Redbeard's Ravings

Lairs are distinguished from megadungeons in that they are the abode of one singular organized body. Key thing here is that many players aren't used to fighting something organized. Many of the PCs around my version of Yggsburgh have had their worst runs when invading lairs. Whether the lair was the Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom or my own 'Kobolds of Ever Winter', they've had runs against lairs that should have ended adventuring careers, even for those that survived. Many of these runs were losing propositions, where they used up in supplies and expendables many times what they were able to pull out of the dungeon. Sometimes you 'eat the barr' and sometimes... It's the kinda thing that aught to drive them to find megadungeon type environments where there is more exploitable chaos. And that's why I run sandboxes, so they can choose their preferred level of risk and reward. I shouldn't be too harsh on my players in this post....

James of Grognardia posted his campaign's take on demihumans and how they are different than humans with different stats and an ego problem. Below is my own take that we've used in our Greyhawk/Yggsburgh/Zagyg campaign. I surrendered to how players would play elves et al as humans with different stat bonuses, but wanted a rational for why demihuman communities and npcs would be different and separate from the mostly human setting, for tension to exist between isolationist elves and expansionist human nations. Each player with an elf or gnome would get a copy of this although it is written from the elf perspective. If I was to rewrite it I would make it more concise. If DM prepared setting material is over a page you run risks of making the campaign for the DM's self indulgence and not about the player's actions. Players won't read or remember more than a page anyway. A player's advice to me some campaigns ago: 'you've got a great campaign, but you...

As I've posted before , I've been disappointed with how ordinary the Wychwood encounters seemed as depicted in the Yggsburgh hardback. I've tried to flavor it more with fey quality ala Midsummer Night's Dream. For players in Yggsburgh, there is a one very big unstated spoiler from the Yggsburgh hardback. Nearly all the rest of the adventure is my own creation or my own import from other sources. The players seemed to enjoy the puzzle solving and negotiation challenges that the evening entailed. Having had bad experiences on both sides of riddle situations, I picked a riddle that was hopefully easy to solve for the six players; the alternative would be that a party of level 2-4 would have to fight an ettin. They did have the idea from the ettin's size and description that they didn't really want to fight the ettin, but they had alternatives besides the riddle; getting the heads to argue and running away. Fighting was certainly a choice - one that surely woul...

Below after my comments is a session report written by one of the players in our Castle Zagyg sandbox campaign. I placed the Matt Finch's Pod Caverns in the Little Hillwood, a side trek away from the Castle, and I've talked about how I've adapted it before in the changing sandbox world. It's acquired quite the reputation for toughness from the players. The session report and my comments contain spoilers. They've really explored very little of the caverns, which has been personally disappointing. There's some old school goodness there that they've missed. In their first expedition they blithely found themselves on the 2nd level in the prison chamber/mulching room. After wards they took that same path - and further right to the Shroom's complex of rooms... skipping floating heads, glowing fungus and other such oddities. They may yet go back since they realize they've missed treasure. The other entrance to the pod caverns, which they've not ...

An Example of the Sandbox in Action It is frequently said that there are no plots in sandbox campaigns. This is a misconception. There are no DM-imposed plots. That is true. But instead of one uber plot, there are many plots. Each and every actor/NPC/organization has their agenda; that's what makes the world feel real. How does that square with the other sandbox rule: player freedom? The ethos of the sandbox is that the game is about the players' plots. The various NPC plots aren't going to force the players to make one choice or the other. Simply put: many of other plots counter act each other But that doesn't mean that the world doesn't change if the players don't act. An example: The characters have of late been confronting the Sinister Shroom from Matt Finch's The Pod Caverns. In our Yggsburgh/Castle of the Mad Archmage campaign , the Pod Caverns are in the Little Hillwood. After getting his Shroomy nose bloodied in raiding traffic on the Menhir Hills ...

We've been playing our C&C game weekly since May. Not every character makes every game, as we have a stable of 14 players and two DMs (who are sometimes players as we've divided duties geographically.) Our table limit is 8. Recently there's been some discussion of death, the appropriateness of it and how to avoid it. Death is at -10, but you don't start bleeding out until -6. Max hit points at 1st level. We've had 6 deaths and some characters have made it to level 4. All character deaths were melee types. Here's a review of death in our campaign: Warf, a half-orc barbarian, died from a swarm of ghouls that also claimed the life of Robert, a hireling. The cleric was unconscious and a TPK was narrowly avoided by running! away! Shaun, a human barbarian, died from a skeleton. The party wrongly decided that we could conserve resources by taking on the skeletons at a choke point. The skeletons got lucky on initiative and hit Shaun too many times in a row....

Matt and I are co-DMing a campaign of Castle Zagyg. It is set in Greyhawk, using Yggsburgh as another independent city in the area. The wiki for the campaign is at Obsidian Portal . We started it by taking over DMing duties in a 1E AD&D campaign of which we were 2 of 8 players. The whys and whynots of switching to Castles and Crusades are worth post that I may yet write. I was inspired by The West Marches Campaign and memories of my first experiences playing Dungeons and Dragons in a sprawling sandbox campaign also co-DMed. Having players that were turned away from the initial campaign because of a lack of table space, we expanded the campaign to a second session. Each are played every other week. So far we have 13 players, one more to start. Some have multiple characters, and the DMs also play when they aren't DMing, for a total of 20 characters.