Put Your RPG Campaign on a Deadline (It’ll Be Okay.)

Posted on July 10, 2024July 10, 2024 by Joel H

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.

https://slyflourish.com/facebook_surveys.html#conclusions

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.

Nightmare Garden for The Shrike by Jantiff Illustration

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?”

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.

NO MEANINGFUL LORE IF STRICT INTERACTIVITY IS NOT MAINTAINED

Posted on December 23, 2023December 23, 2023 by Joel H

If your players can’t touch, smell, be murdered by, manipulate, blow up, discover, or loot your history it doesn’t matter.. Since it’s my blog I can have opinions and I think that if setting history isn’t designed or revisited with the background thought, “How can this maybe lead to interesting gameplay for my players?” it’s not very good for RPG’s.

Like the lonely fun of world building is awesome but as it exists to serve a sandbox adventure game format it should provide Information to your players that lead to Choices that have Impact. Like if I want to develop an intricate 6 tier caste system for my fallen empire of Different Elves.™ That’s cool but why would the PC’s want to know about it? What choices does the information provide them with? What impact would these choices make?

Maybe the Different Elves restricted access to parts of their labyrinth cities by these castes and had magical doors that read the caste tattoo on the user’s palm before opening. Now understanding the society and knowing for example, the funerary practices prescribed for each of the castes becomes useful if the party wants to find some honey preserved Different Elf corpses to cut off a hand and open some magic doors. What if the Priest Aristocrat caste were cremated in a pit of eternal flame, making it difficult to open the particularly fancy doors with their caste name inscribed on it? Throw a few possible solutions into your world, knowing the PC’s may come up with something entirely different that works. You could have a tome of palm designs and the mystic ink needles that can permanently inscribe the arcane tomb secluded in an archive. You could have rumors of a buried maze villa where the resident Priest Aristocrat might still be frozen intact in ice from a cataclysmic icefall. This was like five minutes of spitballing, you can definitely do better spending a bit more time on it. One can have super weird deep history-but tie it into the gameplay itself for the PC’s to experience first hand and internalize which keeps the multiparagraph lore dumps to a minimum.

(Unless they seek out a sage or some other way they’re explicitly looking for that, some players actually dig hearing the history! Then a strange old rambling guy in the game is doing this long lore dump diagetically, not the booming omniscient voice of the GM some players wanted the dump from or not.)

I’m absolutely not against intricate worldbuilding, it’s great creative fun and provides a sense of an otherworld with its own reality. But I think it should be designed or shaped after the fact to provide information and secrets that lead to cool decisions that have an impact in the characters lives and world.

Glory of the Elder Days: Magic Items and Sandbox Histories

Posted on December 23, 2023December 23, 2023 by Joel H

A hundred spells Phandaal personally had formulated — though rumor said that demons whispered at his ear when he wrought magic. Pontecilla the Pious, then ruler of Grand Motholam, put Phandaal to torment, and after a terrible night, he killed Phandaal and outlawed sorcery throughout the land. The wizards of Grand Motholam fled like beetles under a strong light; the lore was dispersed and forgotten, until now, at this dim time, with the sun dark, wilderness obscuring Ascolais, and the white city Kaiin half in ruins, only a few more than a hundred spells remained to the knowledge of man. Of these, Mazirian had access to seventy-three, and gradually, by stratagem and negotiation, was securing the others.
Jack Vance, The Dying Earth

Stick with me, I’m getting to the fantasy worldbuilding and dead gods.

In ecology the trophic pyramid is the basic structure of the food chain. Up to 90% of energy can be lost as waste heat instead of converted between steps, organisms higher up the food chain are more inefficient. It could take 1,000 calories of grass absorbing a fraction of the awesome energy of the sun to produce 100 calories of grasshoppers or 10 calories of shrews feeding on grasshoppers or just 1 calorie of tasty, succulent, owlflesh fueled by catching shrews. As is, this is a neat tool for figuring out the population if you want a bit of simulationist ecology to establish the territory of your biggest scary predators in a sandbox region based on available food sources if you dig that style of world building.

But now let’s take the pyramid and flip the bird.

The power from the owl’s mighty corpse flows upwards, diffusing from its original form to feed a larger number of smaller but still great beings that feed yet tinier and more plentiful beings and so on.

I dig this as a metaphor for how magic and ancient powers can be handled in many post apocalyptic/fall fantasy settings. There is no active inflow to the system in this model. Magics originate from a mighty but finite original source (The Precursors, The Divine World Empire, The Ancients, etc.) that loses up to 90% of its power in waste heat (dead archbeings, spilled blood, burned archives, smashed artifacts, annihilated civilizations) as it is transferred to the next age and then reduced again until the current age is but an echo of an echo of the great power of the past.

This type of worldbuilding method is useful for fantasy setting of old powers buried deep and drawn upon in diminishing fragments by the lesser inheritors searching through the ruins. The concept of a time abyss touched on in Matt Colville’s “Dead Empires” video and Joseph Manola’s OSR Aesthetics of Ruin blog post which elaborates on the idea that “the more wrecked things are, the more open they are to free-form adventure” are both highly recommended pairings with this post.

In order for impressive ruins with cool stuff in them to exist there must exist greater past civilizations. The scattered remnants of House Targaryen at the start of the Game of Thrones series is a shadow of their dominating power in the House of the Dragon prequel which itself is a mere shadow of the wonders of old Valyria. Each age is a shadow of the one before, picking through the bones of its sire.

Some ancient and modern writers saw the arc of real history as grouped into broad ages following a declining trend. Loads of fantasy like Tolkien’s Four Ages or Howard’s Hyborian Age takes inspiration from schemas like this and the influence persists in the heaps of works they’ve influenced. Every age is diminished from the last. Entropy increases. Things fall apart, the center will not hold. All is an echo of the past stemming from initial greatness, the lesser shards and spawn of which produce their own pale imitations of grander forebears.

It should go without saying that real history is messy and doesn’t follow easy schemas, taxonomies, or universalized trends- but fun post collapse world building doesn’t always require accurate historical analysis’s it’s very common that whatever current era the writer was living in was the most unsettled, degraded, and dangerous time- it’s always the end of days, and the worst time in history to be alive, past greatness fading. That’s a pretty powerful vibe, what if it actually was the case for once instead of eternal cyclical nostalgia?

“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
-20 BC, Book III of Odes, Horace

Step 1. Outline your Ages

These ages serve as guide posts for a loose timeline broken into big chunks, things you know are true about your setting and places to slot in your weird magic items, creatures, and ruins. This isn’t prescriptive but rather paints the broad strokes of your setting.

It can be easy to get lost in the weeds here. Don’t do it. If you catch yourself wanting to detail the complete lineage of five thousand year old noble houses, stop! Make a note- come back to it later if it still inspires.

Break down your setting’s history into 3 or 4 main ages of creators, and their ruins, and artifacts- this allows you to have a general concept of what’s happened that can be discovered by your players. What we’re trying to do is add anchors that lend congruency to our loose worldbuilding without building an encyclopedic straitjacket of facts about the setting that ossifies it into a dead fixed thing.

The RPG, The Sword, The Crown, And the Unspeakable Power breaks the process of mythmaking origin worldbuilding into a sweet fill in the blank format that’s worth stealing for any game to come up with the elevator pitch for what your average commoner knows about the past as popular history and what you tell your players.

This is awesome and we can steal the Mad Libs method of history generation for a less elegant version that fits our quick history by Ages format to link it all together. I actually recommend making the Golden Age stuff unknown to most common folklore to leave a more mysterious time period to discover.

“In the beginning… (Golden Age)
† Until… (Fall of Golden Age)
† This resulted in… (Silver Age)
† Until… (Fall of Silver Age)
† Then (Bronze Age)
† Until… (Fall of Bronze Age)
† And now…” (Iron Age)

Questions About Each of Your Eras

How Long Ago?
What Were They Like? (Culture, motifs/architecture/ruins style, etc.) ?
What types of magic items/creatures were often created during this era? Why?
What influenced them from previous eras?
Specific Notable Figures or Creators of Magic Stuff? (Limit to 1- 5 initially, you can always add another hero, traitor, or godking later)
How did their ruin come?

Example Ages of Power

Golden Age/Age of Myth
Examples:, Ascended Immortals, Primordial Beasts of Creation, Angels, City Sized Elder Dragons, Kirbyesque Space Gods, Alien Overlords, Nasty Old Ones
OSE Spell Level Range: 6-???

The most magical time, the origins of your setting that matter, the deepest layers of Just because it’s the most wonderous time, doesn’t mean that it needs to be the most enjoyable time to be alive. Maybe the world was ruled by unknowable Lovecraftian Old Ones, whose slumber led the way to the new age where people could live outside their rule. This could be the dawn of time itself or a thousand years ago, it is the point at which the interesting stuff in your campaign first emanates from. You don’t care about anything before this, it doesn’t matter. In most games most creatures or relics from this era are outside of the range of possible player advancement and gameplay unless you want to wind up playing a truly epic level game. Real Infinity Gem, Simiril, Dragon Ball type stuff. I mostly use this age to set the vibes of the setting, themes, and to influence the direction of following eras.

Silver Age/Age of Legends
OSE Spell Ballpark Levels: 5-6+?
These beings come directly from the scattered magical essence of the Golden Age. Inheritors, usurpers, spawn, or rebels? Their magic items are the most powerful artifacts, creatures, spells, around, campaign macguffins, mighty dungeon treasures or threats. Of these make at least one absolutely crazy artifact as your power ceiling for the expected campaign somewhere, go nuts with that one. This is your One Ring or God Slaying Blade for your sandbox. Tuck it away in a dangerous dungeon somewhere or give it to an ambitious NPC antagonist. Put it somewhere a level 1 PC is likely to pick it up if you want some great shenanigans early on.

Bronze Age/ Age of Heroes
OSE Ballpark Spell Level: 2-5?
These beings and items are inheritors or creations of the Silver Age Powers. This era is your bread and butter, recent enough that it’s vaguely familiar history to most people in your settings but old enough that it has enticing magics and was suitably mighty. If you need a sweet magic mace, wild wonderous device, or helm this will probably have it. I like to have a recent centralized empire, a nice contrast with modern scattered and endangered successor states and settlements for that swords and sorcery vibe.

Iron Age/ Age of Today
OSE Ballpark Spell Level:1-2
Inspirations: Conan/Dying Earth/Dark Souls/Lord of The Rings
This is the fallen realm of today, squatting in the layered shadows of the past.. This where your strange minor items, common supernatural beasts, and new creations of modern mages, witchlords, and alchemists fall under. The realm of the impressive but knowable. In a limited magic setting even these lesser sorceries might be wonders or terrors. In a wide magic but low power setting these types of items and charms might be widely available or replicable. All of these minor magical items from Goblin Punch fit well.

Step 2: Create Magic Items for Each Age

Reserve the most powerful or impactful items for being created or originating from the oldest eras with a little overlap between the mightiest craft of a new era and the weakest of the old. Older stuff is generally rarer and more powerful. New stuff is less potent but more Try to tie almost every interesting magic item to an Age. Give it a style, trademark special effect, material, associate it with one of the historical powers to create a denser web of hooks. This helps players learn more about the world’s connections and history in an interactive manner and be given the context to act on this. They’re also paying more attention than average when you describe treasures. Your players might grow beyond the limits of the current Age and create more mighty items of their own- sweet.!

The trophic pyramid might use a 1:10 scale between new and old tiers but you could use 1:4 or 1:6 or whatever fits your idea of how prevalent magic items from each following era should be. You might also need more or less magic items depending on the scope of your games setting. The specific ratio doesn’t matter just the basic principle.

Example Magic Item Spread:

0-1 magic items? = The Golden Age
10 magic items = The Silver Age
40 magic items = The Bronze Age
160 magic items = The Iron Age

Now at this point you might say “Joel, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to spend the time to come up with 210 magic items for prep – that’s a recipe for burnout.” No worries, that’s cool! You don’t have to, no should you write down a couple hundred magic items before you start your campaign. If you can’t even come up with ten big Silver Age magic items at first, steal and adapt from other sources or just come back and add to the list when you’re inspired or need to invent a magic item on the spot. It’s an aspirational list, but I think it’s neat that there’s also a limit to the number of items of each potency and era existing in your game. It’s a finite resource.

Name:
Appearance:
What Does It Do:
Origin (Who created it and the era, 1-3 sentences ) :

Thrown Together Example:

Name: The Eye of the Flamemother
Appearance: Bloodshot Quartz Eye with boxy geometric engraving, smoking pupil enterally darting around. Shines bright orange When Used.
What does it do: Replaces an eye, ignites everything stared at for 2d6 damage – covered with a ruby eye patch. The user can look into any flame and see what has passed before it in the past. Visions push the user to greater pyromania and must Save to not ignite large flammable structures in view.
Origin: Plucked from the Fettered One’s face during the Silver Age of Legends by the Eld Lord Hanuba who wore it on the battlefield. After he was felled during the Year Without Summer, The Eye was passed down the generations by the Slayers House of Jareen. (I don’t actually know what all these lore references are yet besides the broad strokes of which culture/faction/force was the power of each age, you can flesh out nuggets in random details if needed )

Step 3: Scatter Magic Items Around Campaign Setting

At this point you should have the start of a list of sweet magic items of varying eras and puissances. Start putting them in dungeons and the hands of powerful NPC’s. Anytime you need to place a magic item and don’t already have something specific in mind, grab it from your list.

In creating your adventure sites use whatever your method of sandbox stocking is. I like the Worlds Without Number, An Echo Resounding, and Beyond the Wall region generation procedures supplemented by hand placing others.

Now roll on this d10 table and tie all of your built adventure sites to the. (Again, odds can be shuffled to taste.)

1d10
1-4: Iron Age(Modern Era) – 40%
5-7: Bronze Age Ruin- 30%
8-9: Silver Age Ruin- 20%
10: Golden Age Ruin 10%

This doesn’t track with the various eras’ magic item ratios but those get looted or destroyed over time and shattered ruins stick around longer. If you roll an older era for an adventure location that’s modern and in use then it’s a repurposed original structure dating back to that era-also helps give this setting a sense of history.

If players notice a recurring patterns from exploring a black marble swamp laboratory showcasing eight headed snake motifs carved with glowing eye gems and holding strange animate bone whips and scissor blades, and built atop a collapsed ziggurat whose interior grave chambers contain the undying skeletons of hydras with a single vial of glowing blood locked in a chest of shimmering blue crystal in it’s deepest vault.

This seems a lot more fun and engaging then telling them the players via a lore dump that the vanished Hydramancers of Thaarn built their laboratory compounds in the swamps to revere the undead remnants of hydras bred long ago by the Gray Emperor who used the blood of captured gods in awful rituals. They’re going to remember actually experiencing that archeology live a lot more. Maybe they don’t ever get the whole picture but because you know it, it’s easier for a sense of verisimilitude and consistency to develop with your world- a feeling that there’s always something new to discover.

Not every site needs every layer of history to be present and tangible. Plenty will just be a recent construction or built upon a site associated with a single previous era.

Leveling Up and Digging Down

So what are adventurers and seekers of lost lore doing? They’re scavengers converting the power of the former Age more efficiently and reducing the waste energy that bleeds away to the past on the magic reverse trophic pyramid.

A dungeon consists of going deeper and deeper through the layered ruins of these past ages. The deeper you go the weirder things get, the more dangerous, the more magically potent. As adventurers gain levels and power they are digging back into the past. Explicitly and symbolically. Modern Iron Age structures and settlements are everywhere, Bronze Age ruins are fairly plentiful, Silver Age ruins are rare and the location of the couple intact Golden Age sites are lost to all or the deepest held secrets of some order.

Perhaps in forging great wonders of their own, delving into secrets, they might turn the Wheel once more towards the wonders and glory of elder days?

Later something new and great and terrible could be created- some atom bomb analog capable of putting to shame anything the old order had and laying waste to the new era’s wonders in the process. The future ruins of this brave new world created by that party could be the era’s ruins you have another party crawl through in your next campaign’s shattered future. The cycle continues.

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.

Tag: Sandbox