Starting a new campaign (integrating sandbox and metaplot - mutually exclusive?)

[Mercurius]

I'm currently running our group through (a slightly modified version of) Revenge of the Iron Lich as a kind of capstone adventure for Paragon tier. After we finish we are going to temporarily retire (surviving) characters and start afresh at 1st level. Originally I was thinking of giving Pathfinder a shot, but we all already know 4E and we will eventually convert to 5E anyway. I may just steal stuff from Pathfinder adventure paths and run them as 4E.

Anyhow, all that aside, I'm dabbling with ideas for a new campaign. There are a few objectives that I want to accomplish and I'm trying to figure out how to combine them all:

- A sandbox, exploratory feel
- Some kind of underlying metaplot that the PCs find themselves further and further involved in
- A mixture of homebrew setting and both homebrew and pre-published adventures
- Light to moderate planning required on my part; I'm OK with a bunch of planning up front as I'm a teacher and have the summer off, but once September comes around I want to be able to do minimal preparation, not much more than reading pre-published adventures and tweaking them to suit my campaign.

The basic idea I have at this moment is that the campaign will start off relatively traditionally: the party is pulled together to fight some kind of humanoid incursion of the village they're in, and somehow they gradually get involved with Big Events. But the key is that I want the feeling to start out as sandboxy, but through their exploration they piece together a much larger story. Right now I'm imagining that they find artifacts and objects that point to some kind of unknown history that they will put together over time, like a puzzle.

As far as this thread goes, I'm looking for suggestions about how to do this, as well as recommendations of resources, adventures, etc.

 

[jedavis]

Not sure this is really helpful, but I am happy to report that this is totally doable. I did it in Traveller (eesh, a year and a half ago now). I launched with a Farscape opening, with the PCs escaping from an imperial prison ship. They did a bunch of wandering around looking to make enough to keep the ship in space, saved some psions from enslavement, stole 80 tons of pornography, standard Traveller stuff. Eventually they stumbled on an ancient derelict starship haunted by things from beyond the veil, and this kicked off a metaplot involving avoiding the Imperial Inquisition while fighting cultists, hunting the three parts of the Annulus of Annihilation, evading bounty hunters, bargaining with demons, thwarting the schemes of a mad professor, and ultimately saving the universe.

So: go for it! Best of luck. One thing I will say, though, is that the sandbox remained real throughout. If they decided to high-tail it away from all the supernatural freakiness out into the coreward sectors, that was their prerogative... but it would have caught up with them eventually. Likewise, they could dally in friendly ports for weeks, but the tracking of time meant that I could figure out what their enemies were doing with that time, and they were not sitting idle. Running a sandbox game is all about consequences; you let them do anything, but you make it matter later. You kill the prisoner? OK, but his family is after you now (or he returns as a cyborg monstrosity intent on killing you). You save someone's life? OK, she makes a brief re-appearance later with a piece of useful information. That kind of thing.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It sounds to me like your instincts are guiding you properly. A sandboxy campaign with hints here & there about something more should work- look at things like the "Bad Wolf" storyline for Dr. Who, for instance.

A sign here (an otherwise meaningless intercepted encoded communique), a symbol there (a broken & incomplete medallion or seal)...a chance encounter with an agent of your shadow conspiracy...they'll add up and get the party hooked.

It can be a really cool way to run a game.

 

[Yora]

I think the best way to start any campaign and especially when conceptualized like that, with getting all the players together and decide what group of people they want to play and what their long term goal is.
And then you can prepare a "limited sandbox" campaign that includes factions and locations that are actually directly relevant to the themes the players want.

Found a duchy, become merchant lords, gather a fleet of pirate ships, explore and map the southern jungles, or anything the players can agree on. It's just like sandboxing, except that both you and the players know what you will prepare for and that they agree to keep the campaign within these confines and not suddenly run of to entirely different places doing completely different things.

 

[Doug McCrae]

One way to do it would be to have ruins of the ancients taken over by the usual D&D sandbox monsters - savage humanoids, bandits, slavers, evil cultists and the like. Sometimes unbeknownst to the current lodgers (though probably knownst, in the case of the cultists) these ruins contain the artefacts, portentous frescoes and mosaics, blasphemous tomes, and the like, that point to your unknown history. In the course of dealing with these adversaries, the PCs will be likely to uncover pieces of the puzzle.

I played in a D&D campaign somewhat like this, though it wasn't a sandbox. The setting was Greyhawk - the Grand Duchy of Geoff and surrounding areas. We had many traditional unconnected adventures but over the course of those there was a recurring theme of uncovering the mysteries of the Suel. The first Suel ruins we encountered were being used as a base by a large force of orcs and goblins, who worshipped a demon that, I think, had been summoned in ancient times by the long dead Suel. On a later occasion, we raced against our arch-nemesis, a necromancer, to penetrate the secrets of another set of Suel ruins, which ended up being destroyed in a huge explosion when we upset his experiment. It was a pretty cool campaign - D&D with a Lord of the Rings and Mysterious Cities of Gold vibe.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Yep, totally doable, and in fact IMO a good sandbox should have a couple of metaplots running in the background. The important hings to remember when doing this:

(1) Don't be disappointed if the players choose not to "bite" on the metaplot -- let them follow their preferences;
(2) Resist the urge to railroad them back to the metaplot;
(3) Let the metaplot continue to run to its logical conclusions if the PCs aren't involved, revealing bits of it from time to time. It will make the world seem more realistic and dynamic if you do -- but:
(4) Be careful not to spring the "You're screwed! You ignored the metaplot!" ending on your players, even if that's the *logical* conclusion, since that violates rule #2 . It's a fine balance between having a realistic world that does its own thing in spite of the PCs while still giving players the illusion of choice.

The key to sandbox-with-metaplot is maintaining the illusion of choice.

 

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

A lot of video games do this, actually. Some, such as Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar Games, are excellently done. RDR feels very much like a sandbox (with lots of open-ended quests and challenges, and literally you can go anywhere you want) but a very obvious and intentional meta-plot.

I'll echo what others have stated and say that it is a great way to do a game, and I would argue that that's really the only style of game most of us play, since we have no real direct control over the party's actions.

 

[Nagol]

I run sandbox campaigns that usually have one or more metaplots running in them.

The last was a alternate history Greyhawk with the Great Kingdom in a long slow decline. PCs started in the Duchy of Urnst.

Metaplots discovered by the players included The Great Kingdom becoming revitalised and expansionistic impacting the surrounding countries, a grave threat to the Prime Material Plane coming about from the planned destruction of Iuz by Mordenkainen, and the rediscovery of a lost dwarven city filled with adventure and secrets. There were a couple of other ones, but the PCs never ventured to the west or north and they played out without PC involvement.

There are a few things I have to stress about meta-plot in a sandbox:

• Pick a meta-plot you are comfortable seeing through to completion if the PCs decide to ignore or escape it. Do not take it personally if the PCs try to minimise their involvement or act in ways outside the expected space. Continue to advance the meta-plot in a plausible manner.
  
• Include a bunch of hooks/reminders/tie-backs to the plots scattered throughout the landscape. Metaplot advancement creates new adventure seeds as the setting and inhabitants react to the changes and opportunities, and challenges shift.

 

[Nagol]

The key to sandbox-with-metaplot is maintaining the illusion of choice.

I prefer to give my players choice rather than the illusion of it.

I do tend to implement "Are you really sure?" prompts from in-game elements if their choices are leading to a "Oops, sorry you destroyed the world" moment. But I wil follow through on any meta plot element I introduce.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I prefer to give my players choice rather than the illusion of it.

Done properly there's no difference from a player perspective between choice and the illusion of choice.