Sandbox Traveller

To me Traveller, published by GDW Games and now by Mongoose, is one of the best sci-fi games ever published. One of the things that appealed to me was the star system generation rules and it's ability to create a universe as big as you want. It gives you just enough information to run a sandbox sci-fi campaign. What Traveller doesn't do is tell you how to manage all this information to run a successful game.

I am going to assume you are creating your own background although some of this applies to the 3rd Imperium as well.

Roll up two Subsectors side by side.
Note all the high population planets.
Write a short paragraph on each High Population Plant placing them in the context of your background (Empire, Federation, Free Space, etc).

Find any high tech plants (the highest ones you rolled )
Make one paragraph notes on them.

Find all class A and B starports
Make notes on them.

Each of the three levels of note taking will get progressively shorter as there is considerable overlap.

Scan the remaining plants.
Pick out 4 to 8 that grab your attention.
Make notes on them.

Look at your notes and come up with two to four "plots" that ties one or more locales together. For example a pirate fleet that uses one planet as a base, one planet for shore leave, and two other planets that they raid on a continual basis.

For each of the planets that you have made notes for, write up four "patron" encounters for each. They should start as one sentence each and be self contained in respect to the major plots.

Come up with 6 to 12 general patron encounters that can be placed anywhere in your setting. Make them flexible like (set in a seedy starport, etc)

Make up a rumor chart with 10 to 20 items that feeds information about the plots you came up with and the setting.

Make a list of NPCs. Assign them to the various items you created above. Start out with a sentance worth of info for each.

Look at your notes and decided where recurring NPCs will be. (Captain of the subsector Revenue Patrol, Custom Offical, Badger the Broker, etc). Probably need 6 to 12 of them. Give them a paragraph description in addition to their stats.

This should take about four evenings of Prep for two sub sectors probably two to three evenings for a single subsector. Each subsequent subsector will be slightly less time to prepare as you can reuse elements.

After your first adventure evaluate the players actions and decide if any sites will be needed for the next session. Prepare them in whatever level of detail you normally do.

Traveller is VERY amicable to the use of Computer Software to generate many aspects of the game. In the 80s on a TRS-80 I would make printouts of a hundred random entries of every type (subsectors, animal encounters, NPCs, etc). Then I would scan the list and pick out the ones I would be using.

Whatever you do don't just accept the first thing that pops out. Relying on totally random results will lead to nonsense. The Traveller Charts are good but not that good.

The point of all this is to make a "kit" that you can use to pull out whatever you need. This way you don't have to spend a lot of time in prep. Once the kit is formed then running Traveller is pretty much responding to whatever your players do.

Sandbox Fantasy

From my previous post I explained the origins of my interest in sandbox fantasy. But not why I was so obsessive about these details.

I was never much of a player of AD&D. Pretty much from the start I was a DM. I liked being a DM not for the power it gave me over players but because I just loved watching players explore the world I laid out in front of them.

As a player I was always too impatient. Always wanting to poke into the dark corners of a setting. Even today in MMORPGs I will level up a little and go off exploring. Granted as a DM I knew where everything was, but it was just as fun for me to watch players discovering stuff for themselves.

I wanted them to discover stuff not only in the dungeon but in the wilderness as well. This was main reason that Keep on the Borderland became my traditional starting module over Hommlet. Keep on the Borderlands had a area map. Having the player explore the wilderness was why it was important for the white areas to be filled in, that why the empty 30 mile hexes of Greyhawk bothered me, and that why the Wilderlands were one of the greatest gaming products I bought.

However I quickly realized that just because I was interested in it doesn't mean everybody else was. I had to learn how to make it interesting for people to play at my table.

The first trick I stumbled on to make this interesting was allowing my players to make lasting changes to the Wilderlands. Some DMs at that time got really bent out of shape if you "screwed" up their campaign world. The climax of my very first Wilderlands campaign involved the players carving out kingdoms in the Valley of the Ancients.

I read enough history at that point to know that in order to make a kingdom a success you have to do A, B, C, D, and E. The specifics differed but basically involved lining up resources, allies, and retainers. Of course we were playing AD&D so this meant that there were complications and that meant adventuring to resolve them.

In my first wilderlands campaign I ran a series of adventures for my players starting at 10th level. By the end they were 18th level. After this most of them had successfully established their kingdom.

The unexpected side-effect it solved the problem of balancing high level play. Large number of gold, and magic-items, doesn't really matter when you are struggling to build your realm. You can go slaughter hundreds of your enemies and the problems of ruling are still there at the end of the day.

The another benefit came in the next campaign when the new batch of characters had to deal with the new kingdoms that were established. It was then I discovered that the players actually respected and feared these kingdoms. Because all the defenses and tricks they used to establish their realms can now be turned against them.

By the time I graduated High School I had run a half dozen campaigns in the Wilderlands using the result of the earlier campaigns as background for the later ones.

So for me the most important points in running a Sandbox Fantasy are

1) Players should be allowed to have a meaningful impact on the setting both large and small.
2) The results of past campaigns serve as background for the current campaign.
3) The focus on establishing their legacy solves many of the problems of high level play.

Two Robs, a Jim and a Pirate Stamp : A mini Con

Rob and I went to a convention last weekend. Well, it was more like an organized game day. Four bucks at the door, a room full of tables begging to be used, and many interesting games I’d only heard of. This was the first con I’d gone to in over 15 years.

Initially, I went to check out the vendors and drop off a couple of things to Rob. I’d brought my wife to experience the gaming culture . To see who Rob and I write for and to see it in action. When we got there they put a big red pirate stamp on the back of our hands. She didn’t like that. The vendors turned out to be just one, Jim. I spoke with Jim for a while and he told me he ran a gaming store years ago and decided to try it again. The stores that have gaming products don’t have anyone who knows anything about gaming. Jim is a gamer. When Jim heard Rob was in the business he planned on ordering a few copies of Points of Light so Rob could do a presentation at his shop. I spent double my budget for the show (good thing my wife was distracted by the pirate stamp).

Rob playing a WWI dog fighting game with fantastic model planes glued to antennas. Next to them was a group playing a card game I’d never heard of. Of course there was a group in the corner with their 5000 War Hammer miniatures with a very cool set up of a burned out city block. And I believe I did see a Magic the Gathering duel.

Then there was a table with a guy sitting behind a well-used 3.5 DM screen. The DM, another Rob, invited me to join his game. At first I declined, but after talking to him I found something I’d lost for a while, the excitement of a face-to-face game. After scrounging for a few spare dice and borrowing a pencil I played a half-orc fighter that turned out to be a blast. Rob played a cleric and spouted out his blessings with vigor and a little too much spit at times.

After sticking around three hours longer than I planned and spending more money than I expected, I left tired, broke and psyched. And if that wasn’t enough I had a stack of new gaming products to read. Life is good.

Origin of My Sandbox Fantasy

When I was in elementary school in the 70's I read constantly about everything. By 6th grade I had read over 2/3rd of the books in our school library and nearly all of the fiction. My greatest interest was maps. I loved maps. History was a close second. In addition to all the cool historical stories and I got even more maps of times and places of the past.

I started playing AD&D seriously in the fall of 1979 just after the DM's Guide was released. My mother was a elementary school teacher and did a lot of craft projects for her kids. She had a stock of 1/2 inch graph papers that I thought would be perfect for mapping a world like the one in the back of the Lord of the Rings. You see while I love the map of Middle Earth it wasn't enough. I wanted to know what was in all those white spaces. I wanted maps like the shire map for Nurn, Rohan, Dale, and so on.

AD&D gave me the incentive because after I was done I can use the result as a DM!. In addition to the graph paper I also got a hold of a white 24" by 36" pasteboard. On it I drew my Middle Earth. It had a Gondor and a Rohan but I didn't trace over Tolkein's Middle Earth. I made my own original land.

I just read a book on cartography along with a chapter on scaling. So I took that giant posterboard and scribed a grid the same proportion as the graph paper I was using. I then cut the board up into two dozen or so rectangles. Understand this was around 1980. Pre-computer as far as any graphic arts goes. Using those rectangles I started transcribing them onto sheets of graphic paper fleshing the details of each region. I believe each 1/2 square equaled 10 miles.

Sadly all of this was lost, the only remains is a second pasteboard on which I recreated some of the original big map.

This was my campaign for a year. It was really was not that interesting as it served as little more than a backdrop for connecting Keep on the Borderlands and other early modules. The setting detail was derivative of the Lord of the Rings.

When I saw the advertisement for the Greyhawk Folio I knew I had to have it. Late in 1980 I was able to get a copy and it promptly became my main campaign.

And I hated running it. Don't get me wrong I loved reading it. I loved the product itself.

Remember I wanted to know more about the white area in Middle Earths and I wound up detailing my first setting to the 10 mile level. Well Greyhawk had the howling emptiness of the 30 mile Hex. Not only that it had thousands of these hexes. I found out trying to detail all that was a LOT of work.

I ran one campaign and it was a success. However I was unhappy at the amount of prep work I was doing. Granted if I was more experienced I probably could have worked around it. But what did I know? I was just entering High School.

One day I want down to State Street Model (my FLGS at the time) and there was a product called Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Containing 3 judges map (2 double sided) and 3 players maps (ditto) and book that had nearly every hex DETAILED! Then there was City-State which was completely detailed on a city level. Needless to say I bought everything on the Wilderlands I could afford and never looked back.

From the Attic: City State

This is the very first Harn style map I ever did for my Majestic Wilderlands. I did this around 1986 on a light table in one of my Geography labs. I was able to laminate this just before the point of irreversible damage as it got heavy use.

I did this because my original CSIO maps were falling apart from extensive use and I had some improvements in mind.

Don't get me wrong the original CSIO map was great. But I felt it could be tweaked even better. The main differences is that I made many of the buildings smaller, cut in more alleyway. Redid the fortifications and walls so that they made sense. At least from my point of view.

I move the Arena to the other side of the road and made a whole new Arena district filled with gladiator schools and slums. (particularly the block next to the refuse dump).

I also redesigned the Goblin Reservation and rebuilt the Wharf district into something that would work better as a port. The area under the docks are entire community unto themselves as hundreds of boats are tied up to the piles underneath.

My Religions for the Majestic Wilderlands are different than the original city state. The big building near the center is the Cathedral of Mitra and other big building to the north is the Hellbridge Temple operated by the Church of Set. I cleared out the building to the south of the Temple to form a square.

The U shape building in the center of the city is the Palace of the Silver Dragons which was the old City Government building before the Tharian Overlord conquered City-State 200 years ago.

Nearly all the old shops are still in the same locations and I use the original CSIO as reference as I never had the time to completely rewrite the whole thing.

I was quite please with this and started the long process of redrawing the entire Wilderlands.

And yes I drew each and every tree that appeared on this map.

The Cow in the Attic - Players POV

Note this is authored by Boris the Bagger, who will be posting his own thoughts from time to time.
-Rob

Like Rob said, he was going through a phase of trying out several game systems. This was after 2nd edition AD&D hit and none of us seemed interested in it. We were searching for the next system we could latch onto. I think we gamed twice a week back then, in person (what a rarity these days).

Rob always had Harnmaster lingering in the background. We were entering a game system we had no experience with. We’d just left a 1st Ed. AD&D where all three of us could pretty much quote every monster HD and damage and what was on what page in the DMG. Neither D nor I knew much about Harn, but I liked the maps and the few articles I read were excellent. As I recall, the combat system was interesting, having to treat individual wounds and one hit could ruin your character for months. We went from a system that promoted fantastic, heroic characters, to a system that promoted realistic characters dealing with harsh realities of a medieval world.

So the infamous ‘Cow Adventure’. Hmm. Rob had run a few sample combats for us to get used to that part of the game. But anyone who knows Harn knows that is just one star in the sky for that system. Where D and I started to get frustrated was when we walked to an inn that was two days away and we were being killed by rain. The weather was draining our fatigue every few hours. I remember thinking we are going to die because of shattered showers. I’m not sure why we didn’t have any food, but do remember the cow hunt. Now Rob and I disagree with this section, D (the one member of our group who can remember what we rolled on the dice as well as the events) said we first tried to hunt, but I lost the trail six times, then we found a cow pasture and tracked a cow, but again I had trouble tracking it. When we spotted the elusive bovine we were so fatigued neither of us could hit it and the damn cow ran away.

This has become an inside joke for us over the years. In retrospect I believe the problems were with the system expectations of the players and our ability, players and GM to conform to those expectations. We were used to being heroes who laughed at hordes of evil critters. Food was not something to be worried about. Weather? What weather? With Harn we were just Joe Shmoo fighters who got hungry, got sick, got tired, and needed to pay attention to the smallest of details.

I guess if there is a moral to this story its to understand the philosophy of the game as well as the rules. Rob spoke about immersion in an earlier blog and while it is essential for a campaign to have depth it is also important not to drown your players in it. Back then Rob was more rules oriented and D and I were less patient. The good thing that came out this was the next system we tried was, GURPs, and that’s the one we latched onto. After that, I had no trouble killing cows.

A Cow in the Attic

One way I enhance immersion is add a healthy dose of realism to the campaigns I run. In one infamous incident I went way way overboard.

Harnmaster is one of the view specialized RPGs I like. It is focused on running low fantasy campaign in a medieval setting namely Harn. The best part of Harnmaster is it's combat system. It is one of the few combat rulesets I seen that manages to pull the players into the game.

The trick is that it doesn't have hit points. Instead each successful hit deal so much injury. The injury act as a negative modifier to your subsequent attributes rolls (varying d6s) and skill rolls (percentile). If nothing else bad happens you will be reduced a shambling wreck barely able to lift your sword.

The really bad stuff happens with the individual blows. When you get hit the injury that you inflict caused the victim to make various saving throws against their attributes, unconsciousness, dismemberment, shock, and yes death are some of the possible results. The attributes rolls are effect negatively by your current injury levels so it is unlikely you will be dead before reaching the shambling wreck level.

The clunky part of this system is having to record each hit you take. Mainly because the healing rules involve treating individual wounds instead of getting a chunk of hit points back. Also you absolutely need the one page combat chart. Luckily it is a marvel of graphic design and snap to use. The armor system is detailed and something you don't setup on the fly. It involves adding up different values for a lot of hit locations. However this is all work before the start of play.

However despite the chunkiness of having to record each wound this the mechanic that really immerses the player into the game. The combination of knowing what type of damage that was inflicted (blunt, slashing, piercing, etc), the detailed listing of hit locations, and exact severity of was done to your character's poor body just pisses yes pisses off the player.

Again in actual play that marvel of a combat chart makes it quick to resolve actions. So the player quickly know that he just got slashed in the upper biceps. Or got a severe bruise in the upper chest that left him winded. The accumulated effect is that your enemy is out to get you and by god you are going to get him back.

Oh right the cow story

Well I ran two successful Harnmaster campaigns in college. When I returned home I thought I could interested my group back in Meadville. This was after we quit using Fantasy Hero 1st edition and before we started used GURPS. I was trying out multiple RPGs on everybody and rightfully so they were getting tired of it.

So relucently two of my oldest friend D and Boris the Bagger agreed to try Harnmaster.

A short background note here. Harn is mostly wilderness. Culivated regions are clustered into several small areas.

The players started in the Kingdom of Kaldor in the eastern part of Harn. The first part of the adventure went off relatively well. They had a few fights and like the previous campaigns the combat system really drew them in.

I don't remember the reason for this but it wound up they had go west to the Trobridge Inn. The Trobridge Inn is halfway on the Salt Route between Kaldor and the western realms of Harn. Several days into the wilderness. To be fair they did heed my warning about stocking up. However the price lists of Harn are just as brutally realistic as the combat and there was only so much they could buy.

During the journey to the Trobridge Inn, they got caught by bad weather (randomly rolled). The Salt Route became muddy and soon they were looking at a journey a lot longer then they planned.

One of the player had a decent tracking skill. So they decided to hunt before starving.

In one of the Harnlore magazines there is a niftly little hunting system. Basically you have a chance of finding a trail, the trail is rated in the number of hours old it was, you also rolled for what made the trail. Every four hours you rolled your tracking skill and success will reduce how old the trail was. When you hit zero you found what you were tracking.

Well it may be a niftly little game within a game but a combination of failed and medicore dice rolls meant this went way longer than it should have. For the next two days they followed this animal's trail exhausting their supply of food.

Finally they got the number down to zero and was able to track down what they were following.

A cow.

The two turned to each other and looked back to me. "Rob, this is absolutely the stupidiest game you ever ran. We are never going to play this again. You had us nearly dying to track down what! A cow!"

This incident had a powerful effect on my later style. I will explore this more deeply in a later post. But the short answer is that prior to this incident I was a realism junky, afterwards I started examining why I using realism and more importantly what my friends really wanted out of the game.

This change did not happen overnight, it took several years and one more infamous incident (this time at a boffer LARP) to ram the point in.