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Post by tavis on Jun 15, 2008 21:12:51 GMT -6
I'm about to start running a new campaign and want to benefit from y'all's awesome expertise. Here are my goals for the campaign, in the order I derived them:
- Player driven. This group (friends I've known since grade school who get together about once a month) just aborted another DM's campaign in which there was a secret force behind events and players often bogged down asking "what does the DM intend for us to do next." I'd like to do something in which there's nothing going on, just a dynamic world reacting to the PC's agendas and decisions.
--> First level 3.5 characters, OD&D backend, old-school feel. I argued for playing OD&D straight up, but the players wanted the extra character customization options that come with later editions. I'll miss the speed & flexibility of OD&D combat, but have enough practice running 3.5 enough to not bog down too badly in rules or arguments thereof. Apart from that, though, I'd like to use the guidelines in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures to handle exploration, and in general try to recreate (if this can be said about something I haven't really experienced before) the feel of a "First Fantasy Campaign"/Wilderlands-era game.
---> Wilderness based "hex crawl". I've long been interested in this old-school style of play, and think it'd be a good way to achieve the player-driven goal & allow them to set their own directions. One or more of the destinations they might reach on the map will be dungeons, of course, but the campaign won't push exploring them over setting up trade routes with other towns, etc.
----> Building up a castle as the launching point for the adventure. The game's host and I were talking about the stage in Neverwinter Nights 2 where your goal is to build up the defenses of a castle, which we both agreed was cool. In OD&D (and NWN2), though, that's the prerogative of higher-level characters. To start at first level, we had the idea of having the PCs be the survivors of a catastrophe that had wiped out the normal hierarchy of a castle, forcing them to band together the remaining commoners and struggle for communal survival.
------> Dislocation in time. This group has a good deal of Grayhawk under their belts, so that was a popular choice for the campaign setting. But I wanted a situation that was less mapped out, more unexplored wilderness in every direction. At some point we hit on the idea that the catastrophe that struck the castle caused it to wind up in some other century. Originally we were thinking about going back in time to Greyhawk's pre-history, but as I've thought about it that implies a high potency supernatural intervention. Moving forward in time is easier to do (we all do it at the rate of one second per second!), and given Greyhawk's apocalyptic history, "progress" into the future could easily place our heroes in a more-savage time in which their memories belong to a legendary "golden age" of magic and civilization.
The ideas I have so far are:
* The leaders of the castle find some kind of artifact - a magical egg, perhaps.
* They bring it back to the keep and, in the process of studying it, break it open and release a storm of petrification.
* Centuries later, some of the castle's inhabitants - including the PCs - turn back to flesh, either because the effects of the original stoning wear off, or because some kind of anti-basilisk has wandered into the castle. (Maybe it was a thaumaturgically-bioengineered siege weapon made to bring down stone walls, now wandering around looking for concentrations of rock it can fleshify and then eat? Maybe it's being carried around by some other monsters, like ogres, who use it to "farm" meat from stone?)
* Some of the petrified inhabitants - not including the PCs - have been conscious throughout the intervening centuries, their brains not having fully turned to stone, and are now quite mad. This sets up an initial adventure in which the players try to find the sane villagers and protect them from the insane ones, some of whom (like the keep's priest) they might want to capture alive in hopes of preserving their valuable talents.
* Most of the castle's folk are still petrified, setting up a situation in which survival is not guaranteed & requires cooperation, with finding a way to un-stone the rest naturally emerging as a goal of the campaign but one the players could approach in many different ways.
Does anyone know a good castle map - maybe one that might have supported 500 or so inhabitants, especially if it has a high level of detail? I'd like to give that to the players at the start, since they'd be familiar with the layout of the castle even if the current occupants of the rooms might surprise them.
I would also greatly appreciate suggestions on things the PCs might find in the castle or its surrounding wilderness; comments on this campaign setup & ways I might improve it or problems that might arise; advice on how to achieve an old-school spirit within the limitations of not fully using old-school rules; and anything else you might suggest!
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Post by vladtolenkov on Jun 16, 2008 1:48:58 GMT -6
Well, I'd suggest looking over Gary's wilderness rules on pages 14-20 in Vol. 3 of the Brown Books. Those pages always give me ideas. Even if you're running 3.5 you could still use these rules for wilderness travel. If you like you could give the players some input as to what sort of environments they'd like to be stomping around in? This will help ensure they get what they want out of the game and take some of the work off of your hands. However, it'll still be important to keep much of the setting info from the players as the thrill here largely comes from exploring the unknown! Alternatively, you could define NOTHING beforehand and just make it up (or randomly generate) as the players explore hex-by-hex. Also I'd suggest looking at THESE links for some ideas: arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/94/west-marches-running-your-own/arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ |
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Post by driver on Jun 16, 2008 5:19:59 GMT -6
For the "sandbox" style of wilderness adventuring, i.e., player-driven "wandering around" campaign, I'd look for inspiration to any of the old Judges Guild "Wilderlands" products. You might also look at the d20 version of Wilderlands of High Fantasy. These are very good examples of keyed hex-by-hex wilderness regions in which the players can do what they will. You can pick up .pdf's of the older Wilderlands books at any of the usual RPG .pdf vendors like rpgnow.
For detailed castles, there are a variety of very good Harn products. Harn castles are designed to be more realistic by medieval standards -- no colossal D&D-style castles -- and generally include a keyed village as well. If you're interested, I'll be happy to dig up some links, both to retail products and to some very good fan-created material, some of which is written and illustrated for free by the same folks who author the commercial products.
Hope this helps!
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Post by tavis on Jun 16, 2008 7:40:11 GMT -6
Thanks for the comments, guys! I can't say how welcome the helpful, friendly, and non-edition-warring nature of this board is. Exalts all around.
After posting I did re-read Vol. 3 - the table of castles and their inhabitants is inspiring indeed. The idea of the inhabitants demanding a tithe of 100-600 gp, and noticing that buying a round of drinks while seeking rumors would cost 10-60 gp, had me thinking about economic differences between editions. Given the initial setting, I think that at least in the beginning gold is going to be able to function more like OD&D (primarily a way of tracking achievements in dungeoneering, secondarily a tool for getting large-scale things done in the game world, like castle repair) than 3.5 (primarily a tool for kitting out your PC with the magic enhancements that the system assumes a character of a certain level has). If they ever reach a city big enough to trade in magic items that might change, but for the moment I think I'll give each PC a "legacy" magic item that they start with & grows in power as they do as a low-impact way of handling the 3.5 item expectations, and have old-school quantities of gold lying around for low-level characters to find because it'll remain a commodity that affects the PC's goals in the world, not their personal power.
The West Marches were definitely rattling around in my mind when I came up with the seeds of this campaign, and we might try some of its "just-in-time" scheduling as well since not all players are there for any given session. Anyone know of good actual play threads for hex-crawl or sandbox games?
The Harn suggestion for castles is super - I definitely would love pointers to fan-created stuff, esp. since I could have the players download it for themselves.
I've been thinking of using the Greyhawk map to let the players choose the region they want to start in, and using that as the basis for a player map of the region around the castle - "over here are hills, a road in this direction leads to this city 60 miles away," etc. Then I'd find an area of the Wilderlands map with roughly similar terrain features in the region the PCs would be likely to travel to, and use that as the DM's map, giving the current location of castles, towns, and the like. If I recall correctly, the Wilderlands maps are already meant to be smaller scale (5 miles/hex as opposed to Greyhawk's 30) and I figure that, at least at the level of realism we're looking at, terrain features are fractal enough that I can change the scale without too much trouble.
After the initial adventures within the castle itself - dealing with the anti-basilisk and the mad villagers, taking stock of the situation, perhaps chasing off monsters that have made their lairs in the petrified keep - the next move I reckon I should expect the PCs to take is to set off to one of the towns or cities they know about. I'm thinking they'll find it in ruins, since I want the quest for civilization to be an ongoing challenge. If the old city is big enough, and the terrain jungly enough, that could be a nice place to set Dwellers of the Forgotten City. No adventures in ruined towns come to mind, though.
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Post by dwayanu on Jun 16, 2008 8:12:42 GMT -6
The castle-construction rules in D&D have always confused me; I think AD&D's rules are at least clearer. They work fine if what you want involves "off the shelf" components, but attempts at interpolation (e.g., for towers of other dimensions) just leave me wondering how Gary came up with the listed figures in the first place.
I once came up with my own formulae based roughly on volume of stonework and area of floors, with some approximations both making calculation easier and reflecting the greater time and energy to construct some features. My primary guide to what's involved was Castle by David Macaulay -- a good example of a picture being worth many words!
Frank Mentzer's Companion set -- an add-on to the Basic and Expert D&D line -- includes fairly detailed rules for running a holding, and the "War Machine" system for resolving battles without miniatures. The King Arthur Pendragon RPG, with the Lordly Domains supplement (or the older Noble's Book), covers those topics with more medieval verisimilitude.
My most fervent recommendation, though, is to get (or delve again into) a 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide. Gary put a lot of campaigning wisdom into those pages, and not just for AD&D!
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Post by tavis on Jun 16, 2008 9:19:22 GMT -6
My primary guide to what's involved was Castle by David Macaulay -- a good example of a picture being worth many words! Good call! My son has lots of Macaulay books - Pyramid is also an awesome RPG resource. Frank Mentzer's Companion set -- an add-on to the Basic and Expert D&D line -- includes fairly detailed rules for running a holding, and the "War Machine" system for resolving battles without miniatures. The King Arthur Pendragon RPG, with the Lordly Domains supplement (or the older Noble's Book), covers those topics with more medieval verisimilitude. The Mentzer would be in the Rules Compendium, no? I've been telling myself I'll wait to go shopping at Gen Con, but that might be worth ebaying sooner for a host of reasons. The Pendragon stuff I'd want to look through first, so hopefully I'll find a copy at Indy. My most fervent recommendation, though, is to get (or delve again into) a 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide. Gary put a lot of campaigning wisdom into those pages, and not just for AD&D! I know there's gold in the DMG, but I find it hard to perceive what's there because a) I grew up with it, so it's hard to see past memories/preconceptions and b) there's so much stuff of all kinds. Vol. 3 is remarkable for how little it contains (and how much of that is aerial or naval!), but I find that makes it much easier to tell what's important. That said, if you can think of particular sections of the DMG that contain the pure product, that'd be great! I have been using the AD&D DMG wilderness monster encounter tables for the sea travel sections of a 3.5 campaign (using Paizo's Savage Tide adventure path). I think I'll start with the OD&D tables for this campaign, though, and then build custom ones on the same model. The AD&D style is great for ocean-spanning, island-hopping sequences where there's no need to come up with reasons why any given creature is there. For this campaign, I want to keep wandering monster checks as a central mechanic (in part for old-school flavor, in part to discourage the "15 minute adventuring day" where the party feels they can pick a fight, spend all their resources on it, and then rest and repeat). That'll include making wandering monster checks on days when the PCs didn't leave the castle at all (at least, until the surrounding hexes are cleared). So the greater openness of the OD&D charts will, I think, make it easier for me to come up with realistic reasons for a given monster to be there. For example, I might decide that, the first time I roll lycanthropes, a nearby hex contains a lair of wereboars. I can then say that all future lycanthrope wandering monsters in the region are run-ins with this wereboar tribe, and that this will come up one time in six. The AD&D charts have many more specific encounters, which makes this approach more difficult. |
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Post by driver on Jun 16, 2008 10:06:14 GMT -6
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Post by dwayanu on Jun 16, 2008 10:11:07 GMT -6
IIRC, 3E downplays (or does away with?) XP for treasure in favor of emphasizing XP for monster-slaying. That tends to undermine the function of wandering monsters as a goad to better management of time and other resources.
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Post by tavis on Jun 16, 2008 11:41:58 GMT -6
Oh, the awesomeness of those Harnic maps! I am beside myself.
dwayanu, you're right that 3E doesn't have XP awards for treasure, just for "overcoming challenges" aka killing monsters, with a section on story awards which "should only be used by an experienced DM." This does tend to make wandering monsters a reward, not a disincentive to linger or make noise. However, wise parties still won't want to fight them. Even more than in 1E, 2E, or 4E, a 3E party is much stronger when they're able to prepare for an encounter, which a wandering monster generally doesn't allow. And for a sandbox game in particular, sussing out your opponent before committing to the fight is going to be crucial; letting a wandering monster sneak up on you could mean engaging in a melee that's way beyond your weight class.
This causes me to think about the XP system I want to use for this campaign, though. I dislike the 3E system's encouragement to mop up every last monster for points as if playing a videogame. In Savage Tide, the players agreed to advance in levels at the pace set by the adventure path, doing away with tracking XP entirely. I like that approach for that campaign, but it's neither old-school nor appropriate for a sandbox. I'd been assuming that in this case, since we play monthly, we'd just level up every few sessions. But again, if one of the very few things the LBBs think is important enough to make rules for is XP, that argues I should make it part of the game.
So I'm now leaning towards a FFC-style system where you get the XP not when you scoop up the gold, but when you convert it into something meaningful to your character. I think the emphasis on gold per se might be inappropriate to this campaign, though. In the early stages, I want to allow for lots of ways that the PCs can enhance their castle's chances of survival, like bartering with a tribe of centaurs or recruiting hobgoblins to help man the walls. Gold could be one way to approach these situations, but not the only one. If the XP system focuses exclusively on gold as the means to these ends, I feel like I'd be obliged to establish centers of civilization where the PCs could buy things sooner than I'd like.
So maybe I'll set up a number of goal-based awards, some of which I'll define ahead of time (e.g. 2 XP per day for each surviving inhabitant of the castle) and others of which I'll set up based on the player's decisions ("OK, you're planning to restore the fallen palisade, that'll earn 500 XP when it's completed.")
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Post by Deleted on Jun 16, 2008 11:51:01 GMT -6
Hmmm... no need to have everyone petrified. You could pull a combination Sleeping Beauty and Samurai Jack... have a Big Bad Evil Guy put everyone in the castle and nearby village in a cursed magical sleep, complete with thorns all around and the Get Out of Curse "key." Said key could be something like "When the Dragon's Heart rests upon the Altar of Heironeous, the curse shall be lifted."
Said curse becoming part of legend in the rest of the nearby world, combined with the legend that the "heroes destined to overthrow Big Bad Evil Guy" are trapped in the cursed castle. So a paladin finally succeeds in slaying a red dragon and placing the heart upon the altar in the castle (getting through all sorts of bad guys to get there), and is there to greet the "great heroes" when they awaken. Imagine his surprise when said "heroes" are all 1st level adventurers!
Of course, in the meantime, BBEG has gone on to become the Iuz of the Century in this region, though the cursed castle is on the outskirts of his domain, with wilderness and ruined cities elsewhere in the Flanaess (or perhaps a number of other BBEG domains with wilderness in between).
Hmmm... let's say this is Dark Greyhawk, two centuries hence (ca. mid 700s CY). Iuz rules in the north, the Frost King rules the Thillonrian Peninsula, the Lich King of Rauxes rules Old Aerdy, the Drow Empire rules the Sheldomar, and there are wild lands, barbarian tribes, ruined cities, and savage small kingdoms (mostly evil and beholden to the Four Empires, along the lines of the Bandit Kingdoms or Wild Coast realms) in between. Perhaps the Scarlet Brotherhood is the highest independent form of civilization along the southern coasts! Greyhawk is now a large village built alongside the ruins of the great city (a la Pavis in Glorantha). The dwarves have gone deep, the elves have retreated to the Eastern Ocean, the gnomes and the halflings hide in the wild lands or labor under the whips of the cruel Imperial masters. And the most popular independent temple is dedicated to awakening the Sleeping God to bring an end to it all...
Enter the players...
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Post by tavis on Jun 16, 2008 12:17:38 GMT -6
I dig your suggestions about Dark Greyhawk, James! It's enough to make me rethink my ideas about playing in Greyhawk's future rather than past (if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the PCs might get slept in ~CY 700, and awakened in ~CY 750, or otherwise move from the more-distant past to the more-recent past). But I'm not sure that these players are deep enough into the setting to find things like Greyhawk's Dark Ages, or the notes on the ancient history of Oerth in Erik Mona's blog, as fascinating as I do: www.superunicorn.com/erik/2005/02/ancient-cultures-of-eastern-oerik.htmlOn the other hand I reckon that everyone who's played in Greyhawk wants to know "what comes next," and the dynamic oppositions Gary created are rich in downstream possibilities. It'd also be fun to find out about what these players did with their other characters in Greyhawk (I wasn't part of that campaign) and use those as a seed for future changes. Your idea about the Sleeping Beauty-style setup is awesome - I'd want to play in any game that cites Samurai Jack as an inspiration - but I'm leery of using a BBEG or a prophesy about the heroes because I want to avoid giving even the perception of a meta-plot the players are expected to get on board with. Making the event that dislocates the PCs in time an essentially random thing that "just happened, now deal with it" is sort of dramatically unsatisfying, but I'm leaning towards that approach just to avoid setting anything up as an obvious hook that the players are "supposed" to pursue. EDIT: I've misremembered my Greyhawk chronology, and not read James' post carefully enough - you are indeed talking about the future of the default Greyhawk setting (although, interestingly, it'd still be in Pluffet Smedger's past). I smite myself! |
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Post by driver on Jun 16, 2008 18:53:58 GMT -6
Ah, Pavis.  |
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Post by Deleted on Jun 17, 2008 5:31:32 GMT -6
Making the event that dislocates the PCs in time an essentially random thing that "just happened, now deal with it" is sort of dramatically unsatisfying, but I'm leaning towards that approach just to avoid setting anything up as an obvious hook that the players are "supposed" to pursue. Hmmm... then maybe a meteor strikes over the castle and has the same effect, a la Buck Rogers. After a couple centuries the effect fades naturally, and suddenly the formerly frozen adventurers are fighting the Tiger Men of the Draconian... er, fighting the Orcs of the Undead Empire of Old Aerdy... |
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Post by tavis on Jun 17, 2008 5:54:48 GMT -6
Mmm, a meteor, or maybe a comet, is sweet. It's random enough not to compel the players to any particular action; it allows them to take some interesting directions, like digging up the remnants of the meteor to forge into magic armor, which opens up all kinds of mining & smelting fun a la Dwarven Fortress; and if, having lulled the players into thinking it was a once-a-millenium freak happening, I have another comet appear in the sky, entertaining panic will ensue. Excellent! |
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Post by robertsconley on Jun 17, 2008 11:38:12 GMT -6
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Post by makofan on Jun 18, 2008 7:34:52 GMT -6
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