D&D General Not Railroad, Not Sandbox ... What else is there?

[gamerprinter]

Technically speaking then - this is just a map but in your definition this is what qualifies for Sandbox games. It's the first map I ever posted here, I think...

 

[Maxperson]

Perhaps I didn't explain it well enough, but this doesn't match what I was trying to describe.

First - there is visibility to the limitations. The DM prevents them from doing things that they come up with and keeps them eating off the menu of what he is ready to run. Thus, it is not an invisible hand, it is often quite visible.

Okay. It seemed from the original post that the players would not be told when their decisions were being overridden behind the scenes, so would be unaware.

Second, to me, rails mean you have a singular path. In a Bingo, you truly have multiple options in which you can explore, and the order of exploration can have significant impacts, but you can only choose from those options. It is more like you're on a network of streets than being on a railroad, but there are no streets that lead anywhere out of town.

That's not a rail. That's linear. Linear adventures run A to B to C to D to E in a line. However, if the party is at C and decides that they have had enough, they can just walk away from the adventure and not proceed to D. With a railroad the players have no choice and are forced to advance to D regardless of their desires, which is bad. That's why railroads have the negative connotation and linear adventures do not. Only one negates player decisions.

 

[gamerprinter]

Okay. It seemed from the original post that the players would not be told when their decisions were being overridden behind the scenes, so would be unaware.

That's not a rail. That's linear. Linear adventures run A to B to C to D to E in a line. However, if the party is at C and decides that they have had enough, they can just walk away from the adventure and not proceed to D. With a railroad the players have no choice and are forced to advance to D regardless of their desires, which is bad. That's why railroads have the negative connotation and linear adventures do not. Only one negates player decisions.

Well that's a better definition. I've been more black and white, I guess, only separating "railroads" from "sandbox", when really, by your definition I do linear adventure design. Often you can skip B or C, in an A - D story concept, or as you state, not do D at all. Yeah, that's the kind of modules I design. I guess I don't create actually railroads, then, and never have.

 

[gamerprinter]

Of course, the start of VECNA LIVES! is infamous for just abusing the PCs in a similar manner.

One of the one-shot modules published for my Kaidan setting of Japanese Horror (PFRPG) was an exploration into that setting's reincarnation mechanic tightly focused on this adventure, called Up from Darkness. It's one of those the PCs don't know who they are, and wake from inside stone coffins in the lowest level of some dungeon - the most deadly dungeon you'll ever face. You and your allies will die multiple times before the one-shot is over. It's a test of sorts, and you do not discover the truth of the matter, until the end. It was originally developed as a Convention Game for Origins 2011, I think. The author, Jonathan McAnulty, had his 12 year old son run the module for a bunch of adult gamers!

 

[Bagpuss]

Can I propose...

TIMETABLE The villains have a scheduled plan they are following, and the players may or may not interfere with that timetable depending on what they do. It differs from a Railroad/Card Trick as players have the choice to interact with the villains plot or not, the villain won't seek them out and isn't deliberately targeting them, obstacles won't prevent them not engaging or guide them back on course (other than "Bad things are happening perhaps we better do something?"). It differs from Sandbox/Bingo Card as their is very little else planned to do if they don't engage, other than the events the villain has planned will come to pass an might affect the PCs and campaign world at large.

I think Railroad and Sandbox are two extremes, with Bingo Card, and Card Trick and this falling somewhere between them, but all could easily be claimed to be more related to one extreme or the other.

 

[Bagpuss]

Technically speaking then - this is just a map but in your definition this is what qualifies for Sandbox games. It's the first map I ever posted here, I think...

Yeah dungeon adventures are odd, I guess where they fall on the Sandbox/Railroad scale depends on the options the players have. Is the dungeon liner with only one path, then it is more railroad, are their lots of different paths so encounter could be met in any order then more Sandbox/Bingo Card.

The encounters themselves is there only one solution (railroad), or multiple solutions (more Sandbox). In a Railroad campaign you are going to be forced to deal with the dungeon either because there is something you need in it, or because of a Card Trick, where no matter which dungeon you go to visit it is actually the same map the DM is using. In a more Sandbox campaign, the item in the dungeon might be useful, but it isn't a requirement for the campaign.

The map you show has two paths, to the boneyard bottleneck, then two through Cold Storage, to the Portal bottleneck then some rooms that may or may not need encountering, not sure I would call it a Sandbox. I mean the name Sandbox implies a big open space so you are free to travel in any direction. Any dungeon is going to limit your options, some more than others.

 

[robconley]

As a GM I fully understand, but if I'm creating content for somebody else's Sandbox - is it even possible for me to support that (as a publisher).

Yes but there are nuances .

That's my only question, and the only one I've presented in this entire thread. It was never about Sandbox itself, rather how I can do anything for it, or not...

Understood. And before we get too deep into this, PM me and I will comp you a PDF of my Scourge of Demon Wolf. I found that people understand me better when they have a fully worked out example to look at afterwards.

And I fully understand and agree with that. But only from my point of view, as an author/publisher, how do I create for that?

First off a heads up I am be writing this from a nuts and bolts perspective. And taking it from the top with the basic so we are on the same page.
Overview

• A sandbox adventure is a situation that the players find themselves in.
• There are locales involved in the situation
• There are characters involved with plans, motivations, and personalities.
• A timeline of events that would have happened if the players didn't get involved.

The Situation
Ever been told a story by a friend or acquaintance about what happened in a campaign and found it hard it to listen to it or follow along? Even though it obvious the storyteller had a great time and loved what happened. Many times it because these after the fact stories often only make sense if you were there and understood (or experienced) the context of when it took place.

This is the challenge with writing a sandbox adventure especially when trying to repurpose something done in a sandbox campaign. Most sandbox adventures in hindsight only make sense in the context of a specific group of characters doing a specific thing within a specific setting.

Note, that is most not all. So what distinguishes a situation so that can be turned into a sandbox adventure suitable to be shared or published?

The situation is relatively self-contained within the scope of the setting. This can be geographical or in terms of social distance. In my Scourge of the Demon Wolf the situation is centered around a 10 mile radius of the Village of Kensla. In my upcoming Deceits of the Russet Lord, the situation is also centered on a monastery and a shrine located within the village of Woodbury along with 15 miles of wilderness. In both the situation is both geographically and social limited in a way that make sense.

The first situation involves a pack of wolves terrorizing the area around Kensla. The second situation with the Russet Lord involves a supernatural entity taking advantage of local social divisions to complete a magical ritual.

In both there are a handful of groups and/or individual involved with motivations and personalities that create conflict, that conflict provides the opportunity for adventure. Because the conflict is arising from the NPCs all doing their own thing there is no particular order in which it needs to be resolved hence it can be presented as a sandbox adventure.

Locales
If you are doing this for your own campaign then you can be specific as you want when mapping out geography, buildings, and sites like dungeon. If you are going to publish then you going to have to go for the more generic. If it for Dungeons & Dragons (any edition) one good approach is visualizing a generic fantasy medieval setting and using that. If it for something with a specific setting like Runequest's Glorantha or Traveller's Third Imperium then you want something that at least evokes the essence of that setting. And you have the option of tying it some specific locales You can do that with D&D as well if you opt to publish through the DM's Guild and use the Forgotten Realms.

Characters
To be clear I am including monsters, and animals here as well sentient beings. Anything that can have a motivation and a personality.

What I have found in the decades I been doing this is that people are more interested in people. Sure you have successful sandbox campaign involving exploring a blank hex grid. Or one involving following clues and bread crumbs within a web of inter-connected locales. However the most satisfying adventures (or campaigns) are those involving a interconnected group of NPCs and their plans which are in conflict.

For example in Scourge of the Demon Wolf there are

• The villagers of Kensla who have been terrorized by wolves.
• A group of wandering outcast beggars (several families).
• A group of bandits
• A pack of wolves led by an alpha wolf who been possessed by a demon.
• A conclave of mages. Like a monastery but for arcane spell casters.

Notes

• The villagers are basically a bunch of peasants trying to live out their lives until the Demon Wolf arrived.
• The beggars just happened to be in the area when the worse attacks occurred.
• The bandits were already around the region but decided to move close to Kensla and take advantage of the situation to prey on travellers.
• The conclave of mages were already in the region but largely keep to themselves.

So what are the conflicts here.

• The villagers are frightened, scared, and divided about what to do about this. Some led by the village priest think the beggars are the cause of all this.
• The beggar would just move on, but their chief's son was killed by the Demon Wolf and now wants vengeance. They originally arrived here to buy the bandit's ill-gotten gains and got caught in the situation.
• The bandits made fake claws and a wolf costumes and been making their recent attacks look like wolf attacks.

Finally the heart of the matter.
The demon that possessed the Demon Wolf was a result of a botched summons cast by Arbela an overly ambitious (and amoral) mage apprentice living at the conclave. Unbeknownst to her there was a litter of wolf pups nearby when she cast the ritual.

The demon summoned was a Wrath demons and has used it powers and new form to take over all nearby wolf packs and visit terror on the nearest large settlements, the village of Kensla.

There are a number of way to get the player in on this ranging from hearing rumors, using an encounter, or to be given a mission. The one I use at conventions is that the players are seeking out the local Baron as a patron. The Baron is pissed that his huntsman botched the job of finding the wolf, pissed that the villager have refused to bring in the harvest until this is dealt with. So sends the PCs to go take care of the matter and get the harvest going.

Further wrinkles
So a thing to keep in mind that situation are often not new. They develop over time. That means stuff happened in the past which can provide answer about what the heck is happening and who is doing what.

From the Scourge of Demon Wolf some examples of this are

• On the road to the village there is a dead peddler and his overturned (and looted) cart. It nominally looks like a wolf attack, but if the site is investigated there are clue that it was the work of people.
• There is a outlying steading where an old couple was killed. Like the peddler this was the work of the bandits and made to look like a wolf attack.
• The Baron's bailiff was killed in a nearby field. When investigated there are clear signs this was an attack by a pack of wolves.
• The bandits recently had dealing with the beggars to fence their loot.
• Arbela didn't clean up the summoning site and there was stuff left behind including a satchel that can be connected to her master at the conclave.
• The mages are off in their on world and have no clue of what going on so far. They know of an attempt by the Baron's huntsman to clear the area of wolves and thought he was successful.

Publishing or Sharing this mess
So I first ran this as a GURPS adventure, dropping it in the middle of a campaign after being inspired by the movie the Brotherhood of the Wolf. Then a year later, some other friends wanted to try D&D 3.0 and I realized my notes on this would make for a nice self-contained sandbox adventure provided if I did the bit with the players being agents of the local Baron. The original adventure started out with the party hearing rumors of wolf attacks and then later finding the peddler. The 3.0 adventure ran fine and left me with more notes.

Then I started writing and publishing and thought this could be my first adventure. So I started running it at conventions using Swords & Wizardry and my Majestic Wilderlands. I knew from the 3.0 adventure that it could be run as a four hours adventure with 3rd to 5th level characters. I started to keep notes on what the players did or did not. I did this 12 times all over the Eastern United States including a impromptu session in a game store in Savannah Georgia when I was on a business trip. It was pretty bare bones (I normally use minis) but invaluable as that group completed the adventure in a completely different way than any other group before them.

The notes on all these outlined what I had to focus on and write about beyond the usual character descriptions and mapped locales. For example none of the 14 groups opted to approach the village via an overland trek. Instead they all stuck to the road even tho it wasn't the direct path. So I didn't write about what would happen if the group decided to go off-road to enter the village.

Half of the group investigated and the other half didn't. Roughly 3/4 of the groups treated the peddler's body with respect and brought it back to the village. While there were patterns every group handled the adventure differently and none of them felt there was a way they had to do things. Instead at every point they felt they had enough to make a decisions even when it wasn't entirely clear as to what was going on.

The Savannah group bypassed the village completely, by discovering that the peddler was attacked by people, tracking down the bandit, finding out about the beggars from the bandits, tracking down the beggars, deciding to help the beggars avenged the murdered son. Searching the Wilderness and finding Arbela's botched summoning. FInding out about the conclave of mages from the beggars. Visiting the Mages and making the connection to Arbela. Then dealing with the final confrontation with the Demon Wolf and Arbela.

All this comments and notes I had, I turned into Rob's Notes and stuck them in-between the various descriptions and explanations.

Rob's Note: If you get Scourge note that it is two products in one. The first half is the sandbox adventure and everything a person needs to run it is there. But the make the product useful beyond the adventure, I elected to make the back half a supplement where three of the locales are fully fleshed out for further adventures using these locales.

Deliberately making a Sandbox Adventure.
Generally these adventures come about initially as a game of what-if. I think of or look at some circumstance and think "What would cause this? Who is involved? What are the consequences?" I try to keep the number of complications by roughly keeping to a handful (5) of a handful. The overall situation involves a handful of elements, and each element has at most a handful of specific complications.

For example in Deceits of the Russet Lord, I wanted something involving faeries and star-crossed lovers. For a long time, I didn't have a handle on how to incorporate faeries into my campaign in a satisfying way. Then I came up an idea that faeries exist because of strong emotion causing magic to manifest as a sentient being. Virtues giving rise to summer faeries,Vices giving rise to winter faeries. Faeries are driven to recreate the circumstance that gave them birth to maintain their existence. If they master new stories they gain power.
And because the emotions must be extreme for this to happen, it doesn't matter whether we are talking winter or summer. They are all dangerous and mercurial to interact with.

So here the Russet Lord of the Winter Court and want to recreate the circumstances that gave him birth. A village riven by social dissension caused by star-crossed lover from opposite social classes was sacked and burned because they couldn't unite in time to fend off raiders.

Once again I turned to a medieval village as the setting. The two sides at odds are a medieval knight and peasant tenants. The star-crossed lover was the peasant son of a blacksmith and the daughter of the knight. The Russet Lord sent one of his faerie minion to encourage the lovers to elope, and in another guise to enflame tensions in the village. Then at the right moment the Russet Lord recruited an orc tribe to march in and sack the village and kill its inhabitants.

I though peasant versus knight wasn't nuanced enough. So I added a monastery and a pilgrim shrine to the village. Made the abbot the lord of the village, and the knight was the monk's bailiff who handled the day to day affairs of the manor. The monks were wealth from the income from the shrine so were indifferent to the situation in the village.

From there I outline what happened, and what could happen and proceed to flesh out the specifics of the adventure. So far I have run it six times. There are patterns but each groups handled it in different ways.

Wrapping it up.
I know this is a long post but I hope it helpful in explaining what it is I do to publish sandbox adventures.

 

[cavetroll]

Can I propose...

TIMETABLE The villains have a scheduled plan they are following, and the players may or may not interfere with that timetable depending on what they do. It differs from a Railroad/Card Trick as players have the choice to interact with the villains plot or not, the villain won't seek them out and isn't deliberately targeting them, obstacles won't prevent them not engaging or guide them back on course (other than "Bad things are happening perhaps we better do something?"). It differs from Sandbox/Bingo Card as their is very little else planned to do if they don't engage, other than the events the villain has planned will come to pass an might affect the PCs and campaign world at large.

I think Railroad and Sandbox are two extremes, with Bingo Card, and Card Trick and this falling somewhere between them, but all could easily be claimed to be more related to one extreme or the other.

I like that a lot, and it helps punish players who sleep after every encounter to regain all their spells

 

[Maxperson]

Well that's a better definition. I've been more black and white, I guess, only separating "railroads" from "sandbox", when really, by your definition I do linear adventure design. Often you can skip B or C, in an A - D story concept, or as you state, not do D at all. Yeah, that's the kind of modules I design. I guess I don't create actually railroads, then, and never have.

In a linear adventure, you generally can't skip portions like that. They're constructed more like...

A: The party arrives in town and the barkeep who is keeping an eye out for adventurers tells the group that the wizard Meezap(7th level wizard) is looking to hire a group.
B: The group travels to the edge of town and meets Meezap in tower where they are told that his apprentice has been taken by an undead creature. Meezap used his last oil of scrying(made up item) and has determined that the creature, which is beyond his abilities but not a group such as the PCs, is holed up in a cave with the apprentice.
C: After arriving at the cave and defeating the undead beastie, the group discovers that the creature was working for an even greater master who took the apprentice before the PCs got there. The master is 1 day away down a passage at the back of the cave to the underdark and will be sacrificing the apprentice 2 days from now.
D: The PCs travel through the underdark and battle through the minions of the master to save the apprentice.

Those are all parts that you have to go though to discover the next leg. It's linear They aren't really skippable, but you could stop at any points and ditch the adventure. Perhaps the group is like, "Underdark! Master of this guy?! Heck no!"

If you can skip parts B or C and go straight from A to D, that's a more open adventure that isn't really linear or railroad. It's also not necessarily sandbox like the Isle of Dread. There's lots of space in-between linear and sandbox games for adventure to fall into, and most adventurers that I've read are in that space.

 

[gamerprinter]

True, but one of the modules published for the Kaidan setting of Japanese Horror (PFRPG), the second module of the Curse of the Golden Spear trilogy, Dim Spirit, has several encounters between the start and ultimate destination of that module, that could be missed if the players don't follow certainly clues and skip a particular encounter. It isn't critical to the module to miss that, though not doing so has ramifications later in the module. The local daimyo has assassin teams hunting the PCs, which will drive them towards safer areas which is where their destination lies. It's the only module I'm aware that has a mid-story encounter that could get skipped, but that's completely based on which way the PCs decide to go...