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I found that we could square the circle of sandbox and story by making the story character-driven. Taking cues from Unweaver's Character-Driven approach, I discussed each PC's background and goals, as well as π΅π©π¦ π±ππ’πΊπ¦π³'π΄ π¨π°π’ππ΄ π§π°π³ π΅π©π¦ π€π©π’π³π’π€π΅π¦π³. I didn't do this in session zero - I let the player get used to the game and their character before asking them to set a direction, and tried to let them do so at their own pace.
Once a player has told you that his character's goal is to find a cure for his ailing father, he's given you a lever to pull to get his character to pursue whatever adventure you want. When you know what's going on with each character, and what each player wants to see them doing, you can sprinkle your sandbox world with hooks leading into their stories. And because you've communicated, you know in advance they'll want to follow them - no railroading needed.
As they pursue the hooks you've left for them they'll explore a mixture of sandbox and story content, and you can both incorporate sandbox happenstance into their arcs, and start to draw connections between their individual stories.
Maybe the abducted sister one character is looking for was stolen away by the foe another PC is trying to raise an army to defeat; maybe two characters nemeses are working together; maybe the cure to one character's illness takes them to a place where they find a secret about another character's past.
Perhaps a PC discovers a hex map location of such fragile beauty they swear themselves to protecting it; perhaps they adopt an NPC; perhaps a failed saving throw gives them a curse they must struggle to lift or tragically succumb to.
Sometimes the sandbox is just a diversion - you don't have to spend all your time on the epic story, it can be fun to just poke around the map and explore, or get involved in an unecessary sidequest. Other times, it throws up story elements which you or the players can seize on and build deeply into the framework of the story.
As the game goes on resolutions to the characters arcs will present themselves. Here it helps to study the essentials of storytelling - setup and payoff, the antagonist as the dark reflection of the protagonist, what it takes to make a victory or defeat feel 'earned' and so on. This does not necessarily mean academic study- you can learn a lot about these things just by watching a movie with a loved one each day and talking about what you saw! Just as long as you're thinking in those terms, and training that storytelling muscle.
As the arcs develop you will be able to imagine directions they would go if they were in a TV show, book or movie. Does the betrayed character find a way to forgive, or wreak a terrible revenge? Does the cursed swordsman die in fulfilling his destiny, or find something to redeem him from it? It's desirable to leave these questions open until the last minute, as they provide the core tension or anxiety of the story, as well as a pivotal sense of player agency.
Once you have an idea where things are going you can write a (very brief!) summary of how the campaign will play out, how you'll tie all the arcs together with a nice little bow and resolve everything. It needs to be brief because in a week or two you'll throw it out and rewrite it! But having an idea where you're going "all else being equal" can be helpful.
Once you're indulging the players by filling the world with their stories, you'll often find they're more willing to indulge you - so alongside their stories you can fill the world with what inspires you. The DM is a player too!
In tension with the idea of a character arc driven game, particularly in the OSR, is the risk of unpredictable character death. It's perfectly fine to have games where the heroes don't die until it's their time; some would say this cheapens the game but the fact is there are other stakes to play for. The character may have plot armour but the things they fight for do not. You can even make this mechanically explicit within the game world: Having an arc means having a destiny, and until that destiny is fulfilled or averted you cannot die any other way, instead being taken prisoner or surviving through lucky escapes.
Or you can simply make character death unlikely, and provide routes back from it: Resurrection, returning as a ghost 'until your work is done.'
Or you can let the dice fall where they may, and find ways to allow the arc to continue between characters, with others picking up the torch for the fallen - though this can limit how personal, and thus powerful, the motivations can be.
The world in which your story takes place should feel deep and wonderful; like a real place the players will be excited to return to each week. Take some time to think about (and discuss with the players - they are, as the studio model tells us, producers and writers too, after all) the tone and atmosphere of the world. Is it a gonzo fantasy where magic swords cross with rayguns?
Or is it a more archetypal, earthy fantasy, where you can smell the damp soil of the barrow-mound as the skeleton rises and hefts its rusty sword toward you? Sometimes, when it comes to atmosphere, less is more. Zhu's ππ’ππ¦ π°π§ ππ’π³π¬π΄π±πͺπ΅π¦ π’π―π₯ ππͺππ΄π°π₯, linked below, reinvents the simplest of fantasy monsters - a goblin and an ogre - as truly fantastical, deeply in touch with the natural world and the tides of fate.
Ben Laurence has written about the technique of giving the players a 'home base in the known' from which they venture into the fantastical; by setting up a mundane area of the world you can make the strange and wonderful truly feel strange and wonderful by contrast. I feel like my ideal Cthulhu game would be one where everyone gets deeply invested in the details of day to day life in the 1920s, with little hints of paranatural goings-on luring them gradually into the weird.
I love to read weird and wonderful books and draw inspiration from them. My game was influenced by the writing of Grant Morrison, Yukito Kishiro, David Britton, and Brandon Graham, the art of Pascal Blanche, Philippe Druillet and Russ Nicholson, and collective works of popular culture like Star Trek, Diablo and Portal. You can just chew all this stuff up and regurgitate it for your players like a mother bird feeding hungry chicks.
Players love to see pop culture references, but if you can incorporate something obscure and odd as well it can add spice to the pot. It's a way to share things you've enjoyed, albeit broken down into elements and reconstituted into something new.
D&D is often about violence, horror, dark places, danger, betrayal and avarice. These things are exciting and common fare for stories, but there's a whole spectrum of positive emotions to draw from too.
You can give the players a beach episode where they can just enjoy a peaceful interlude in a beautiful environment. Give them a fancy party or a romantic or kind moment. Let them have tea with a kindly sorcerer and his charming wife.
Love is the emotion they'll remember the longest. After the horror is no longer scary, the love will remain. Let them pick up waifs and strays; let them fall in love with NPCs. And sure, sometimes threaten or kill those NPCs - but not always! Love, in itself, is enough!
If you can inspire love you know your game is going well. There are so many NPCs from our campaign I simply have to mention by name and my players will break into a delighted smile.
On the subject of NPCs, your world will be full of gods, kings, and other powerful figures. If you have friends who can't play, have them take on these roles. They don't have to show up at the table - you just consult with them between games.
I love this technique because it makes the factions and major players in the world autonomous, saving you valuable brainpower and making them feel more authentic. It also gives more people the chance to participate in the game, especially those who might be pining for some RP but unable to fit it into their schedule. And it lets you talk about the game and bounce ideas around with another person between sessions, alleviating the loneliness of preparing for a session.
The easiest method I've found is to have two documents, a secret one and one shared with the players. The shared one should contain a bullet summary of every session, experience gained, any narrative interludes and downtime results, with headings listed by in-game and real-world date. 5 minutes at the end of the session is sufficient to maintain it, and if you share it somewhere it provides a full up-to-the minute account of the campaign, for week-to-week use, for sharing, and for posterity.
This is one mechanic from ππ©π¦ πππ’π€π¬ ππ’π€π¬ I was completely sold on. Instead of experience points, you get a smaller number of one-sentence descriptions of an accomplishment or event considered worthy of advancement. By selecting which events qualify you can alter the tone of the campaign - is it important to vanquish foes, or explore, or make friends? Do you get experience for completing quests, encourating diligent pursuit of goals? Or do you give them the same XP for agreeing to new contracts, making them balance advancement with not taking on a dangerously untenable number of obligations?
Another feature of the technique is as a supplemental campaign record - every character sheet becomes a summary of the character's adventures. Simply glancing down the list conjures up dozens of enjoyable memories.
It also allows you to play with experiences as currency - memory-stealing monsters can snatch them away, they can be traded to daemons for power, or invested in items to empower them in some way appropriate to the memory.
...is what I'm going to call this. It's another method we adopted from Ben Laurence. The Wilderlands maps published by the Judges Guild from 1977 present a sprawling and sparsely detailed space for exploration. It isn't as overcrowded by lore as somewhere like the Forgotten Realms - in its brevity, it presents more questions than answers.
A hex in the Wilderlands might be described thus:
1410 Isle of the Dismemberer - A mad high-level Magic User created a Flesh Golem that patrols the beach area and rips apart the castaways and visitors as they try to come ashore.
Then Ben gets hold of it, and weaves it into something baroque and terrifying, turning it into this:
The Isle of the Dismemberer (1410 circled in red) takes its name from its sole inhabitant. In ages past he was a master architect. He raised for the sorcerer lords mansions to suit their whims, constructed like puzzle boxes, with secret gardens, jeweled libraries, and glittering towers. But in his arrogance, he slighted Sarpedon the Shaper, and so entered his protein bathes and blending chamber. He no longer remembers why he builds, but build he must. So he fashions a cathedral to his long dead master from rude materials, fastened with an ichor secreted from the weeping surface where his face once was. Embedded within the walls are the tanned limbs of his victims. From the walls of the nave, a choir of tortured faces peer, and the entryway is decorated by torsos from which spring a bewildering farrago of limbs.
Outside his own crude hut, the tanned hides of his latest victims hang, their bones bleaching in the sun. Inside, his few remaining tools are carefully arrayed on a rotting velvet cloth: a compass, a mallet and chisel, and a cleverly fashioned level. Hidden among the dried reeds that serve as his bed, a watertight scrollcase contains the Dismemberer's antique blueprints. If removed most will crumble to dust, but a partial blueprint of the demesne of his former master remains, as well as a topographical map that can be used to find the hidden abode of his master's old rival, Mirvolo the Summoner of Voids.
Following his example I took to letting the players explore the map by taking the sparse, generic, tantalising, weird or just plain stupid hex descriptions from the old pamphlets and thinking "what can I do with this?" It's a wonderful source of inspiration, hitting (to my mind) just the right level to inspire ideas while leaving plenty of room for improvement and embellishment. I love it because you feel like you're exploring this vast space along with the PCs - not just creating, but discovering.
I remember several occasions where I've pored over the map with one of my players, saying "I wonder what's going on here?" and "How different things could have been if we'd started our adventure π©π¦π³π¦, and not in Ghinor!"
As mentioned in the article on loops, having downtime actions where the PCs can spend their gold and time on remaking themselves and the world they inhabit serves to provide an upper layer for the campaign, a space where players can make plans and make the kind of big changes they spend their adventures working toward. When I started doing these I'd write a quick summary of the results and post it to the group in between sessions.
At first they were things like:
Aeris & Rhea went looking for a teacher to do some martial training. They found Leander, disgraced, drunk and one-armed former captain of the Chatelaine's personal guard. He doesn't like to talk about his time at the palace. They had to ply him with 6 coins worth of drinks before he'd agree to train them. He was intrigued by their tales of the underworld beneath Zyan, and trained them on condition they'd owe him a favour.
But then they started to grow, and while we still called them 'downtimes', they weren't just downtimes anymore. By the end of the campaign they had become little short stories in their own right. The one that ended the campaign was 5,000 words and I spent a whole happy Saturday sitting in a cafe writing it up.
They still contained the downtime results, but what I was writing now were π―π’π³π³π’π΅πͺπ·π¦ πͺπ―π΅π¦π³ππΆπ₯π¦π΄, and they were a hit! The players loved them and looked forward to reading them every week; I loved writing them. They let me do things with the world and the characters that I couldn't do face-to-face and on the spot; I could really think about dialogue and characterisation in a way that I'm just not sharp enough to do at the table. I could sit back and muse on the perfect way to frame a scene, or do research and look up quotes for inspiration.
In short, they provided a completely different way to engage with the world and the story. The combination of tabletop play and fiction produced something that was greater than the sum of its parts, and now I use them in every game I run.
Taken as stand-alone fiction, these interludes are poorly explained and indulgent, but they're not meant as published stories: They're for a particular audience of five or six people, and in that role they excel. I've never thought of myself as a writer of fiction but being able to produce something and have it appreciated within this limited arena was deeply satisfying as an artistic activity in itself, even aside from the campaign as a whole.
Depending on how elaborate the stories become, you have to take care about putting words into PCs mouths - but you can always talk to a player between games and run the text by them, ask their input, or even ask them to a write an interlude of their own!
World Building & Old School Games by Ben Laurence (including "Home Base in The Known")
A Tale of Barkspite and Hilsod by Zhu Bajiee
Experiences vs Experience Points
The Shattered Isles and the Isle of the Dismemberer by Ben Laurence
Collection of Articles detailing rules for Downtime Activities by Ben Laurence
Review of Alan Moore's "Writing for Comics", Peter Derk
[Note to self: Add a Storytelling 101 article, and a link to the campaign's downtimes.]