Sandboxes, Pool of Radiance, and my new campaign

[Jasperak]

With all of the talk about sandboxes, I wanted to get some input about some work I am doing on a new campaign area. I am modeling it after SSI's Pool of Radiance in that the PCs will start in a town that has a number of leads to adventure sites--like PoR's: clearing the slums, investigating and clearing the Keep, searching the textile house, meeting the lizardfolk, etc... Based on difficulty, there is a fairly clear order to the adventure sites, but the options are there for the party to go wherever they wish like PoR.

[sblock]I have yet to decide if there would be any overriding arc like PoR's Councilor Cordona betrayal of the PCs or an antagonist like Tyranthraxus [/sblock]

The question I have is, would a campaign that started like this (or PoR for that matter) constitute a sandbox?

EDIT: how does one put in the spoiler buttons?

 

[Keefe the Thief]

I´ve done exactly that and my Campaign is running for 2 years+. The sandbox is not in the setup but in the freedom you grant your players. Many times i prepared a session and caught myself preparing several possibilities but unconsciously choosing one i would have liked to happen. This is the greatest danger for a sandbox.

Of course, the start in Phlan is pretty straightforward. All thos council proclamations available, but at first, all they can do is clean out the slums. Only when the slums are free can they get to other areas and really "choose" where to go.

I solved that by creating 6 sub-missions for the slums they could approach in any order. Some of those "solved themselves" or were solved by other adventurers, but they had to decided where to go and what to do. They tended to ask the council about their preferences (whith which they´ve established quite a relationship).

I say go for it: the moonsea is the perfect place for a sandbox. And for me it´s the perfect place to prove those wrong that say that you cannot sandbox well with 4e.

Happy gaming!


EDIT:
To expand that a little bit, in the slums i had
a) a meeting of important demihuman leaders, where they could learn some secrets about the invastion of the army of darkness.
b) a hobgoblin group that stole some treasure from a temple.
c) the mad mage Ohlo who sends them on a quest. In my version, it is really the ghost of Ohlo who died hundreds of years ago. When they bring him his potion, he will finally "remember" that he died and vanish away.
e) a nasty group of gnolls led by a gnoll bardesse - awesome, tough fight (eladrin + feystepping on towers + rangers shooting = death on a stick).
f) kobolds hiding in the old stables of the city militia.

Most of those encounters were inspired by the game - it´s unbelieveable how much of that game i still have memorized to this day.

And i would think long and hard about using Thyranthraxus. He´s a cool villain, but his "totally take over a PC on a botched roll" is not something i would use IMC.

The only drawback of sandbox campaigns? Prepping a destroyed Zhentil Keep with 100 locations and the players say "what the heck, we don´t like this city" and move on after half a day.

 

[tylerthehobo]

If you want it as source material, there was a good 96 pp. set of encounters released for AD&D based on Pool of Radiance called "Ruins of Adventure".

Ruins of Adventure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Could be handy for sandboxing.

And to your question, yes, if you let the players kind of find their way around the world and take the hooks that they want, then yeah, that's a sandbox in my book - that's how I've been running my campaigns for years.

 

[robconley]

The question I have is, would a campaign that started like this (or PoR for that matter) constitute a sandbox?

Sandbox campaign more a technique used by the referee so that the players can feel free to make their way across the setting on a path of their own choosing.

You setting sound finds. You may get some additional ideas from the blog post I wrote on the topic.

How to make a fantasy sandbox.

Bat in the Attic: How to make a Fantasy Sandbox

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Re: Ruins of adventure. I really cannot recommend it. While it lays the whole "plot" of the game out for you, there really isn´t much more than you can learn from reading the manuals or playing the game.

Additionally, it is not the best-written thing out there. Not at all. You have:
- Dwarven NPCs called Phanal and Shanal (not related, just listed beside each other).
- Elven NPCs called Silvanestri and Gilesestry (someone was playing / reading Dragonlance, eh?).
- Did i mention the elven NPCs called Vilanestro and Talinestri? And the elven Assassin Eelzifestro?
- It even gets better with the half-elven NPCs, who are (like the others) just listed if you need an NPCs on the quick - but are all named after precious stones. Jade, amber, onyx, jet, and of course the magic-user carnelian. Sigh.
- Yes, the half-orc npcs are all named after weapons. "You meet mace." "Now you meet dagger the half-orc." "This is spear, the half-orc." And so on.
- Poor Ren o´ the blade, you were a classic D&D name. Now we have Kantal o´the axe and of course the buccaneer Lanyard o´the sail. I wonder if there is a baker in Phlan called Dave o´the bread.

The adventure is full of classic lazy adventure design. You have things like this:

Pilgrim Bands: These groups should be found everywhere, and always under attack. Their size should be random and the larger the pilgrim band, the larger the reward for saving them. Pilgrims usually reward PC groups with gold, but 10% of the time the bands give out magic items.
Pilgrims should also be a huge source of information. The larger the pilgrim band, the better the hints they can give to the adventurers.

Why? Pilgrims for what? What do they visit on this monster-infested, overrun coast? The small tempel to Sune? Or the big bane-temple? Why are they everywhere? Why are they always under attack? And how can they give out magic items?

I could go on and on. It´s a train wreck, pure and simple.

There´s also the old moonsea supplement, but it´s... uh yeah. Just stay away from that. Download the manuals for Pool of Radiance from Replacementdocs and use those. On the cover, a red plume and a zhent are fighting each other using a loaf of bread as a weapon. That should tell you anything you have to know about THAT book.

 

[Jasperak]

Thanks for the responses everyone. To be clear though, I just want to use the general frame work from PoR as inspiration, not a direct lifting of plot points or encounter areas.

The thing I like most about PoR is the council and how it can be used as both a jumping off point for a sandbox or as the first stop on an adventure path. I like that the players can decide right there in the beginning or later on as they grow in power if they want to follow the council's lead or just use the proclamations as an easy way to find adventures until they decide to strike out on their own.

As DM I hope that either the PCs generate the plot, or that I have the ability to weave together both the world's and their threads to form an entertaining and cohesive story.

@Keefe> I like the way you extrapolated different types of encounters based on PoR's 15 hack & slash encounters in the slums. I am hoping to do the same thing so I can make the area seem more alive and so it doesn't seem like just another hack fest.

@ester> That post is one that I thought I had saved offline awhile ago to use as reference, but could not find it when I had recently looked for it. Thanks for the link. Between your post, various threads here and elsewhere, PoR, TSR's World Builder Guidebook, T1-The Village of Hommlett, and the Dungeoncraft articles in Dragon from years ago I hope to build a fun little playground.

 

[Jasperak]

Many times i prepared a session and caught myself preparing several possibilities but unconsciously choosing one i would have liked to happen. This is the greatest danger for a sandbox.

Did you find that a problem because you going more for an adventure path style, the direction they wanted to go wasn't prepped as much, or the direction they wanted to go was either too difficult or too easy? Or another reason I may have missed?

The only drawback of sandbox campaigns? Prepping a destroyed Zhentil Keep with 100 locations and the players say "what the heck, we don´t like this city" and move on after half a day.

And that's why Johnn Four's 5-Room Dungeon has been a godsend for me. In another thread concerning the 5-room dungeon, I listed an encounter area that took less than an evening to generate. I never finished writing it up in a "publishable" format, but all the monsters, treasure, and NPCs were there. I could run that now almost three years later for an evening's worth of fun. I could set up a half-dozen of these to match the proclamations and what am I out? I would always have a big file of single-evening adventures. Never again will I waste time detailing massive complexes in whole.

Now truth be told though, linking together encounter areas, like B4-The Lost City, in a dungeon complex might be fun, but I would only do it in a more modular form. To be more specific, it would be more like generating 5-encounter-areas (for argument sake) that I could plug-n-play into any area the PC's might be exploring. I toyed with that idea years ago for a megadungeon complex that I could build as the PCs explored. Like fully stated dungeon geomorphs.

 

[robconley]

The only drawback of sandbox campaigns? Prepping a destroyed Zhentil Keep with 100 locations and the players say "what the heck, we don´t like this city" and move on after half a day.

A trick to managing sandboxes is make sure that players have backgrounds that ties them to the setting. This doesn't have to be elaborate 1/2 page to a page worth of material is sufficent.

The best way I found to create this is to sit down one on one with the players. You ask the player "What do you want your character to do in general terms." You throw a bunch of possibilities, the players pick. Then you offset some specifics, the players talks about them and narrows his choices. You keep going back and forth until you have something that the player like.

The advantages of this approach for a sandbox campaign are:

1) The players are not standing around at the beginning going "mmm where do we go."

2) It makes life easier for the referee as the chance of the player dealing with something in their background is much higher than just going off randomly. Once the campaign gets rolling

As for your specific example if one or more player has ties into the ruined Zhentil Keep, something they need to find, being a member of an organization headquartered there, etc. Then those 100 locations are likely not going to go to waste.

Plus even if they don't get to it right away chances are they are going to want to deal with the Zhentil Keep as the players with that in their background clamor to go back.

From my own campaign the party consists of two elves, and a human magic-user of the Order of Thoth. The magic-user knows that by 5th level he needs to have a scholarly work prepared in order to advance in the Guild. To this end he has obtained a journal that lists various circles of a long defunct magical order.

They hit one at the beginning of the campaign and then one of the elves wanted to return to the elven homeland (about 5 days away). Something I wasn't quite prepared for. So they went there and I made up most of it on the fly. Finally when the elf concluded what he wanted to do. The magic-user said he wants to get back to exploring the old circles.

So now in the next couple of sessions they are going back and try to find the other circles and the work I did on them will come into play.


You can read about the background process from one of my player's point of view here.
The Rusty Battle Axe: On Player Character Backgrounds

 

[Haltherrion]

The question I have is, would a campaign that started like this (or PoR for that matter) constitute a sandbox?

I tend to think of a sandbox as a game where no matter what the players decide to do, the referee will go with it. For that reason, keeping the players in this adventure hub probably isn't a sandbox per se but why worry about that. It could be a fun setting with plenty of choices for the players to make, within the limitations of working from a particular base camp.

Most players are reasonable and realize they will get a more enjoyable adventure if they go with what the referee has prepared, especially if they got to decide which arc to persue. Remember, a lot of sandbox games can be rather dull in the wrong hands as the players blunder about looking for something interesting to do.


Usually a hierarchy of decision points works well:

• Between adventure arcs, give them a lot of freedom in choosing the next arc. You can give them a range of choices or maybe just toss out hooks until they bite on something.
• Once they select an arc, the understanding is that they will see it through so they lose some freedom to leave it (within reason). But still give them as much choice as possible in how they approach the adventure.
• These choices will lead to encounters, fighting and roleplaying. Once the encounter starts, the players are 'stuck' there but give them as much freedom as possible in how they resolve it- let them talk their way out of things, if they create an interesting plot idea, consider working it into the adventure.

One thing to watch out for in your concept- if there appear to be say eight adventure arcs but the players try them one by one and find that one after another is "too high level for them" until by luck they finally find a low level one they can do, it will not seem like much freedom and may be rather irritating. Rather than pre-determining the level of most arcs, considering setting the level to match their current level for all but maybe one or two arcs that you can clearly identify, in-game, as very challenging. That gives them something to aspire to defeat some day while giving them free range over most of the setting.
Put another way, if you have eight arcs available but at any given level only one or two is accessible, that isn't actually a lot of choice the players have.

 

[S'mon]

Don't have lengthy pre-planned arcs - ignore the 4e DMG 'super adventure' advice to have each arc/locale take up an entire level. Prep arcs/locales each with 1-3 encounters; with everything immediately accessible to the PCs being within their scope. For 4e with 1st level PCs that means keeping everything EL 1-5, with a fairly even spread across those levels. You can include clues to easier or harder missions but everything should be potentially doable straight off by a skilled and lucky party.