How to manage a sandbox campaign: The pre-game

Last post I mention three broad areas on managing sandbox campaigns. The pre-game, the bag of stuff, and world in motion.

The pre-game is crucial to a successful sandbox campaign. Nothing kill a sandbox campaign quicker than the lack of meaningful choices. It doesn't matter if you have two dozen want ads on the campaign's tavern board if the player doesn't have any way to judge which one is best for their character. They might as well roll a dice to see what ad to pick.

The purpose of the pre-game is to give the character a context in which to make their initial choices.

Using my Blackmarsh setting as an example; the players makes up a human fighter.

Blackmarsh Human Origin

1. former Bright Empire (d6 1-2 Castle Blackmarsh, 3-6 other settlement)
2. Ostrobard
3. Vasan Viking
4. Grand Kingdom
5. Rangers of Blackmarsh
6. Other (d6; 1 raised by another race, 2 from the Ochre Empire, 3-6 from another culture)

Each of the above choices present different possibilities for the character. Who do they know for contacts, what they are concerned about, and what complications they have to deal with.

For example a 3 is rolled for Vasan Viking. During the pre-game it is decided that the character's father was an baron of Vasa who banked a sum of gold with a banker in Castle Blackmarsh. After the conquest of Vasa, the merchant conveniently "lost" the record when the character's father attempted to collect it. The baron's copy was lost in the conquest. The player decides to have the character vow to recoverthe lost fortune.

Along with this referee notes that the copy is currently held at Norbury castle along with a bunch of other scrolls, records, and books from Vasa. Notes the details of the banker, his allies, and his enemies along with some adventure hooks relating to all this.

With items like this resulting from the pre-game the player has the context to make his initial choices in a sandbox campaign centered in Blackmarsh.

Here are some techniques to use as a starting point for your own pre-game.

You need to be knowledgeable about your setting. Note this is NOT mean you need something like Tekemul, Harn, or my Majestic Wilderlands. You can use this with little more than a mountain with a dungeon and a village at it base.

How? Because D&D itself has a context, the vaguely feudal medieval, swords & sorcery themes that inspired the original the rule book. Reflect on what elements you want to incorporate into your campaign and make some notes. You don't really need any specific details as to names, or geography. Only the understanding that there is a probably some kingdoms with a king, dukes, and baron. That there is a forest of elves, a mountain of dwarves, and a quaint land full of hobbits err halflings. Just make the player aware that some specifics will be filled in later.

But in the end you have a bunch of characters whose players all know why they are heading to this particular village next to this particular mountain. And the character will have goals independent of just cracking open the dungeon door and looting what inside.

The format of the pre-game.

Alex expressed some concern in a comment to the previous post.

...and the one time a GM asked me for a one on one session that basically sent me into a two week mental freeze.

I can see that happening but the pre-game does not need to be a one on one roleplaying session.

The majority of my pre-games are simply me talking to the players before the game. Basically it is a interview. I ask what they want to play, the player throw out some things, I throw out some choices, the player think the choices suck, I throw out some more, the player likes being an Agent of the Black Lotus, we talk about that, the player finds it limiting but likes the stuff about the Brotherhood of the Lion (a thieves guild), and so rolls up a thief. And then we talk further about the character background. However informal or formal you make the pre-game, the end result is a background for the character.

The pre-game works best when you have no more than two pages of detail. One page for personal background, and one page of general information. This post has a background from one of the campaigns I ran in the 90s. The second half, which I no longer have, was four paragraphs and gave general details on City-State, the Black Lotus, and the Order of Thoth.


You could do a one on one roleplaying session, but some will find it too elaborate or time consuming. While others will just sit the table as a group before the first game and talk about the campaign and why are there. The important part is that it is done before the start of play, and it conveys both campaign and personal character info. Doing this give the context in which the players can being interacting with your setting.

I use the interview technique because the Majestic Wilderlands has a lot of details. I found it to be the most effective and fun way of getting what the player needs to know about the setting.

For the novice to the Majestic Wilderlands, I don't get into the details of the setting right away. I simply asked that based on their knowledge of fantasy and D&D what would they like to play. After that I start giving some choices and details from the setting.

Using Blackmarsh as an example, the player say I want to be a human thief. I say "You can be from the Company of Honorable Men, a thieves guild in Castle Blackmarsh which is . Or be a ranger specializing in spy type work that requires thief skills. Or you can be a treasure seeker looking for vis and artifact from the Grand Kingdom. An Ostrobard or Vasan that from improvised background and living hand to mouth.

We go back and forth asking each other questions and giving answers. Finally the players decides on what they want to be.

Then the next step to personalize the character by talking about the character's background. Is he from a rich or poor family, who were his allies, friends, and enemies. The most valuable treasure is my campaigns is not the +1 sword you gain from killing the minotaur but the allies and friends you gain along the way. Using this technique allows the player to take advantage of this from the start of the campaign.

Last are interesting complications for the character. The two of you should consider what has driven the character to be an adventurers. You want to skew the complications to something that works well for adventuring.

Last you need to realize that as the referee you have formidable powers to manipulate this process. Now you don't going to get a player to play something he doesn't like but you can tweaks things so it fits better for the type of campaign you are planning to run. But more importantly, you manipulate the pre-game to provide natural reasons for the party to stick together.

I found that done right, players with characters that would otherwise beat the crap out of each other work together because they have some mutual or reinforcing goals. This is much more powerful technique for keeping a party together than a referee fiat.

By this point, I written quite a bit on the pre-game and some of you are probably thinking that is pretty elaborate for the game you like to run. In reality all this doesn't take much time and I will bet that 90% of you are doing some sort of pre-game right now. My "interview" doesn't look much different than chatting with the players about the campaign before it starts. The difference is that I am trying to do prep in a more consistent way.

Even you use none of my techniques, the most valuable thing you can do to improve your campaign is analyze what you do to prepare players. Especially if you are unhappy with how thing turned out in a previous campaign. By breaking it down, you will find the area that you need to improve but also find that you been doing a lot of things that are good.

How to manage a sandbox campaign

JB over at B/X Blackrazor posted about the issues he had with sandbox campaign style. ChicageWiz takes issue and answers his post point by point.

JB issues are not new, there are numerous posts on various blogs and forums, like Enworld, that recount the failure of a sandbox campaign. All the issues that JB raises in W for Wandering Adventures I seen written by others.

So what going on? Part of the problem is how the term sandbox campaign arose. A bunch of us who helped with Necromancer Game's Wilderlands of High Fantasy adopted it to described what the massive boxed set was good for. A setting full of local details so your players always have something waiting for them over the next hill. It simple and easy to grasp and probably helped sell a lot of those expensive boxed sets.

And it was the worse possible way we could have chosen to describe what we all did with our versions of the Wilderlands. Because the reasonable conclusion that most referees came to after listening to us was: pick out a village/town, do some prep, players make characters, and have them show up at the gate.

And more often than not it failed than succeeded. Why there were more failures? Because this particular setup require that the player not only be very active in digging info, but also lucky that the particular info they dug up was interesting. If all they managed to find was the mustard farmers being menaced by kobolds and the group thinks that's lame, it can be hard for a campaign to recover from that.

Then there were the campaigns where people recounted that they had a great time. Describing how they felt their choices really made a difference in the fortunes of their characters.

I thought for a while that some of it was about the sheer size of the Wilderlands Boxed set. So I created, with Joseph Goodman, the Points of Light series of settings. And later my How to make a Fantasy Sandbox series of posts. For 2008 and most of 2009 I wrote settings, gave my advice and wondered why the failures kept appearing. Then it hit me what is not being explained.

The heart of the sandbox campaign is the feeling that that for good or ill that it is the player's choices that control the fortunes of their character. The triumph is all the more sweeter as the player knows not only he overcame the challenge but also made it happen in the first place.

I noticed that most of the favorable posts described the middle or end game portion of the sandbox campaign. The players recounting the plots he brewed up, the complication he overcame, and describing how it came about what he choose or didn't choose. That when it hit me.

The successful sandbox campaign reached a point where the players have enough knowledge about the setting to where they feel they can make reasonable choices. The ones that failed where because the players felt they were just throwing darts randomly onto the hex map and going to that point. It seemed hit or miss to whether a sandbox campaign got that point where the players had enough knowledge to make reasonable choices.

Also I realized that for me, I haven't run for a long time the campaign where the player just showed up somewhere and start out by looking at the tavern want ads. Very early on I was influenced by a section in the original Harn Folio about the pre-game. This was a page of advice, with tables, where N. Robin Crossby tells you to sit down with the players, figure out where they came from (rolled on the charts), who their family are (more charts), and then run a little one on one session where the two of you figure how the character came to be an adventurer.

It all came together for me and I realize that the main reason these campaigns failed is that players didn't have context. And without context you can't make meaningful choices, that all you do is take a dart and let it land on the hex map. And hope that something interesting comes up.

So the key to fixing this issue is to give the players context right from the beginning of the game. The best way to do that is to take N. Robin Crossby's advice and run a one on one pre-game with each player in the campaign where the two of you work out together the character's background. Then when the campaign starts and they look at what beyond the gate of Castle Blackmarsh they have an idea of what going on, and something interesting things to do.

I will get into details about the pre-game in the next post. Also note that this is not the only issue that JB and other referees have with the Sandbox Campaign. I will also be talking about the referee's bag of stuff and how that makes management of a sandbox campaign considerably easier. Finally how to make your setting a world in motion.

The issue of Royalty RPGNow vs Lulu

Pat over at Henchman Abuse has a rebuttal to my post on RPGNow vs Lulu. It is well written except for one problem.

The non-exclusive royalty rate is 65% at RPGNow/DriveThruRPG.

From OneBookshelf FAQ

You earn a royalty of 70% if you are exclusive to our marketplaces or 65% if you choose to be non-exclusive and sell through other online stores. Our share of revenue covers our server upkeep, bandwidth, payment processing, marketing and customer service.

*In reply to Pat's Comment*
This is not available on a public link but the royalty rate is the same for print.

Q: How do royalty payments work on printed copies?

When you set-up a print option on one of your products, you will be shown the current cost to print each copy of the product. You will then be asked to set the margin you want on that title. For example, the print cost on a title might be $4.41 and then you choose to set your margin at $5.58, thereby setting the consumer price for that printed title at $4.41 + $5.58 = $9.99.

When that printed copy sells, the print cost is removed from the purchase price and we split the margin that is left with you per our usual royalty agreement with you (i.e. the same royalty percent you get on download sales). This is credited to your publisher royalty account in real time just like when a customer purchases one of you download products

*reply to Pat's further comments*

OK at first glance I was scratching my head at the linked agreement and then I remembered what the clause is for.

(b) OBS shall pay to Publisher a fifty-five percent (55%) royalty on the sales of Licensed Products for which Publisher submitted the Product to OBS as a hardcopy printed book suitable for OBS to scan and produce a digital file version

If you have a book with no digital file, you can send the book to OBS and they will scan it in for you and post the digital files for you to sell. But... they take a bigger cut in this case so you only get 55%. This is NOT the royalty rate for print. The royalty rate for print is the SAME as the royalty rate for PDFs as stated in the FAQ. The one exception is where you decide to offer the scanned digital file as a print copy. Which somebody with a popular out of print title from the 80s may decide to do.

Reading over my original post I wasn't clear on this point. For project larger than 84 pages and willing to use b/w publisher's quality then it is a wash. Lulu has a better royalty rate, RPGNow has a better shipping rate to foreign customers. RPGNow has a slightly better royalty rate on the PDF version and you have the ability to package multiple files and update notification while Lulu all you can offer is a single PDF.

But if you have a lower page count than 84, or if you are using color, the RPGNow is the better deal.

On Lulu, 16 pages can only be printed with standard paper for a cost of 5.90. ($7 - $5.90) * 80% = $0.88
On RPGNow, 16 pages can be printed full color for a cost of $2.50 + .30 fee ($7-$2.80) * 65% = $2.73

For b/w publisher quality printing Lulu gets a lot better the larger your margin. As Pat points out the 15% or 10% difference start adding up.

Majestic Wilderlands at digest 140 pages I make .36 more on Lulu 5.92 than RPGNow 5.56. Of course the difference grows the more is charged for the book. But I make 4.41 on Lulu for a PDF sale and 4.55 on RPGNow. I only get that by using Publisher Grade and as a consequence any oversea buyers faces the infamous large lulu shipping charges.

But what does this mean for the OSR Publisher?

*DISCLAIMER* please don't take this what if of an analysis of what it really cost James Raggi to produce Loftp RPG. He uses his own printer so this is purely a what-if.

Well let's look at one of the more expensive products out there Lamentation of the Flame Princess RPG. James Raggi has his own printing done but let's present it was going to be done Print on Demand. At 32.50 Euro it works out to $47 or so. Let round it up to $50. It is 360 total pages if combined. It is the European equivalent of digest size. I may be wrong about this but let's go with the smaller size.

On Lulu we find that 360 pages at digest size for b/w publisher quality is $7.90. So James Raggi would earn ($50 - $7.90)*80% = $33.68.

A RPGNow the cost would be $6.60 per book and he would earn ($50 - 6.60) * 65% = 28.21. A $5.47 hit per book. If he was exclusive then he would get $30.28 per book at hit of $3.40 per copy.

If he sold a 100 copies over a year, which is not unreasonable for a high quality project, $547 (or even $340) is a big hit for recouping costs.

However the price he would pay is that anybody outside out of the United States would get hit by exorbitant shipping rates. So he and any other publisher will have to weigh the lost overseas sales vs better royalty. I don't have much hard data but my impression is at least a quarter of the market for the OSR is overseas. There was a lot of the print MW that didn't get sold overses until I put it up on RPGNow.

But to be honest projects like the Lamentation of the Flame Princess are an outlier. Most OSR projects hover far below the $50 selling price $30 margin. In fact range roughly from $5 to $15. There the difference are much less dramatic and as in the case of my Majestic Wilderlands less than a dollar.

I appreciate Pat bringing up the royalty issues and his well thought out post but I still stand by my original recommendation that OSR publisher should consider RPGNow over Lulu for their publishing needs. This may change because of the evolving of the PoD technology so check and compare periodically.

If you are going to publish PoD use RPGNow not lulu

Part of the problem is that RPGNow POD prices are behind the publishers only menu but here are some comparisons to illustrate why RPGNow PoD is a better deal and why Blackmarsh is not on Lulu.

Lulu only competes with RPGNow using Publishers Grade B/W only and it has minimum page count of 84 for both digest and letter.

84 pages is $5.01 letter size b/w on lulu
84 pages is $3.84 letter size b/w on RPGNow

200 pages is 7.10 on Lulu
200 pages is 5.30 on RPGNow

For color it there is no comparison RPGNow beats the pants off of Lulu
100 pages letter color is $25.50 on Lulu
100 pages letter color is $11.50 on RPGNow

For low page count it is even more silly
16 pages letter color is 8.50 on Lulu
16 pages letter color is 2.50 on RPGNow

In fact the only way a product with less than 18 pages for RPGNow is to use the full color option.

RPGNow is a better Print On Demand service than Lulu for RPGs.
Plus it appears their shipping is more reasonable especially foreign shipping.

Techniques for dealing with large groups of gamers

During my monthly game, at the Gold Star Anime, I have an open game with varying numbers of players. In the past year I sometimes deal with groups larger than five players which is something I haven't dealt with for a long time. April's session was one with one such large group.

Normally my style is for each player to roll individual imitative. I always disliked the caller system and my style is to speak directly to each players as to what they want to do. But I admit this doesn't scale too well. For the large group sessions I been a bit erratic on how I handle things as I try to relearn old techniques after a gap of 30 years.

In April session I think I finally feel that I got a grip on two aspects of managing a large group. First retaining individual initiative, and wandering around a town or dungeon as separate individuals.

For initiative, I am going to a count down system. Basically start at the top with the highest number calling out for anybody who has that initiative and working my way down to 1. This way I don't have to fiddle with my initiative board. I think this works great with large groups and allows for the individual bonuses to come into play.

For town or when the party splits, I use a strict round robin policy. I start on my left and referee that player or group for two or three minutes and go onto the next person or group. The key element is timing, looking at the roleplaying/action and getting a feel for the right moment to cut them off. Combat is rather easy due to the round structure. For roleplaying to go around town I generally use one complete exchange between a player and a NPCs. For example going to a shop and ordering magic items. The danger of not doing this right means you have players sitting around twiddling their thumbs. But on other the other hand the individual players get some center stage time like in a smaller game.

It a compromise and I am always juggling things around keeping the game moving forward, the players having fun and retaining interest. One thing is that I need to look at the seating arrangement as the long table means that the players seated farthest away are least engaged. I am thinking of turning the table longwise so everybody is sitting in front of me like a panel. That should cut the distance between me and the furthest player down considerably as well as make the game board more accessible. The other method is to make a T with me sitting at the top and the players sitting in the L section on both sides.

Blackmarsh and Majestic Wilderlands Reviews

Zombie Cowboy has some good things to say about Blackmarsh in a short review of Blackmarsh.

Over the RPG.NET Zachary of RPGBlog2 gives glowing review of the Majestic Wilderlands. Also in the comment sections I replied to a customer about the reasons why the Majestic Wilderland supplement was made the way it was. Some of you may find it useful for your own publishing plans.

What it took to publish Blackmarsh

January 20th
Sent email to John Adams offering him a setting. Noted that the only compensation I wanted was credit and for the entire setting to be under the OGL.

January 21st
John likes the idea and we agree to chat on Skype to hash out details

January 23rd
The other Delving Deeper developers like the idea.

Beginning of February
It took a couple of days to coordinate schedules but we finally manage to chat. Agree it was to be digest size and no more than 24 pages plus one 8.5 by 11 map.

Middle of February
Decide to use the Blackmarsh map after talking it over with Tim of Gothridge Manor. Due to needing this done by the end of March I didn’t want to draw another map. So the final choice came down to between Blackmarsh and The Outdoor Map. Tim thought Blackmarsh looked more interesting.

February 15th
Wrote the Introduction, Overview, and History

February 20th
Rewrote history, the first version was based off of the Greyhorn Setting I wrote for the live-action roleplaying chapter I ran. While I could made it work it didn’t have the gold rush feel I wanted and frankly I wanted something unique to Blackmarsh. This is version 1.

March 5th
Completed First Draft sans rumor table, city key, and Castle Blackmarsh map. This is version 2. It had Stat Blocks. Sent it to John for initial approval along with the question do I include stat blocks or not?

March 5th
John and the DD team likes it and tells me to axe the stat blocks. Yay!

March 6th
Went through and edited version 2, got rid of the few Stat Blocks I had and saved it as version 3.

March 7th
Sent it to Tim, Started working on Version 4 with the City Stuff added.

March 12th
Get the edits back from Tim saves at Version 5, review edits and make a handful of changes and saves it as Version 6.

March 22nd
Finish City, and Rumors in Version6. Send it to Tim again. Also sent it to Dwayne and the Rusty Battleaxe for edits and comments. Finished the City Map.

March 24th
Tim and I get on Skype and read out loud the entire document, applying edits as we go. This becomes version 7.

March 26th
Apply the edits sent in by the Rusty Battleaxe saves it as version 8.

March 27th
Layout day for the digest version.
When through my purchased Stock Art and began picking out suitable pieces. Mostly landscapes. Created a new art subdirectory with a subdirectory for each vendor. Copied the picked pieces into each vendor’s subdirectory so I knew who to credit.

Converted all at to CMYK 32-bit TIFFs important for PDFX/1a compatibility. Otherwise the RPGNow convertor will kick in and I wanted to avoid that as I am pretty sure it is the source of why my art and map were half-tone in the Majestic Wilderlands.

Created the digest title page which is also it’s cover.

Did the layout for the digest size version. Had to mess around with the font size and the OGL license text font size to get everything into 24 pages.

March 29th
Final Digest PDF created and sent to John Adams
Greyhawk homage cover created for RPGNow.

March 31st
Finished the Letter size PDF it is 15 pages compared to the digest’s 24 page. I had to leave the last page blank per Lightning Source specs.

Letter size PDF is successfully converted to PDFX/1a format using Adobe Acrobat

Setup RPGNow product and uploaded files

Setup RPGNow print on demand I chose full color costing $2.50 per book.

Decide to go with $7 for my book price which nets me $2.77 per sale. If I was going to sell the PDF I would have sold it for $4. Which I calculated by dividing 2.77 by .65 and rounding to the nearest whole dollar amount. The .65 comes from the 65% I get from RPGNow.

April 2nd
Print PDF now goes into Lightning Source processing queue.

April 8th
Print PDF clears processing and now available for order. I could have released then but that not a good idea until I see for myself what it looks like. So I order two books for myself costing 11.45. Shipping doubles the price.

April 14th
Books get here and look great! Release of Blackmarsh.

April 15th
286 gamers downloaded or bought Blackmarsh. Hopefully are enjoying reading it and getting some great ideas for their campaign. 50 gamers downloaded the Blackmarsh SRD at batintheattic.com. Note if you ordered the free PDF off of RPGNow it has the SRD.