Continuing on the topic of operational theaters in sandbox D&D, this time from the practical angle.
Campaign begets theaters
In the last newsletter I explained the concept of “operational theater” as it applies to sandboxing D&D: the theater is the geographical region in which individual adventure expeditions (hexcrawls, often) occur. It’s possible for the theater to concern only a single long expedition through an adventurous wilderness (like say a “discover the origins of the Nile” type expedition), but in low-tier D&D in particular it’s more common for multiple adventurous excursions to begin and end in a single HQ town that then comes to define the operational theater surrounding it; any operational concerns in such a space are likely to leach and leap from expedition to expedition, being shared between multiple adventures.
The above might be somewhat pointless for most, but perhaps this’ll be a fun exercise: I’ll document the operational theaters that have so far popped up in our Coup campaign. These examples of why and how a campaign “buds” new theaters might be instructive.
First, here’s a piece of the campaign setting 30 mile hex continental map, the Darlene map. Over our ~100 sessions of play so far we’ve developed several operational theaters that I’ve marked on the map with letters. Overland travel on the 30 miles scale is supported, but we’ve done relatively little of it in practice. Let’s discuss each of these theaters quickly, see what they are and why they exist.
A — Selintan Valley: The campaign started here, in the small town of Yggsburg (halfway between Greyhawk and Hardby). The valley is a sort of “starter location” in some ways, being fairly civilized and peaceful. The adventuring opportunities tend to be petty goblin stuff, urban adventures in Greyhawk City, and the centerpiece megadungeon of Castle Greyhawk. As the area has several towns and other habitation Yggs is really the primary HQ town out of convention, and because living is cheaper than in Greyhawk. I would characterize the area as ultimately having a limited amount of adventure potential, just barely sufficient for a lucky party to catch a nest egg before leaving for more adventurous parts. Unless you specialize in urban intrigue (infinite amount of that in the City, basically) or want to commit hard to the frankly quite peculiar megadungeon. City or the Castle, that’s what Selintan has to offer.
B — Gnarley Forest: After about 50 sessions of play in Selintan Valley, the campaign got kinda forced to switch to a second operational theater in the neighboring Gnarley Forest: I took a writing hiatus from the campaign, so Tuomas took the reins as a GM, and we arranged for the practicalities by having Tuomas build his own independent operational theater in the woods. As the area is populated densely with adventuring opportunity, we might be hanging out in Gnarley for a while; soon to be 30 sessions in there, and we don’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. I think that the arrangement has worked out great: while being right next door to Selintan Valley geographically, Gnarley is genuinely a distinct cultural region that has its own concerns, so we’ve managed to keep the inter-GM coordination fairly light. Tuomas has populated Gnarley by a very different philosophy (he took the Top 10 recommended adventures from Tenfoot Pole and built the local theater from them, as I understand it), so seeing how that pans out is great.
C — Eyedrin Principality: This is the campaign starter region for the face to face fork of the campaign, so a sort of second fresh start with different player base. A border barony type deal at the edge of and elf-forest and a vast swamp, teeming with classic adventure opportunities like Darkness Beneath and Dyson’s Delve. Something of a soft start for a group mostly consisting of new players; I specifically picked the adventures for the area with beginner-friendliness in mind. Unlike Selintan Valley, Eyedrin is much more intense, though; the adventure hooks sort of jump at you, it’s not “empty and civilized”. Much more of the “keep on the borderlands” ideal of orthodox old school D&D.
D — Temple of Doom: The Sunndi campaign started feeling footloose fairly quickly (in say 20 sessions), and the clear break-away concept in that regard was no doubt the throwaway idea that one of the PCs had been trained at the “Temple of Doom”. I grabbed at the idea and developed the Temple as this massive megadungeon cult cluster, like Silicon Valley for demonic cultists. The place became a real operational theater when we specifically took all of our evil adventurers in there to live and plot among the locals, which has since then resulted in a steady stream of actual adventures occurring at the Temple or associated locales. Basically, imagine a campaign where the adventurers live in the megadungeon, as part of the dungeon population, spending much of their time either running errands for the bosses or intriguing with the other psychopaths willing to live in a dungeon. Fairly experimental, and that certainly shows in the adventures we’ve had here.
E — Dhalmond Principality: The players had been talking about going to the capital of Sunndi, Pitchfield, for a long time by now, but my writing hiatus in the fall kinda encouraged the campaign to a different direction. Dhalmond was first defined as a concern mainly because we needed a place to set Tomb of the Iron God, the hiatus adventure that Sipi refereed for the group while I was away. I was since then inspired by the concept of a principality in anarchy such that I populated the place with a full complement of adventure hooks; Dhalmond’s consequently been our default “Good party” stomping ground over the winter. It’s basically more of the general kind of rural-liminal-wilderness stuff as the Eyedrin theater offers, but while Eyedrin hasn’t exactly been dug out yet, I think the players feel a bit like that; totally their prerogative, and maybe they are more correct than I am about this, and Dhalmond (or even some place even further away) offers better adventuring.
F — Hollow Hills: The most recent operational theater that got added to the campaign. As I discussed last week, we’ve pretty much gone to the Hollow Hills to adventure because of a whim of one of the more successful player characters. This is absolutely something that I expect to become more common as a campaign goes up in power tier: mid-tier adventurers should be engaging in grand overland expeditions, that’s all but the definition of the entire tier of activity. So here we are, living the Expert box dream.
Technically speaking we’ve also adventured a few adventures in the astral plane, which counts as its own operational theater with its own local maps and all. Haven’t seen too much activity there yet, but we’ll come back to it sooner or later no doubt. It’d also be possible to interpret our sojourn to the Isle of Dread as a separate operational theater, but the way we played it, it was more like a “sublevel” of the Temple of Doom. Wouldn’t be hard for the Isle to become its own theater if we ever travel there “unassisted”, without having the high-tier Temple bosses managing the travel logistics.
The point of this concept
Well, mostly I just think that the operational theater is the natural unit of sandbox campaign development. The orthodox theory of how to develop rpg settings has since surprisingly early in the hobby envisioned top-down development wherein you “bore down” from large scale issues (“is my world a globe?” is a classic) to the small scale. OSR development has generally forsaken this conceit, and for good reasons; top-down doesn’t really do anything useful for a campaign in its beginning phases. I can totally see how it’s really creatively rewarding for a veteran GM to work with large-scale stuff (like remember my buckyball brainworm a couple issues ago), but presenting it as advice for a beginner GM starting a new campaign is a crude, mistaken stance. I join the masses of OSR theoreticians who freely encourage you to just put down a HQ town in the middle of the map and then fill the surroundings with interesting stuff; that’s how you begin seeding a new campaign setting, not by drawing a continent map.
So, small scale development is important, and old school D&D specifically runs swimmingly for quite a while with just that one operational theater worth of material. If you never play long campaigns, that might actually be everything you’ll ever need; a single operational theater is your campaign. But if you do go long, then it seems to me that the best way to organize the campaign material of a continental scale long campaign is by operational theater: keep separate folders for separate operational theaters, switch mapping techniques as necessary… heck, even switch up the rules when transitioning between theaters! They’re largely modular, that’s the entire point.
Or, another choice of words that might make all this more meaningful for some: a D&D setting is best understood as “points of light” on the continental scale. That’s how it grows organically, that’s how the adventurers see it at the grass-roots level, that’s what the GM actually needs to be concerned with. Large-scale generic gazetteer treatments fail because they do not match the natural structure that we see emerge in how the game plays over the long term. It’s better to focus on the operational scale when doing setting design, like maps or random encounter tables or demographics or really just anything.
A practical demonstrative example: what is the place that you write rumour tables for? Where is the place the adventurers sit in when considering whether to go for adventure hook A, B or C? That’s your HQ town, and the set of adventure hooks defines your current theater of operations. Sandbox campaign design operations on this scale.
This is what makes a theater-scoped setting work superior to the continental scale work. The City State of the Invincible Overlord is better than World of Greyhawk as a game-actionable setting product, because it describes an operational region instead of getting lost in the generic concerns of an entire world. (This is not me saying that Greyhawk is worthless. It’s just me saying that that kind of continental scale setting product is a very specialized conceit that ignores the actual scale on which D&D operates, and this makes it difficult to use for practical purposes. The way I find myself using Greyhawk is more as the big-picture service invoker, with more specialized operational theater content providers answering the call of the high-scale setting. Worst thing: nobody has ever written operational scale setting products for Greyhawk, with the big fat exception of the City of Greyhawk box, which is unfortunately trash.)
AP Report Pile: Coup de Main #78
I’m again several reports shy of the present day on account of the uneven pace of newslettering. Ah, to get back to the days when I wrote these up the same week we played. Tuomas’s accounts really help here, shame I can’t get our Tuesday crew to write these up for me as well. Tuomas is really dependable in this regard, he basically writes up the session immediately afterwards, before retiring for the night. Example to us all.
Knights Temp had suffered major loss but they were still very much operational.
It seemed that the fighting had ended for now. Normal procedures followed, checking corpses for valuable, drawing maps, resting, checking the immediate vicinity for anything interesting and such.
The spellcasters had interesting looking ring, the cursed blade, a key and then some coin, not much in general. The corridors flowed with blood and more blood discovered in a ritual chamber. Corpses hung from chains on the wall and the room was dominated by basin of blood. And all that right next to kitchen/barracks so you can pop in for quick snack if you get hungry while performing blood rites!
The other side of the complex had an empty prison, empty chain on the walls, apparently the prisoners had been spent recently. Really foul-smelling natural corridor lead out of the prison but it was not investigated yet.
All main corridors seemed to lead to same place, huge room with most of the floor covered in foul-smelling goop and altar in the middle. On the altar was rotting giant head its mouth sewn shut but it eyes apparently alive and franticly looking around, large maggots crawled all over it. Knights Temp started to get sick from all the sights.
Knights continued through the goop room and found a locked door that lead to opulent bed chamber. Numerous interesting items were found, magnificent harp, glass eye, glass prism, liquid in snake shaped bottle, wand, three clay urns and bloody shovel that looked out of place in the room. Finally, a limbless, gagged zombie was found under the bed, strangely it had a key around its neck. Knights put it out of its misery and collected all valuables. They had to hold back Bard who really wanted to try out the obviously magical harp.
It was the moment of truth, Knights had gone through the whole cultist lair except the routes that lead to the foul smell, and most likely to the place where Fearmother dwelled. Knights set all loot ready to go and took defensive formation. Rob carefully went to scout the corridor to the foul smell from prison, his goal was to find the Fearmother.
The corridor soon turned to same goop that was in the big room with giant head but Rob continued on after bit of experimentation with the goop. He found a large chamber covered in goop, floor, walls and ceilings. Close by was clean side corridor and there was single “egg” about the size of man’s torso and behind it a promising looking lockbox.
Rob tried to pull the lockbox with grappling hook but couldn’t pull it closer, the egg was on the way. His working theory was that the egg would do something terrible if he went too close. Finally he decided to throw a sack over, quickly grab the lockbox and run.
It worked, though ominous sloshing sound started to follow him from the main goop chamber.
Rob dashed back to Knights and they quickly slammed doors behind them and ran towards the entrance. They made to their piled loot and nothing seemed to be following them. They took their spoils and left.
Bard returned for quick look back in but didn’t notice anything happening in the lair. He returned back out and Knights Temp started planning what to do next.
An actual dungeoneering session for once, will wonders never cease. Highly successful, too, as we learned more of vague incidental information about the cult and the Fearmother without having to actually fight the darn thing. Still flying fairly blind on this, but the party was now clearly more inclined towards the conclusion that the Fearmother really is more of a mindless beast than a conniving demigod.
AP Report Pile: Coup in Sunndi #51
As I discussed in the last newsletter, the Sunndi campaign has started an exciting new sandbox. Ordinarily we’d have kept going with that, but Sipi, playing Magister of the Song, the main protagonist of the affair, wasn’t feeling it; too complicated and dry for him after a tough day at work. So switching tracks, we did something easier: our bounty hunter heroes in Dhalmond had finished the bounty on the nefarious Sam-Em-Ap a couple weeks back, but hadn’t yet found the valuable accounts book that the rogue accountant had hid away, so perhaps we could look for that now?
This is a good example of how flexible a long-term sandbox campaign is, by the way; the agenda for each session is literally just to do whatever it is we feel like doing. The GM prep isn’t on a session by session basis anyway, so it’s no big deal to decide to pick up something the GM was presenting a session or a few ago, if you feel like doing that now. I absolutely love the fact that Sipi didn’t have to continue with our dry logistics-heavy hillcrawling here, and that we actually happened to have a simple oneshot affair on hand to do instead.
The conceit of this Dhalmond side adventure is basically that the local chief of police in Dhaltown (a small manufactory town that’s grown next to the princely palace of the Great Dhalmuti; somewhat unusual in Sunndi, the place has very low urbanization) used to be involved in drug smuggling a half decade back with Sam-Em-Ap, a white collar criminal the adventurer-bountyhunter PCs captured earlier. The chief set aside half of the reward money for Sam-Em-Ap on thin pretext, and will only give up that sweet 750 GP if the PCs bring him the incriminating account books from back then. The task is complicated by communication difficulties (sort of unwilling to talk too openly about his past crimes, the chief) and the plain fact that Sam-Em-Ap hid the accounts so well that nobody’s found them over these years.
The adventurers had roughed Sam-Em-Ap a bit in the last session, though, and gotten him to slip the essential detail: the man claimed that nobody had ever found that account book because it was “still there”, and he “never went back for it”. As in, still in the old caravansary that got burned down during the political troubles a few years back. Adventure hook!
This is a kind of adventure that I like a lot: very deeply embedded, organically developed. I’d had the notion that the old caravansary ruins would make a natural adventure location ever since our develop-setting-by-playing-Great-Dalmuti session in January, and the details had been accruing since then. I hadn’t quite firmed up the prep to module-standard level, so I improvised the details as we went, but I thought that the result was quite nice: lifelike, not too “wacky”.
The ground level of the caravansary ruin was basically a big pile of crumbled rock and some still standing walls, thoroughly overgrown after several years of neglect. The locally-famous adventure peril in the ruins was a pack of wild dogs. The PC team was sensible enough to keep their distance from the dogs for now, and they did manage to enter the ruins and search for anything important without having to get into a pointless dog-fight.
The search was arduous (unlucky dice rolls, bad guess as to what parts of the ruins to emphasize in the search), but after a few hours of mostly moving rubble the party happened upon an intact cellar hatch that opened, wonders behold, into something reminiscent of a dungeon. Suspiciously 5-feet wide corridors, though; maybe it’s not a dungeon so much as a slightly more realistic basement? What kind of dungeon does Eero create when he takes five minutes to jot down a quick map?
The Dhaltown caravansary used to be a cyberpunk style corporate trading post for the “Consortium”, a network of Sunndian overland merchants who’d grown a bit big for their britches during the Aerdian occupation. They’re not really holding together as a major concern in the present day, but back then their caravansaries were fairly significant centers of commerce and grift. The caravansary basement here reflected the going concerns of gambling (there was an underground casino here!), financial subterfuge and smuggling.
What was left in the basement was a few store rooms, a bit of trap and secret door action, old Consortium files, and perhaps the most adventurous bit, the old underground casino that’d become a lair of a lizardman colony that may or may not consist of consortium employees turned feral. (The Consortium has this “may be controlled by lizard men in suits” theme to it, you see, so this is funny.) The way this unraveled in play had some real Aliens vibes to it as the adventurers discovered a lone feral lizardman, and then stumbled on the main hall of the casino, where they could hear the lizardmen in the dark…
Deciding to not brave the casino proper (despite obvious dreams of finding moneys in there), the team focused on the more private consortium part of the basement, and particularly the filing cabinets. A thorough search uncovered some nice bounty hunting stuff (a bit of a side quest related to this place, laid out well in advance: the Consortium had files that would, if turned over to the police, pan out in the form of better bounties in the future), but no sign of Sam-Em-Ap’s account book. Maybe they’d mistook the clue trail somehow, or the book was in some ruined part of the caravansary and not recoverable?
The adventurers left more or less empty handed, and that was the adventure! One of these things with less action and more atmosphere.
State of the Productive Facilities
I’m trying to get back on schedule with these newsletters by free-scheduling them, putting them out as quick as I can. I guess the entire affair is a bit anti-rational in that the newsletter is just about the only thing I don’t have any external commitment to write; I could just stop and instead focus on finishing Muster, which has been kinda disappointingly going nowhere since January.
I might write more about my productivity issues in a later newsletter, but I think a fair general summation is that I’m kinda lazy by nature, so at times I lose sight of the bitter draught of duty that is the share of every self-determining man. Been too healthy and happy this year to work much.
Sane as I am, I just spent far too long putting a new icon on the blog’s top menu. Also updated the front page project board to orient myself on how much I’m behind on the newsletter, exactly. Five issues, apparently.