2023-11-19 Campaign building blocks

@enfors@ttrpg-hangout.social recently wondered about "important aspects of sandboxes that one can iterate over and add to."

I'm reminded of the term "Gygaxian Building Blocks". I think I first heard this phrase from @settembrini@rollenspiel.social in episode 1 of Zock Bock Radio, a mostly German, sometimes English podcast about role-playing games. "Gygaxian Building Blocks" are the things one can add individually to the rules and therefore everybody can participate in the game as a creator by writing spells, items, monsters, classes, and so on. These things stand on their own and aren't usually influenced by other such blocks. Adding them is easy. Conversely, the core game without the lists of spells, items, monsters and classes can be relatively short. It's a beautiful way of organizing the game.

episode 1

Zock Bock Radio

For a sandbox campaign, the things that have that same quality and which I'd call my "sandbox campaign building blocks" would be:

• powerful people: names, titles and retainers including spells and magic items
• settlements: names, a small number of interesting buildings such as defensive structures and temples, the number of people ready to fight in case of a battle
• ruins: mostly dungeons, big or small, often just three to five zones that may or may not map to "rooms" with monsters and treasure
• magic schools: these are spell collections by legendary magic users that facilitate writing up spell selections for other magic-users since I can select the school they're from and pick an appropriate subset of spells (this is what my Spellcasters project is all about)
• secret societies: names, leaders, and then for each settlement figure out if the secret society has a presence and if so, who the representative is
• gods & demons and their temples: names, themes, and then for each settlement figure out if there is a shrine or temple and if so, who the head priest is
• monsters: I usually like to focus on a subset that is intelligent, with settlements and plans of their own, almost always humanoids
• legendary items: as a consequence of treasure allocation for the above, some powerful magic items entered the sandbox and I need them on a separate list so that there can be rumours and quests pointing players towards them
• permanent portals to other planes: names of these realms, powerful beings that can be reached (for spells, prayers, summonings…), environmental effects, rumours and pointing players towards them, preparing for the high level game
• rough events in the past: names of wars, sides, immortal necromancer kings & queens, but only insofar as they help flesh out locations and magic items etc. – there is no need for a timeline and years, as far as I am concerned (trying to imagine what I would know without schools and books – practically nothing except for "Germans bad because of the World War" and that's it, I guess?)

Spellcasters

Anyway, I think those are the things I am concerned about when I start a new campaign. As the campaign progresses, I find it easy to add just *one more thing* to one of the lists. 😄

If you have a blog post with a similar topic, let me know and I'll add a link!

​#RPG ​#Sandbox