated through their episodic roving and delving develops overarching themes, reoccurring nemeses, and familiar territory that help tie past actions to future consequences.

About Damn Times: A Campaign Event Table

Posted on February 20, 2022February 21, 2022 by Joel H

There’s been heaps of great writing has been about the value of specific procedures in old school D&D that atrophied away and were forgotten as editions marched on. The reaction table, morale rolls, and a system of location exploration turns linked to diminishing light and increasing odds of random encounter are all valuable to support a specific style of gameplay that has time and resource pressures and doesn’t default to all things invariably trying to kill you.

Another element of specific procedure for sandbox games that I think could use a renaissance are Campaign Events.

The original AD&D Oriental Adventures comes with mountains of well deserved baggage but it did have one area that provided a really useful table for inspiration-the Campaign Events section. A DM could use the tables to roll up the overarching events of an entire year in advance.

I think the ‘Maiden of Virtue’ entry is going to remain absent in my version of the table.

There was also a daily events table but I feel that territory has been pretty covered by using location Wandering Encounters table stocked with events as well as potentially hostile foes for whatever city, blasted wasteland, or hole in the ground the PC’s find themselves in.

A neat element of the system is that the table rolled for monthly events are affected by whichever yearly event was rolled while the seasonal event is happening. If there’s a 4 month War for the seasonal event on then Major Battles and Bandit Activity are likely while there’s little or no chance of marriage events for the months that the War lasts. Curiously, seasonal events of natural disasters also make every other natural disaster likely while they last, if there was a Famine then a Minor Earthquake is suddenly more likely during this time. I think this non-scientific take can work well for a lot of fantasy settings as the natural world is often portrayed as magically interconnected and if there’s a period of natural disaster and instability it makes sense that it affects the rest of the natural order.

These tables are interesting because they introduce a broader plot that doesn’t involve the players while using the oracular power of dice to surprise the Gamemaster and inspire them through producing seeds, pushing the game in a direction they wouldn’t have taken it if they had just created the timeline of future events from their own plotting and creating an impression of the wider world going on and changing without them giving a great sense of verisimilitude to the setting. These events don’t have to be written in stone but offer inspiration and provide a living world that changes without the PC’s touching it.

When I’m running a campaign I’ve found that it’s easy to have everything just remain in a state of delicate stasis instead until the PC’s come and screw it all up. In my opinion, Hot Springs Island is the best sandbox RPG adventure published at this point. They refer to the setting of the island as a “keg of black powder” with volatile elements and complex factions in a precarious equilibrium waiting for the PC’s to come in and light the match that blows it all to hell with their shenanigans. One downside of this approach is that that large changes to the setting are only precipitated in a rippling butterfly effect as a result of direct or indirect interaction with the PC’s and centers most events of broad reaching disruptive change around them.

This is my default way to run sandboxes. If the PC’s haven’t interacted with it, it exists frozen in the same state until they do, or their actions impact it. This works for my brain the same reasons most video games don’t render every single level and simulate every entity in the world while the players aren’t there- I’m saving precious processing power. Still, there’s a lot of gameplay value in simulating a world that feels alive and changes in big ways in the background without any PC input.

Before getting to the tweaked campaign events table there’s a couple other ways I’ve seen modules and systems introduce change that exists independent of PC’s. The sandbox Mothership module Pound of Flesh uses an event meter that ticks up in one direction every session along a series of crises from a dockworkers strike to a cybernetic plague until they get to their inevitable cataclysmic conclusion unless PC’s act to prevent this. I used a more limited potential timeline of future events if the PC’s do nothing in my space western module, Desert Moon of Karth. (I took the future timeline idea from Deep Carbon Observatory.) These are great and focused but only provide one or three potential timelines of changes instead of a huge procedural range for a long term campaign in the same area.

Faction procedures offer another way of introducing more setting dynamism without needing the PC’s finger in all the pies. I ran a real enjoyable star hopping campaign with friends using Stars Without Number for 14 sessions. The detailed faction procedure was a lot of fun to run six factions through for an hour each week with an automated spread sheet of their assets but the solo RTS I was playing didn’t seem to deliver the same value for the players. I think something like Mausritter’s faction procedures would have been more useable for my purposes. In that procedure, factions each have several goals that require a certain number of progress marks depending on how difficult the goal is. Between sessions a die is rolled to see how many progress marks are added to their goal adjusted by how many unique resources they have at their disposal. If the goal is targeted at harming a rival, they lose one targeted resource when the goal is completed. If PC’s help or harm the goals of a faction they can add or remove a number of progress marks towards the goal depending on the scale of their interference. I think a faction system like this could pair nicely with an overarching campaign events table representing more unexpected outlier events and acts of nature than the steady progress of factions towards their goals.

Fun to make and brainstorm, but worth the extra 1 hour a week rolling dice and creating a newsfeed? Maybe!

In making my own version of a Campaign Event Table, I made a number of changes from the Oriental Adventures events table to make it more user friendly, and customized to my swords and sorcery campaign purposes and preferences.

First, I changed the types of disruptive overarching events to the categories Faction Chaos and Natural Chaos which sums up the origin of most types of large changes that affect the area. I also reduced the timeline scale from Yearly Events and Monthly Events to Seasonal Events (12 weeks) and Weekly Events. I did this because I tend to operate campaigns on a shorter in game time scale than I think they were assuming in 1985. If you run a game with regular downtime in between or that operates on the same time frame as reality in between sessions and dungeon expeditions it’s easy to have an event come up every session, which is my ideal pace. You could easily adjust what increment of time the tables represent to your liking.

I think these are best rolled in advance to create a timeline of outside happenings if the PC’s don’t interfere and synthesized into a more detailed and partially interconnected series of events. Also credit to John Arendt for the Campaign Events table in their Black City setting inspiring several of the entries.

How It Works

Roll on the Seasonal Event table. Roll for how many weeks of Faction or Nature Chaos caused if needed.
Roll 1d12 to see what week of the 12 week season the Season Event starts on.
Roll a Weekly Event for each week, rolling on the Faction Chaos or Nature Chaos table if the week occurs during a period of either from the Season event.
Repeat the process for more Seasons if more time in your game’s calendar is needed. Though probably best to just wait until you get right before the next season to roll again.
Look at the series of events and weave them into an interconnected timeline of what will happen in the region that season without direct interference by the PC’s.

1d100	Seasonal Events
1	The Dragon Wakes: Faction Chaos for 2d6 weeks as it ravages before it returns to it’s slumber.
2-7	Major Birth: Local celebration lasts for 1 week.
8-14	Faction VIP Visit: Remains for 2d6 weeks
15-21	Assassination of Faction Representative: Faction Chaos for 1d6 weeks
22-28	Death of Faction Representative: Faction Chaos for 1d6 weeks
29-35	Diplomatic Marriage: Celebration at both factions lasts for 1 week.
36-42	Coup Plot Discovered: Faction Chaos for 1d4 weeks
31-35	New Cult: Faction Chaos for 1d8 weeks
36-42	Invasion: Faction Chaos for 1d10 weeks
43-49	War: Faction Chaos for 1d8 weeks
50-56	Famine: Nature Chaos for 1d6 weeks
57-63	Plague: Nature Chaos for 1d6 weeks
64-70	Great Earthquake: Nature Chaos for 1d8 weeks
71-77	Steppe Fire: Nature Chaos for 1d4 weeks
78-84	Gray River Floods: Nature Chaos for 1d4 weeks.
85-91	Starstone Impact: Nature Chaos for 1d6 weeks.
92-98	Red Comet* Only occurs once. Nature Chaos for 1d6 weeks.
99-100	Cinderstrom Erupts: Nature Chaos for 1d10 weeks

Weekly Events

1d100	During Faction Chaos	During Nature Chaos	During Normal Times
1-4	Accident	Accident	Accident
5-8	Bandit Activity	Skystone Impact	Locusts
9-12	Birth	Locusts	Bandit Activity
13-16	Death	Bandit Activity	Birth
17-20	Outsider Visit	Bandit Activity	Death
21-24	Fire	Birth	Minor VIP Visit
25-28	Haunting	Death	Minor Fire
29-32	Deadly Predator	Death	Haunting
33-36	Incursion	Minor Earthquake	Travesty
37-40	Travesty	Minor Earthquake	Mistaken Identity
41-44	Raid	Flooding	Hidden Hunter
45-48	Skirmish	Flooding	Marriage
49-52	Battle	Minor Fire	Infamous Criminal
53-56	Major Battle	Minor Fire	Vengeance Seeker
57-60	Infamous Criminal	Haunting	Bad Weather
61-64	Recruitment	Disease	Seasonal Festival
65-68	Mutiny	Deadly Predator	Blood Feud
69-72	Kidnapping	Deadly Predator	Disappearance
73-76	Troops Moving	Travesty	New Dungeon Discovery
77-80	Vengeance Seeker	Landslide	Supply Issues
81-84	Bad Weather	Landslide	Outsider Visit
85-88	Fire	Bad Weather	Team Up Offer
89-92	Landslide	Bad Weather	Rival Party Slain
93-96	Minor Earthquake	Demons	Skystone Impact
97-100	Flooding	Mastodon Migration	Merchant Caravan

Blank Season Calendar of Events

10.

11.

12.

An Example Season:

I rolled for the Seasonal Event of the year and got a 93, Red Comet. They then rolled a 1d12 to see what week the Seasonal Event started and got Week 7. Reading in the description of the Green Comet that it lasts for 1d6 weeks of Nature Chaos they roll to see how long it will last and get 2 weeks. The first 6 weekly events are rolled using the During Normal Times table, and weeks 7 and 8 are rolled on the During Nature Chaos table, and the last 4 week’s events are rolled on the During Normal Times table again for the following 12 week Season results.

New Dungeon Discovery
Accident
Birth
New Dungeon Discovery
Mistaken Identity
Merchant Caravan
Red Comet; Death
Red Comet; Death
Supply Issues
Skystone Impact
Haunting
Outsider Visit

Looking at this timeline of events I decide that the Season starts with a rival adventuring party discovering the Steaming Grotto’s hidden entrance to the volcano megadungeon of Cinderstrom and bragging about it a bit too loudly in a settlement’s drinking hall. Next week one of the members falls into a mud pot and is nearly fatally scalded on a subsequent expedition requiring bandages over their entire body. The third week, Anasa the herb merchant gives birth and there’s much celebrating and festivities in the village of Nabtaar. In the fourth week, the same rival adventuring party decides to venture away from Cinderstrom and stumble upon the Mound of the Horselord and prepare to loot it and brag copiously again. This angers the plainsfolk who hear about it and a rowdy mob is assembled the next week to punish the party defiling the tomb of their ancestor. Unfortunately their info is bad and they believe the PC’s are the ones that entered the mound while the rival party skipped town.

On the sixth week a merchant caravan passes along the trade road and brings merchants bearing strange goods that are available for the short week the caravan stops in the Cinderstrom Basin, the rival party flees the region with them. On the seventh week the Red Comet is visible and magic is empowered and strange things stir as it’s visible for two weeks, in the same week dealer of the black pomegranates in the Janeer Bastion is wracked by convulsions while gazing up at the Red Comet and dies. The eighth week see’s the strange death of the recent mother Anasa the herb merchant in the village of Nabtaar under similar circumstances. After that the comet passes and the natural world reverts to a less weird state. However, the Red Comet’s emanations polluted all of the magical potions brewed in the region and none are available for that ninth week until more are brewed. On the tenth week a blaze is seen in the sky as a late chunk of the Red Comet flies from the sky and lands on the Tallgrass Plain with an ear shattering boom, killing a herd of mastodons and emanating magical radiation. The eleventh week the tortured and angry souls of the mastodons rise as specters and create a new hazard for any travelers across the Tallgrass Plain. Finally in the last week of the season a robed stranger with a huge ax comes to seek out the Mound of the Horselord that they heard about from the rival adventuring party fleeing north with the merchant caravan 6 weeks ago. They claim they are the heirs to the Horselord and wish to claim their birthright within the Mound.

This took me about 10 minutes to come up with and write down. The events rolled aren’t set in stone but fertile seeds for inspiration for a timeline of what will happen without player activity that actively prevents the events from occurring. In order to get information of these out to the players it’s great to add to drop evidence of the event into local rumors or NPC conversation if the player’s don’t directly witness the event.

Let me know what you think! Have you ever used a campaign events table? How did it work?

Better Side Quests With The Therefore or But Principle

Posted on January 17, 2021March 2, 2022 by Joel H

January 17, 2021

Side quests provide much of the meat of a sandbox region, potential hooks that are unrelated or tangentially related to a primary goal that allow player pursuit of a variety of goals and interests. In fact, it’s completely fine to not have a “main quest” in a tabletop campaign dedicated to player autonomy in a sandbox setting.

I came across this YouTube video on the Witcher 3’s game design and the poster mentioned that he found the side quests are made more engaging than many other open world video games side quests by integrating what the creators of South Park refer to as the “therefore or but” storytelling principle. The gist is that if you’re telling a story and it leads into a “then this happens.” it’s a shitty story. There’s no conflict or change resulting from a logical chain of events, just a series of unrelated events following each other. Sandbox computer RPG’s can be offenders here, as can a sandbox tabletop campaign if the GM keeps situations static and unconnected..
“So they want you to kill some rats, then you go fishing, then you go to the tavern, then you sleep, then you wake up and go rob everyone and wait until they forget, then you go into that barrow mound dungeon to grab some gold and a better sword.” There’s no railroad and plenty of options here, but they’re weightless and without impact.

The THEREFORE establishes what action follows as a direct result of the initial situation existing and the BUT introduces conflict THEREFORE something else happens as a result of that conflict that follows a chain of consequence back to the initial situation.

I think this is equally useful in designing situations that lend themselves to better stories generated through play at the table. A tabletop RPG example can be found in the similar methods in this very useful faction design post by Gucci Fuligin Cloak and seems useful for establishing any initial situation in a game that has some layers to it.

“[FACTION] want(s) [MOTIVATION], but [OBSTACLE]. Therefore, [PLAN OR METHOD OF SURMOUNTING OBSTACLE].” For example, in my volcano megadungeon I’ve been working on, the Drakencultists want their living god Skornag the Spell Drinker to destroy everything and build it anew BUT the dragon has slumbered deeply for the last 40 years, THEREFORE they’re hunting for magic items to pile mounds of around the wyrm’s bulk for it to absorb sufficient energies and awaken BUT most of the are in the heavily secured Mage Vault he where the surviving remnants of the sorcerer lords barricaded themselves after the dragon’s coming SO the Kobold Cultists are searching for a secret entrance or a way of breaking the defensive enchantments. There’s tons of player quest or mission material that is spawned from following the chain of cause and reaction. For a different specific sidequest example you could have something like:

“The mayor wants the murders to stop BUT they can’t find any traces of the murderer THEREFORE they hire some adventurers BUT it’s a stealthy vigilante sneaking in to kill people they believe have evil brain leeches THEREFORE the party can decide to investigate if they’re legit or not.” The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford structures this principle well with a small sidequest I really enjoy, SPOILER for one of the module’s sidequests below.

So Warwick the town smith in Brandonsford believes he’s haunted by some kind of evil fey because he keeps finding flowers and strange charms left outside his door- THEREFORE he hires the party to investigate BUT it turns out his is actually the terribly shy town alchemist awkwardly flirting by leaving flowers and love notes the illiterate smith can’t read THEREFORE the party can use this information to blackmail the flustered alchemist for a payout to keep silent or help play matchmaker for the couple and bring them together.

After this initial situation is properly complicated it’s in the hands of the Game Master to add in their own THEREFORES and BUTS as the situation naturally evolves through player interaction and new choices. The additional details that flesh out the side quest don’t make it take much more text than my example and it’s immediately so much more interesting then a single layered job to kill or remove something or someone, or fetch an item. At their core many quests are still these things, but by introducing additional wrinkles or twists they immediately become both more interesting, complex, and grounded in the setting.

These reactions to player input makes things feel more immersive and “real.” instead of feeling like you’re push a limited set of mechanical buttons to achieve abstract goals within the disconnected game rules. Interesting and meaningful decisions with information to inform these choices that then have impact are at the root of what I think makes playing RPG’s fun. On their blog, RavenCrow King presents the idea of these three pillars of sandboxing succinctly. as Choice, Context, and Consequences.

This is part of the absolute magic that a good GM can bring to a tabletop session that the best sandbox video games can only poorly and partially imitate through extreme effort on their designers’ part to produce an illusion of- that the world reacts to any player’s decisions logically and changes results from this.

That every choice actually matters.