Apparently this is the year of the beta release. I ran a campaign using Mothership house rules I called Beyond Iskander’s Gate for 6 sessions that I canceled due to scheduling issues. But 10th century Central Asia is so rad and deeply underhyped as a setting for fiction and gaming and learning about the workings of Volga Bulgars, Khazaria, the Abbasid Caliphate, The Byzantine Empire, The Rus (Vikings make everything cooler) and their relations with each other kept me interested for months. Shifting frontiers between societies make some of the best RPG historical settings. Cultural variety and political instability are the bread and butter for a party of ambitious misfits with questionable ethics looking for adventure. Adding some paranormal events to the mix is even more fun.

My favorite source for this campaign was “Penguin Classics Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North” is the most gameable primary source. This review from False Machine really showcases the crazy inspirational value for the RPG enjoyer.

Campaign Overview

The year is 923. The Islamic world thrives in an age of science, law, and cosmopolitan splendor, though the Abbasid Caliphate’s political power wanes beneath the gilt surface.

You are members of the Ikhwān Al-Ṣafā, the Brethren of Purity—a secret order of scholars from Baghdad, devoted to uncovering the universal truth through every field of knowledge, including the occult.

Your mission: Investigate the truth of a mysterious letter from Ibn Fadlan, a member of the order and the caliph’s ambassador to the Volga Bulgars, where he describes the bones of a giant in the northern woods. You’ve just arrived at the great Persian city of Bukhara after months of travel and have months left before your caravan will arrive in the recently converted land of the seminomadic Bulgars, where the riches of the fur and slave trade have grown their influence in the region.

 Some learned scholars in Baghdad claim these lands lie beyond the Iron Gates built by Iskander the Great, said to hold back the forsaken barbarian tribes of Gog and Magog until the Day of Judgment.

Some Entries from the Real Journal of Ibn Fadlan

A giant
Tikīn told me that in the king’s lands there was a man of extraordinary size. When I arrived
in that country, I asked the king about him.

‘Yes, he was living in our country,’ he told me, ‘but he is dead. He was not one of our
people, nor was he an ordinary man. His story is as follows. One day some merchants set out
in the direction of the Itil River as they were in the habit of doing. The river was in flood
and had broken its banks. A day had scarcely passed when a group of these merchants came
to me and said: ‘“O king, we have seen a man swimming on the waters a man of such a kind that if he belonged to a people dwelling near us there would be no place for us in these lands, but we would have to emigrate.”

‘I set out on horseback with them and reached the river. I found myself face to face with
the man. I saw that judging by the length of my own forearm, he was twelve cubits tall. He
had a head the size of the biggest cooking pot there ever was, a nose more than a span long,
huge eyes, and fingers each more than a span in length. His appearance frightened me and I
had the same feeling of terror as the others. We began to speak to him, but he did not speak
to us and only stared. I had him taken to my residence and I wrote to the people of Wīsū,
who live three months’ distance from us, to ask for information about him. They wrote to
me, informing me that this man was one of the people of Gog and Magog.

Gog and Magog
‘They live three full months from us. They are naked, and the sea forms a barrier between
us, for they live on the other shore. They couple together like beasts. God, All-high and All-
powerful, causes a fish to come out of the sea for them each day. One of them comes with a
knife and cuts off a piece sufficient for himself and his family. If he takes more than he
needs, his belly aches and so do the bellies of his family and sometimes he even dies, with all
his family. When they have taken what they need, the fish turns round and dives back into
the sea. They do this every day. Between us and them, there is the sea on one side and they
are enclosed by mountains on the others. The Barrier also separates them from the gate by
which they leave. When God, All-high and All-powerful, wants to unleash them on civilized
lands, He causes the Barrier to open and the level of the sea to drop and the fish to vanish.’
I questioned the king further about this man and he told me:

‘He stayed with me for a time, but no child could look at him without dropping dead and
no pregnant women without miscarrying. If he took hold of a man, his hands squeezed him
until he killed him. When I realized that, I had him hung from a high tree until he died. If
you want to see his bones and his head, I will go along with you and show them to you.’
‘I would like very much to see them,’ I answered.

He rode with me into a great forest filled with immense trees and shoved me towards a
tree under which had fallen his bones and head. I saw his head. It was like a great beehive.
His ribs were like the stalk of a date cluster and the bones of his legs and arms were
enormous too. I was astonished at the sight. Then I went away.

Some Entries from the Imagined Journal of Ibn Fadlan (Recovered by the Player Investigators In-Game)

Departure from Bulghar

I hired a crew of Rus, strong men well-versed in rivercraft, to take us down the Atil in their longship. Though pagans, they were skilled and reliable. We sailed toward the forest of the Samara Bend, drawn by the rumors of giants who still remain there by the bones of the one the king had brought me to see. The Rus disbelieved these rumors but have taken my coin to carry myself and Bars the Slav downriver. It is good and proper to seek to learn more about such wonders of Creation so that one may further increase their appreciation of the world and help others do so. The Atil was calm and cold, its waters guided us steadily toward the South for three day’s journey. It is in the land of the Burtas, a tribe opposed to the Bulghars and also subjects of the Khazars.

---

The Samara Bend and A Sighting

After arriving, we climbed the hills over the Samara Bend, our party reached a dense forest where the trees grew tall and close, their branches entwined. Many birds and animals dwell here but I am told no fur bearing animals live there  and the land is rocky and hard so the Burtas do not often visit. As we ventured deeper into the forest, we heard a low thudding in the distance as the beating of a great drum. The sound grew, and with it, the earth seemed to tremble. We halted, peering through the thick undergrowth towards a wide trail, there we beheld the giants.

The four giants stood thrice the height of the tallest Rus, their limbs thick and heavy, their skin the color of stone.They wore no clothes to cover their nakedness, both their men and women. Their hair hung in matted locks about their shoulders. They seemed to possess great strength but little in the way of reason. Their faces were broad and heavy, with features like boulders.

One of the giants turned its head towards us but did not see. We took this as a sign and departed, careful to avoid making any sound. We did not stop until we had returned to our beached ship, giving thanks to Allah for our escape. I have been told that these are the people of Gog and Magog by the Bulghars. Bars said the Rus named them “jotun” and pressed upon us to leave as they think them eaters of man as the Bulghars do. I reminded them of the half payment of silver still awaiting them on my return and they relented

---

The Ritual

Bars and I disembarked with caution, leaving the longship along the shore. The Rus remained behind, their faces pale with fear, unwilling to follow into the dense forest. With Bars leading the way, we climbed the hills, moving through thick underbrush and towering trees following the trail of the giants until we came upon a clearing.

Four giants stood before an outcropping around a small cave entrance where a landslide had fallen from the cliff. We watched from the brush as the giants conducted a strange ritual. They each carried a slain deer in two great hands with the same ease as a man holds a chicken. With care, they took the deer’s blood in their hands and each dripped it over glyphs carved into the stone around the cave’s entrance placing each before setting the remains aflame with loud shouts much like words but like no tongue known to me.  We waited until the giants had finished their work and left down their trail before we approached the cave.

---

The Cave and the Giants’ Return

Bars agreed to stand outside to watch so that we would not be caught and trapped in the cave without escape. The entrance to the cave through the ash and remains was not wide enough to admit the giants, and beyond it lay a wide carved passage that led deep into the earth. I followed it, a torch flickering on the walls, revealing more of the lined shapes etched into the stone. 

The passage opened into a vast domed chamber, hewn from the rock by hands larger than those of men. The air was thick with musty scent, and the walls were lined with enormous white stone vats. Curious, I pushed with strain to remove the stone lid of one. Each was filled with a dark, viscous fluid. I leaned over one of the vats to peer inside, and something cold and sharp leaped forth and bit into my flesh. I recoiled, only to see a pale, writhing worm burrowing beneath my skin. I tried to remove it, but it was too deep, its movement sickening me as it squirmed in my veins. I was overcome with dread.

Before I could gather my thoughts, Bars let out a shout of warning. The giants had returned. Their awful voices echoed with rage. I left the cave and we took flight as the giants closed behind us.They were upon our heels before we could reach the thick forest where they would be slow.

They caught Bars, and rended him in their hands as one smashes a grasshopper. A true friend, his life snuffed out in an instant. I was blessed to enter a thick stand of trees as another came for me, unable to pass quickly. I barely reached the longship as the giants began hurling logs and boulders at us. The Rus, seeing the danger, had pushed off from the shore with haste and I had to wade through water to reach the ship in time. One of their number was struck and killed by a rock of great size. The longship rocked violently but was not overturned. I could do nothing but collapse overcome by exhaustion. We returned north, each day bringing us further from this darkness by the light of Allah’s grace.

Inspirations:

Ibn Fadlan in the Lands of Darkness by Ibn Fadlan and assorted other writers
The 13th Warrior directed by John McTiernan
Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon
The Jews of Khazaria by Kevin Alan Brook 
The Long Ships or Red Orm by Frans G. Bengtsson
Ikhwan al-Safa, or Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity
The Strain (Nocturna) by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro
The Assassin’s Creed Video Game Series
Against the Cult of the Reptile God by Douglas Niles
Silent Legions by Kevin Crawford
Armies of the Volga Bulgars Khanate of Kazan by Osprey Publishing
Legacy of the Bieth by Allandaros
Iron Gates Blog Series by Skerples,
Against The Wicked City by Joseph Manola

P.S: Beware of Overprepping

The problem with historical settings if you have a tendency to hyperfixate and overprep is that the well of lore you can draw from research is endless. It’s the same difficulty with running a game in a detailed preexisting setting like Star Wars or Tekumel x10000. If you’re a recovering overprepper like me you fall into old habits and your notes can start looking like this.

When you start researching primary sources to create an accurate price list for goods when you’re running a paranormal investigation style game without asking how your players experience will improve by being able to know the historically accurate relative worth of an ermine coat and a big jar of honey you may be in the throes of a hyperfixation and not prepping useful material for your next sessions adventures.

I need to get over my misplaced desire to do “historical justice” to representing the era and embrace the “good enough, let’s have some fun” vibe that good RPG historical settings can provide. Kevin Crawford, author of Stars Without Number and a bunch of related systems recommends a simple guiding principle for all RPG campaigns, but I’d say applies even more to historical campaign prep.

“Am I having fun? If you’re enjoying yourself, then
you can keep building. We follow this hobby because it’s fun, and if you’re enjoying the process then you
should let yourself have your indulgence.
Am I going to need this for the next session? If what you’re creating is something you know you’re going to need for the next game session, then you should finish it. Don’t let this feeling of obligation extend to every detail, however; it can be easy to imagine situations where you’ll need to elaborate some NPC or organization or location, but if you respond to every such possibility you’ll never get away from the drawing board. If you’re not having fun and you don’t need it for your next game session, stop it. You’re going to exhaust yourself on minutiae and trivia and not have the energy to do the parts you really do need, or the vigor needed to actually run this for the group.”

Good stuff to keep in mind.

How have I not posted here since October? I’ve been busy and am easily distracted and but part of the delay has been overthinking what it means to post a blog. I got some quality advice from the prolific Prismatic Wasteland to break out of the slump.

Ah yeah. This isn’t a published book or zine, this is just the first draft place for any neat idea I want to share with folks. The important thing is the practice of sharing, or writing something about what I care about or find neat in RPGs and life, not that every single thought needs to be well considered. I’m super guilty of waiting for some muse to come and only writing then. Sometimes you’re not inspired but turns out you get inspired more often by actually doing the thing. Routine and practice isn’t sexy or fun but it’s the way anything get done and bit by bit improves. Something mid is always better than a perfect nothing.

For this New Year I commit to giving you, reader, more middling quality and poorly edited blog posts. There will hopefully be some absolute bangers too. You should try the same!

Anyways, I just started an in-person Traveller RPG campaign with some friends and I’ve been really enjoying it. The lifepath collaborative character building mini-game where you spend a session making characters was concerning because I’ve spent years trying to make getting into my games quicker, more accessible, and less complex to not scare off new players. But it was great! We went around the table and had everyone design a homeworld that I added to my sector map which gave them instant buy in to the setting and reduced my workload.

Then we went through each 4 year term around the table to each player and found how life treated. There was tragic mishaps, ridiculous fame, fortune, and betrayals as they aged (The fact characters can die in character creation in the original rules is hilarious and sets a fun tone, though we were playing Mongoose 2e Traveller where they only suffer mishaps). We’ll be starting the game with characters in their 40’s that have lived an eventful life and have the skills and existing contacts to prove it and are working on paying off an 11 million credit mortgage as one celebrity artist noble seeks to save her doomed world and a former successful pirate, and an ex-marine mob enforcer too good with lasers are deadset on revenge against Wesley the Rat who sold them both out during both their criminal days. It’s the most fun I’ve had in character creation. People dug it and didn’t find it too long either!

I think there’s a place for long form character creation when the complexity is itself fun and helps for a connections in a big campaign sandbox. This post on Rise Up Comus had me thinking about offering different modes of character creation in the same game. Replacement characters I’ll probably just have players use a quick generator for unless they want to play the lifepath minigame on their own or we both have an hour free to hang.

Ever feel like your players aren’t as deeply engaged in your game world as you’d like? Collaborate and build the setting together!

In my games I want players to know the background of the setting, have a general idea of what’s going on and how things work. It gives them context to make interesting choices and understand possible impacts. Knowledge is power. It increases their ability to act in the world by understanding its connections, helping them naturally immerse in its logic without constant non-diegetic lore dumps.  One of the best ways to do this is to share your tools of world creation for the very first session.

The issue this addresses is that no matter how cool my lore is or how focused it is on encouraging interesting gameplay, players won’t be as into it as I am. The most engaging parts of the game are the parts a player directly interacts with or creates, through the act of playing the game.

In the past, I’ve made a series of detailed and but accessible intro briefing handout packets for multiple groups to try to give folks this information to help give context to the setting and have had at best 1-2 of the players really dig into it each time.  It’s just not usually worth the time to invest to try to upload setting background into your players heads ahead of time.

As a player I also don’t usually enjoy reading a lot of lore that I may or may not be able to interact with. I can’t blame them, most of the times a GM has handed me a handout over a few pages to read before a game. I’ve felt at least some of it was extraneous to playing the game and interacting with the world.

Player’s don’t want to do homework for the game. Life is busy. The thing people care about most is their own actions and the results. That’s why all the RPG war stories that are the most memorable and fun stories people tell about games are about what their characters did in it and the impacts their crazy choices had. The longevity and viral spread of anecdotes like Tucker’s Kobolds, The Gazebo story, Sir Bearington, and other game tales isn’t just because they’re funny and digestible anecdotes, it’s because these speak to the promise of the game where players discover something by interacting with the GM’s world and something interesting happens as a consequence of their actions. The emergent and unplanned interactions between the two is where setting and character comes to life as more than dusty description but dynamic elements in an otherworld that can have a semi-magical feeling of existence to it.

When I’ve been cornered by a GM that wants to describe the setting of their world or a player talking about their character’s build and backstory without asking, it drains my life energy a bit. Even when I appreciate the passion they have for what they’re talking about, telling people about purely personal lore is like telling people about dreams or revelations from psychedelics, people generally don’t give a shit because by definition the specific texture and feeling of these experiences are deeply subjective and impossible for others to really relate to. Lore is a dead sterile thing until the person hearing about it gets to make interesting choices about how to interact with it through play.

Story games like Brindlewood Bay, Fiasco, and Microscope get around this by explicitly breaking open the GM’s toy box and giving worldshaping tools to all the players as they create the story of the game collaboratively throughout a session. The joys of creative power to shape the narrative is spread to all the players while encouraging improv and stopping a GM from railroading or burning out by doing days of background prep that may or may not  actually be relevant to the game as everyone discovers what the reality of the world is through playing it. I really have a blast with these types of games but it’s not my preferred format.

I also appreciate the joy of secrets and discovery when playing in RPG’s, of getting surprised by something that feels like it was there independently of my  or the weird stuff that happens from emergent properties of the world outside of what is narratively satisfying. As a player, if I get to enjoy the GM style thrills of creating the true identity of the murderer or the contents of this treasure chest I don’t get to enjoy the feeling of finding out from an external source and as a GM I can miss watching my players enjoyment as they discover something unexpected. I dig the feeling of being an explorer in an otherworld with its own kind of base reality. When I get to change the base reality too much in the player role, it can take me out of it a bit and remind me that we’re just playing a game and of course it’s all just made up. I like getting into the illusion of being in a realm with some kind of objective reality just like ours does, treating the fantastical situation my character is in as if it was real to them. 

So how can we give players both the joys of setting narrative creation and the joys of discovery in a mysterious world? Let them make the game world with you in the first session! They get to enjoy helping create a setting that is personally interesting and engaging to them and then return to the more limited perspective of the player character. There are still secrets to discover, and events that occur throughout the length of the game. The difference from the traditional wholly GM created setting is that from the very first game without any extra reading or homework, your players are familiar, connected, and more deeply engaged with the background lore of the world because they made it. There’s several sweet games and blogs that have fun collaborative worldbuilding procedures and I’ve cobbled together my process from a few of them.

My Collaborative World Building Process:

Sources: Beyond the Wall: Further Afield, Microscope, Dungeon World: The Perilous Wilds, Build Your World- Yochai Gal, Worldbuilding as Team Support- Prismatic Wasteland

Materials:

Blank sheet of paper or other writing surface, bigger is better.
Pencils and erasers (or markers if you’re using a big whiteboard. You can also do this online on a shared whiteboard page through Discord, Microsoft Whiteboard, or your VTT of choice.)

Steps: 

1.  Go around the table with introductions and ask for something you enjoy about playing RPG’s. This is more for new groups to each other but it’s fun and useful to hear what your longtime friends specifically dig about gaming. The GM or a nominated player should make sure to take notes of everyones contributions throughout the process so there’s a record of the collabertive setting framework after this is done.
2. Explain the one sentence concept for the game as the GM. This is a good time to set the scope. Is this on a lost fantasy continent? A star sector around a black hole? An island chain after an apocalypse? An ancient underground megastrucure? Keep this super brief and open, this isn’t the time to have a bespoke premise you’re married to as it limits things too much or might not fit the setting that emerges from the end of the process. Note that you are also a Player and will contribute as well anytime the process has all the players add an element so don’t feel like this is the only place you’ll get creative input.
3.  Using the Palate concept from Microscope by creating a list of elements players can Add or Ban.  Each player says anything they want to Add or Ban from the setting. This gives some initial colors for the palate (yeeah!) that we’ll be painting the world with. Do a round of turns for everyone at the table twice. Generally Add things you want but think others wouldn’t expect in the setting and Ban things you don’t want but think others would expect in the setting. Players discuss their picks, everyone should dig the Adds and Bans that are here and have a consensus this is a fun list to play.
4. Each player adds one Truth of the Known World. These are simple statements of 1-2 sentences from each player that are absolutely true about the world and help define it. The GM asks some followup questions to the player and takes notes to have some inspiration fuel to expand on these later. 
5. Go around the table 1x and each player outlines a Region. They draw a boundary shape around an area on the map and name it, which can be a political region or geographical terrain. Describe it in a few sentences.
6. Go around the table 2x and every player marks a Major Location on the map and names it each go round. This could be any type of interesting location to have in the world where some kind of adventure could happen. Give a few sentences describing the place. If players are stuck or GM wants to encourage specific varieties of areas they can have the players roll on a table to determine the type of area they’re detailing. For example, Beyond the Wall-Further Afield  uses a 1d8 Table with 1. Major City, 2. Ancient Ruins, 3. Human Settlement, 4. Recent Ruins, 5. Inhuman Settlement, 6. Monsters’ Lair, 7. Source of Power, 8. Otherworld which I used this process before but any table of location types that fits the setting premise could work well.
7. Go around the table 2x and every player adds a detail to someone elses Major Location or embellish upon it each go round.
8.  Go around the table 2x with every player drawing a connector like roads, tunnels, or rivers on the map between Regions or Major Locations.
9. Pick a Starting Location on the map from the existing Major Locations or decide to place another together.
10. Make an inset minimap or use another piece of paper for the Starting Location Map. Each player will place a Specific Place within the Starting Location depending on the Starting Location and describe it in a few sentences. A village, starport, bustling port city, slimy goblin cave network, or apocalypse vault will all have different types of Places.
11. If there’s still time in the session, build characters together. Why are they working together? Where are they from on the setting map? It’s best to do this after you’ve got the world made as it helps make the process easier by providing background for making characters that fit the setting that everyone around the table already knows.

12. Done!*

13. Not you GM! You still have to do whatever your preferred style of game prep is and flesh out the part of the setting the players will initially be starting at and directly interacting with. Don’t do the same level of more detailed prep outside of the Starting Location and places they’re likely to go to in the first session or two unless you’re having fun with the process and not feeling burnt out. 

Collaborative Setting Creation Overview:
Add or Ban Elements: Go around the table asking everyone for a pick, 2 per player
Truths of The World: 1 per player
Regions: 1 per player
Important Locations: 2 per player
Details to Important Locations: 2 per player on other players Locations
Add Connecters Between Locations: 2 per player
Game Starting Location: Players pick
Specific Places at the Starting Location: 1 per player

Disclaimer: With brand new RPG players, if you have an inconsistent cast of players coming and going in an open table, or if available play time is tight and the game is limited to a few sessions.  I would probably skip this as it will take up at least most of a session.

It’s a fun worldbuilding activity but still less fun than actively playing the game for most folks. For people there for a single game I think it’s important to get people actually playing the game within like 30 minutes of sitting down at the table (or screen). I’ve heard too many stories of people turned off from RPGs for years because they spent 4 hours planning a game or flipping through books to create characters together the first time they tried.

Bonus Sci Fi Tweak:

Just make the locations whole planets, defined with a couple sentences. Build it on a hex map if you’re running something like Traveller or Stars Without Number. Mothership works fine on a blank page with connecting jump lines and distances added as part of the process.

Example from Real Players: Land of Yorth

This is messy, partial, and has typos as it’s my actual hasty notes from recording player input and running a basic version of this process live. I’ve made changes to the premise and massive additions but this formed the core framework of a setting I’ve played with six different game groups over years of play and now use as my default home fantasy campaign setting.  Thanks Dani, Rayne, and Alex for planting these seeds with me. A loose scribbled setting outline with player input like this can lead to years of fun.

Setting Truths:

1. We live in the shadow of a great civilization that has fallen, things used to be better.
2. There’s a great war happening in the distance
3. Dinosaurs and amphibians/large reptiles
4. There’s no widespread concrete proof of the specific nature of gods or their existence. 
5. The Ancient’s grasp exceeded their reach and thus weird magic and strange critters.

Regions: 

1. Land of Spikes and Pits.  Exceptionally hostile, foilage struggles to growth. Ancient warzone, pools of toxic liquid. The Wasters are the only ones who know the ways. Undetonated minefield things. Killer machines that rip flesh off. Rust Red dirt.  

2. The Weeping Swamp:  Very hot, called weeping because trees leak and sap everywhere.  Known for huge amphibians and slugs. Often very foggy.  

3.  The Drake Marches: It’s separated by a mountain range that scrape the sky and dragon warlords and their cultist followers always in combat.  Like Siberia 

4. The Fallow Fields. Ancient overgrown and untended vineyards and farms for miles. Agricultural autonoma still trying to do their jobs in the fields and often threatening. Feral overbred livestock. Vegetables that eat humans. A group that claims to be the heir to the Ancient Empire dwells among the fields in ancient buildings turned into fortifcation.  

5. The Thorne Woods: Dinosaurs, brambles, ferns 

Major Area

1. Lost City of Arkon. It is like a maze inside. The walls and the streets and the streets even move. It’s a former port city of the ancients. An ancient ship and it still guards the port to this day. Ghost ship or magical steam ship? 

3. The Port of Spoota. City of glass trade and spices. Everyone walks giant bearded dragons. Walled city with nice oasis, water.  Rich as hell, sick gems. Music and food in the streets. It is NICE.  More hirarchy. All of their structures is glass, super strong glass in a variety of colors. Weapons made of very sharp hard glass. Independently invented, ubiquitous technology. 

Accuracy 20: Right on! Bonus information

5. The Bronze Tower. Big Tower that goes up to the sky, linked to the ground by enormous chains. Dead settlement at the base. All sorts of remains and mutated former residents. Something is in it.  

7. The Smoking Basin. Volcanic ruins of  an ancient dwarven citadel.

9. The Three Sisters- Major waypoint with trade for Spoota. Goods travel through there, trading stronghold. Culturally made up of folks from distant lands. Anything goes! Seabeasts in the area. Densely populated one seedyish. Rocky crags. C.R.E.A.M. Legendary sea monster sleeps for many years before rising once more. Serpentine monster like an underwater dragon. Hasn’t risen in over a century. 

11. The Absence of Wealth: Former enormous pit mine spanning over 10 miles, riddled with sinkholes, industrial machine. Tons of ancient tools, equipment and wierd, and iron. People living along the sides of the pit and inside some of the still former equipment.   

12. Rocky Death- Kalodon the Unkillable, an enormous scarred t-rex. In the middle of the forest a huge cave filled with mini ecosystem lairs within.

14. Citadel of the Lizard Regent. Lizard society is genderless, bloodlines important. The clans have been recently unified under the Lizard Regent. 

Starting Location

Arro’s Stand: Nobody knows who Arro is.  An Arosi is someone from there. 

Arro’s Rite: Rite of passage once a year to bring back a successful big hunt to the village.      

The Village: Rocky, wastey, rabbits, agave, and edible big lichens. Occasional ambulatory vegetables.   

Hell’s Kitchen: Out of an old tower ruin, exiles from another plane. Human attitude, currency, red demon person sized. Grumpy, I hate Mondays.  Townsfolk, reacted with fear and now regard with nonchalance. Shazira, goes by Shaz.

Scrapyard and bits and bobs, run by one of the people from land and spikes and pits. Hand cranked macerators, accumulated. You pick through. Zakephron the gobliny, hairy scrapmaster.

  Ancient Bathhouse- poorly maintained but still works, based on some hot springs. Quiet Old Lady, nobody knows her old age. Mama Gams. 

 Town Militia: Big spikey wall with crossbows, on top of steep mesa with windy single wide path going up, used to be a fortress. 

 Games don’t last forever. I really want them to but a perpetual game is an impossible goal by definition. So many cool things can emerge from a really long term game that strives towards that longevity but in my experience I haven’t been able to pull it off. Life happens. People move, schedules change. A gap between cancelled sessions goes too long and the game world grows fuzzy and forgotten. Or the players or GM gets bored with the type of campaign and wants to try something new.

 I’ve designed a few sprawling sandbox campaigns with intrigue and hidden lore, 80% of which never get the chance to see the light of play. I know that this is impractical and against my own advice to focus on player facing lore, but it’s a guilty pleasure and I get lost in it. I’m also definitely not the only one who struggles with this problem of never satisfactorily finishing a campaign.

So if I acknowledge I am not going to get the years of play time needed to experience the emergent joys of a persistent forever campaign I can design a campaign that better fits my life as it is, not for an ideal version of it. A campaign where I can already see the end on the horizon when I ritually strangle the game to death on the appointed date. We can get to all the good stuff! 

This is also less intimidating for new players. Signing up for a weekly event that has no end that may or may not be fun for them is a lot to commit to fit into a schedule. A campaign limited to just a couple specific months is a lot easier and lower pressure to plan on and fit into a busy life. The two campaigns that I managed to wrap up with a satisfying conclusion had less than 15 sessions and were planned to end by then. The feeling for both me and the players was sweet! Instead of abandoning the otherworld to gather dust frozen midway though we were able to get a fun sense of closure and enjoy the satisfaction you get from the feeling of completion as the game came to a definitive end. 

Looking at my past games I’ve usually managed to play an average of like 13 sessions before the game ends. My record is ~23.  I like to play weekly.

My current play goal is that my campaigns will be designed to end by 11 sessions. (+ or – 2). When designing a good limited run campaign I think there’s a few principles that are handy to keep in mind.
  

1. Define the Campaign’s Dramatic Question

This question is the theme of the campaign, the central pole that everything revolves around. Unlike a more meandering picaresque campaign style, there is a clear question this campaign is about. Most sessions contains some adventure content that impacts the ultimate answer to that question. These are SMART questions (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) that will be definitively answered by the last session of the campaign.

Examples
Will the cult be able to complete its awful ritual?
Who murdered Lenore?
Can the marooned PC’s escape the cursed island?
Will the adventurers be able to survive the dungeon and get enough loot to pay off their debts before they explode?
Can the zombie plague be contained?
Will the Vikings decide to go to war?
Will the stolen Maltese Falcon be found in time?
Will the alien invaders conquer the city?
Can the bounty hunters hunt down John the Skinner?
Who will win the mayoral election?
Are robots sentient and will they get rights?
Will the crew be able to heist the casino?
Which warring party will gain the throne?
Can the Dark Lord be defeated before the Equinox?
Will the ragtag fleet survive long enough to find Earth?

2. The Player’s Actions Decide How the Campaign Question is Answered.

While more focused, this campaign format is not a railroad or a non-interactive movie. How the campaign’s dramactic question is answered is largely up to the actions of the player characters. The PC’s should be characters that have a goal and care about how the campaign question will be answered. I think it is of crucial importance that it is possible that they can fail in their goal of achieving a certain resolution to the campaign question.

This is, I think, one of the most important freedom’s in an RPG- the freedom to fail and see what interesting things happen from there. 

An “If the Players Do Nothing” future timeline like the one in Deep Carbon Observatory which inspired the same section in Desert Moon of Karth is a handy way of having a default answer to the campaign question that you can tweak in response to player actions. Factions may also want to answer the questions in a specific way that may align or be opposed to the player’s interests. Using a dynamic faction system is another way to create an answer to the campaign question that surprises the GM too.

3. Start With a Possible Endgame in Mind

To wrap things up neatly there can be an awesome climatic event or location at the end that will hold the answer to the campaign’s main question, all the threads converging here at the final session. This climax or ultimate revelation or location might be soft gated by required information, allies, power, or items that can be acquired in other sessions adventures. I think it’s fun to write a sweet overdesigned set piece for an epic conclusion as long as the GM stays open to tweaking or even possibly throwing it out entirely and improvising if unpredictable player actions and campaign developments require it.  Manufacturing the premise for a likely climactic scene where the question is answered can be cool as long as the way the climatic situation is resolved will be decided by what the players do and have done previously instead of having a prescripted outcome.

 A crushing and specific defeat is a fine ending to a campaign, just as a resounding triumph. The important thing is that the question was answered in a definite way even if it’s something like “Now, we’ll never know.” or “Everything is doomed.” It’s fine if the players are able to skip a bit faster to the end through clever play. Since the resolution of the dramatic question is the purpose of the campaign the end is whenever the question is resolved by the players actions.

3. Connect Your Adventure Sites

I like to work in region based campaign design where several adventure sites are created in a specific constrained geographic region. In the excellent Silent Legions sandbox horror RPG, Kevin Crawford recommends starting with 9 adventure locations within your region (megadungeon, kingdom, city, wilderness, moon, whatever it is)- which seems like plenty for a limited run campaign. Each of these individual location adventures can be designed on a scale likely to be completed in a single session. This episodic format helps the campaign keep momentum towards and gives every session more variety than being filled with a single section of one location adventure. 

The PC’s should always have enough information to keep them moving in an interesting direction. The players should know what the dramatic question of the campaign is by the very first session. Each adventure location has its own dramatic question (even if it’s as simple as a traditional “Can we loot this place and survive?”)

Most of the resolved answers to these questions draw the PC’s closer to answering the campaign’s question. In order to help make sure the PC’s have a lead they want to follow it’s good to offer at least 3 hooks (LINK three clue rule) that point to other adventure locations

That said, I like how there’s tons of X-Files episodes that are unrelated to the show’s central questions. The bendy hibernating guy who eats livers has nothing to do with the overarching alien conspiracy plot. But due to the limited run format of this campaign we need a higher ratio of campaign question related sessions to unrelated ones. Silent Legions recommends that 20% of adventure locations be unrelated to the central campaign premise. This seems like a nice number to give some variety to a focused campaign.

The Conspyramid diagram from Night’s Black Agents RPG is another handy tool that visualizes a campaign tracing the levels of a vampiric conspiracy as a sort of dungeon crawl towards the ultimate answer to the campaign’s dramatic question. I’ve focused some on investigation focused campaigns in this post but dungeon delving or wilderness exploration works with this same framework too. The party pursues their same goal of answering the campaign’s ultimate question “Can the PC’s find the lost Cloud Ship of The Weeping Autarch?” “Can the PC’s get to the inner sanctum of Badkill Dungeon and get the Doom Gem?”

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Here’s an example campaign adventure site map I just threw together based on some partial notes from the limited 11 session Delta Green Nevada investigation sandbox game I ran to completion along with a couple campaign question unrelated location sites for variety. The dotted lines represents hooks or clues leading to other sites. The entire map (a 1976 highway map absolutely scribbled with location annotations, spooky sketches, cryptic expressions and stored in a combo locked leather briefcase along with some other weird props.) was made available to players near the start of the campaign to give them more info to make adventure choices.

5. Leave Wiggle Room In The Number of Sessions.

Players are unpredictable and wily creatures and some things will be a lot quicker or take more time than you anticipate. If a particular adventure takes two sessions instead of one. While you are putting some gentle pressure it’s not worth turning into a demanding wagon driver, spurring your players on faster. Sometimes they’ll find things interesting. With a bit of wiggle room for slow sessions, or unexpected left turns that have you scrambling to expand on the campaign world.

Also conversely if they breeze past content you find interesting to move on towards the ultimate question, you don’t need to drag them back to check it out. Just like you shouldn’t force your players to explore every single room of a dungeon, they don’t need to interact with every adventure site in your campaign. The goal of the characters is working towards answering the campaign question to their liking. If they bypass a few adventures on their way that’s just reasonable. If you want to entice them to explore more adventure sites, one way is to include useful contents in them that could help them make sure the resolution to the campaign’s dramatic question is the one they want (Resources, information, power, etc.)

6. Still Wanting More? Renew for Season 2! 

Blades in the Dark RPG recommends treating each campaign like a season of TV that ends after a dozen sessions or so. The main questions get resolved by the end of the season. This chunks a campaign into discrete segments that allow for multiple satisfying end points whenever the campaign draws to a close. To start again, build on the events of the previous season and introduce a new dramatic question for Season 2. Since you’re not beholden to squeezing profits out of a dead horse you don’t need to crank out 33 seasons of The Simpsons- you can quit renewing whenever you find you or the table is satisfied with what they’ve gotten out of the campaign and interested in something fresh. 

Related Reading:

https://slyflourish.com/breaking_endings.html

https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2024/05/how-do-you-end-campaign.html

https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/8015/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-6-alternative-node-design

https://dungeonfruit.blogspot.com/2024/03/beginning-of-end-how-to-finish-campaign.html

The megadungeon has a creative call to it, this grand and imposing space mapped out for adventure, a beckoning otherworld to explore. People dig superlatives, the biggest, the tallest, the most dangerous, the most powerful, the deepest. But the challenge of making something epic in scope can swamp even the most dedicated GM.

It’s very hard to make a truely big space mapped out to a dungeon level of detail, as scope increases the amount of work required to fill the space well increases exponentially. Even some of the largest megadungeons could fit into the footprint of a large mall you could explore in a half day (though a mall with the lights off and filled with monsters and traps would take longer to survey).

To oversimplify this excellent post on the sandbox triangle: High detail, high freedom, or lower effort. Pick two of these qualities for your megadungeon or sandbox design.

For example: If I wanted to make a gameable version of The Forbidden City at high detail, and a high freedom of navigation, I’d be looking at keying ~8000 rooms if I wanted to key the entire thing as a dungeon.

The biggest published megadungeon I know, Ardun Vul, is around 2000 rooms and just 500 yards at its widest. It’s huge, monumental for a dungeon- but compared to realworld spaces, it’s nothing special in scale. I usually don’t try to predict the future but I feel like it’s a safe bet that there will never be an 8,000 room megadungeon that’s better than Arden Vul (which almost buckles under the sheer scale of its contents as a convient GM reference work), though someone is welcome to take a couple decades of their creative life to prove me wrong.

Megadungeons and ruined cities (a sort of open air megadungeon, everything’s a dungeon) can be hard to pull off.  My favorite solution is to keep the required effort manageable, player agency and navigational freedom high, and cut detail, reserving the bulk of creative description energy for the specific points of interest inside the megadungeon or lost city. Cut the time at the table spent playing and describing stuff in the middle, between the most interesting node areas of your megadungeon.

For running something like the Mines of Moria, instead of filling half a session with detailed literal miles of mostly vacant corridors, halls, and chambers maybe roll an encounter check or two and describe the miles of interstitial hallways and rooms between your detailed and keyed areas in a quick chunk of evocative description sorta like this:

“The passage twisted round a few turns, and then began to descend. It went steadily down for a long while before it became level once again. The air grew hot and stifling, but it was not foul, and at times they felt currents of cooler air upon their faces, issuing from half-guessed openings in the walls. There were many of these. In the pale ray of the wizard’s staff, Frodo caught glimpses of stairs and arches, and of other passages and tunnels, sloping up, or running steeply down, or opening blankly dark on either side. It was bewildering beyond hope of remembering.”

The Fellowship of The Ring

Having too many navigation decisions in interstitial areas is increasingly counterproductive as adventure site scale increases. RPG adventures can be chunked into different blocks of time and space, maybe a 10 minute exploration turn, a several hour watch in the wilderness or a six mile hex, maybe an entire week of downtime. These discrete chunks are boxes to fill with something interesting enough to note or interact with in the game. If most of these boxes are completely empty I think you either need more content or less boxes to fit the scale of the adventure.

You could break things up into abstract narratively significant scenes like a movie as a number of RPG’s do- but that’s not my preference. I like the feeling of specific time and space. But since we can’t narrate every second, we have to decide where to use the squishy CPU power in our  skulls. So we skip and zoom in. A fully detailed and keyed dungeon works well up to a certain scale but in dealing with ruined cities and truely mega dungeons, a pointcrawl style between detailed keyed dungeon nodes offers my favorite balance of detail, freedom, and GM effort, as well as speed at the table.

My thinking on this is most in debt to John Arendnt’s work on The Black City project- which I still hope gets published in a complete form at some point.  In one post on node based dungeons he notes:

“This node-based style feels EPIC, and supports vast underground complexes worthy of Moria.  It lets you separate your major areas geographically and establish strong themes at each node.  The dungeons and lairs are not so expansive that it’s exhausting to stock them.  Putting more distance between lairs, factions, and other inhabitants of the dungeon enhances the verisimilitude.  It’s much easier to manage dungeon dressing and similar details by starting with a small, strongly themed lair or mini-dungeon complex.  And from a preparation perspective, it allows the referee to develop the mythic underworld in much smaller chunks –  one mini dungeon at a time  – instead of having to generate a sprawling 100-room complex.  It combines most of the best aspects of the wilderness hex crawl and the graph-based dungeon into a seamless continuum.”

A great example of these types of node based dungeon map design are metro systems. 

Each station on the DC Metro Map, is a point of interest, somewhere to the tunnels in between. Different colored routes offer varying paths with different encounters, routes. In your megadungeon/ruined city, these could be routes like “The Webwrought Path, The Worm Tunnels, The Trail of the Candlelit Pilgrims, or The Imperial Way” with associated perils, scenery, and encounters and inform the environment of the dungeon nodes along their path.

One issue with real metro maps is that they’re designed for practicality in transport and offer heaps of stops right next to each other to be most convenient for their ridership to access a large portion of the city. This isn’t exactly the right metaphor for how to design a sweet node based dungeon.

So in Granada there’s a tourist “train” that looks like this. 

It runs in a route around the city in a repeating loop every day. People can buy a one way trip or an all day hop on hop off ticket around the city including a couple stops barred to any other vehicle traffic. On the hottest days in the summer it looks like a ship crammed full of damned souls with no AC. 

The ticket price, route, and purposes of the train don’t meet the day to day needs of anyone living there and would be completely impractical for general transportation. It’s designed for managed discovery of neat places for tourists. It’s not trying to present a comprehensive entire city, but an impressionistic representation of the city, a road accessible highlight reel that tries to give a kinda feeling for what makes the place tick.

Video game towns like in Skyrim are similarly impressionistic, trying to give an idea of the city while making a much smaller version then would exist in reality. You could spend your time detailing every street, corner store, and fountain plaza but it wouldn’t be a good return on your time investment. Through the power of tabletop RPG creativity you can have a huge town of thousands or a, you just gloss over the majority of the area, apply a fuzzy lens. This area is abstracted through a pointcrawl.

Fantasy adventuring parties are a kind of tourist, outsiders in the area under time pressure, searching for the highlights. They’re not generally trying to find the routes and places in town that allow them the most convenient day to day mundane life. They’re skipping over 90% of the place to find the palaces, cathedrals, royal gardens, and tombs that hold the treasure they’re looking for in the brief visit available. Many players want to be transported somewhere, to travel and see wondrous vistas when they play in your role playing game world. So give them some cool shit to see and focus your creative energies on these hotspots and let them check out the ones that appeal!  Hop on, hop off.

So metaphorical megadungeon metro systems are great. I also think it’s cool to put an actual subway in a dungeon. So many dungeons are the ruins of ancient advanced precursor civilizations why not put a magic or sci-fi podway in there. There’s something fantastical about this to me. As someone who grew up not too far from the middle of nowhere in Nevada, mass transit still feels a bit magical to me, in the same category as castles on peaks or dragons.

Here’s an early draft diagram of the volcano megadungeon, the fallen keep of Cinderstrom I’ve been working on for too long. I used Scapple to make this and dig that program a lot for dungeon planning, but any type of flowchart software would work. There’s also this site which lets you make your own custom metro maps that fit the classic aesthetic and iconography if you’d like to make dungeons that way.

Who knows where the hell the pods go?! Smash some random buttons in a dead language and find out. Maybe one of the pods is sentient and challenges you to riddles and threatens to crash if you don’t come up with good ones. Huge variety of fun options for gameplay with a fantasy podway.

Further Reading:

https://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/2013/11/dungeons-with-hexes.html

https://bonesofcontention.blogspot.com/2022/08/spectral-interrogatories-iv-dwarrowdeep.html

https://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/2013/02/megadungeon-thoughts-part-iii.html

https://dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com/2013/11/megadungeon-topology.html

https://www.kjd-imc.org/blog/node-based-megadungeon-design/

https://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2014/01/pointcrawling-ruins-revisited.html

https://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2013/03/whats-so-damn-hard-about-running-ruined.html