Redbeard's Ravings

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 ...

In honor of the controversy and the locked threads and the moralizing , I would like to quote from the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, page 192: Harlot encounters can be with brazen strumpets or haughty courtesans,thus making it difficult for the party to distinguish each encounter for what it is. (In fact, the encounter could be with a dancer only prostituting herself as it pleases her, an elderly madam, or even a pimp.) In addition to the offering of the usual fare, the harlot is 30% likely to know valuable information, 15% likely to make something up in order to gain a reward, and 20% likely to be, or work with, a thief. You may find it useful to use the sub-table below to see which sort of harlot encounter takes place: 01-10 Slovenly trull 11-25 Brazen strumpet 26-35 Cheap trollop 36-50 Typical streetwalker 51-65 Saucy tart 66-75 Wanton wench 76-85 Expensive doxy 86-90 Haughty courtesan 91-92 Aged madam 93-94 Wealthy procuress 95-98 Sly pimp 99-0...

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 ...

Some of us see 'emergent story' and we look for it even while we're running sandboxes and dungeons like Castle Zagyg. Take one of our players, C. C played a human fighter named Hengist. In true old school fashion, the low level fighter died at the hands of some orc slavers. Hengist's role in the story was now over - but wait. The orcs were using slaves to mine. As we're playing an old school game, C is able to roll his six attributes, pick a race and class at the table. Thus Ethelred is introduced, a human ranger, joining the adventurers that freed him from a short life of slavery. What is to become of Ethelred? Months later, the party finds a trail of a different band of orc slavers. Instead of other options like the plant creatures that the party had set out to kill, Ethelred insists that they track the orcs back to their lair in the Menhir hills. The random encounter of the orcs becomes a plot element that's more important to Ethelred than the original...

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....

One of the best campaigns that I've ever played in was the first long term campaign I played in, back in my first year of high school (1980). It was kind of AD&D*, run by two DMs and a horde of players. We'd invade someone's house for about 24 hours each weekend. The two DMs were busy nearly the entire time. While all the players were hanging out, you could organize a group to put down the atari, pause the Monty Python and go after something in the game world - and the DMs would run it. They didn't, to my knowledge, use modules but their own world, city and dungeons. All of it was accessible for us to explore, though a lot of it was dangerous. That kind of player freedom was incredible. Throughout the day and into the evening, you'd hear bits of what other players had accomplished. "Jeff and Chris went off to the island to see the archdruid." Wow - what did they do that for? What did the druid tell them, or give them? "Gabe ...

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.