Building the Sandbox

After thinking about running a campaign to the roots of gaming and considering the various possibilities offered to me for a while, I finally settled for the World of Greyhawk as our backdrop. Just as I wanted to use the Original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D) rules and let the game system shape itself organically, from actual play, I knew I wanted to make the game world our own, through and through.

This meant I wouldn’t try to run an official, “canon” version of the World of Greyhawk, but instead would create my own setting by picking and choosing among the many offerings of the 1983 boxed set. Along with other game elements from outside sources I would want to use in such a campaign, I would rearrange all these bits and pieces into a coherent, workable whole that would entertain us by providing a large, open-ended background for the game.

What applies to rules, I thought, must apply to the setting as well.


One of the characteristic aspects of vintage gaming to me is what many aficionados of the game call “the sandbox campaign”. The idea stems from the realization that the game isn’t about telling stories, or narratives, or anything of that sort. The game is about actual, if fictional, events as they occur, experienced by the players as they immerse themselves into their characters’ roles. The “story” here is a consequence of game play, the stuff you can talk about to your buddies once the game has been played.

The idea of the Jade Lantern here is just a component of a much larger environment which may be explored by the players’ characters (PCs), or not at all. It’s not up to me, the Dungeon Master (DM), to force the players to investigate this or that mystery of the game world, but rather to react to their decisions, whatever they may be.

This is why so many adventure modules were based on locations, and their keyed descriptions thereof, rather than laundry lists of events which could, would, or should occur if the PCs decided to do this or that during the game.

The direct application of this principle on the scale of the entire game world itself is the notion of a sandbox, a large area centered around the PCs that they can explore to their hearts’ content, whenever they please, however they please. In practice, this means the PCs start somewhere, at a point X on a map. From there, they can go North, South, East or West, and explore the setting. It’s an open world, a completely free, unscripted game experience, which I believe brings about the best out of role-playing game sessions.

With all this in mind, I picked up some hex graph paper and, using the original Greyhawk maps, started to craft the campaign setting.


First, I took the East Mark as depicted in Castle Zagyg, vol. 1 – Yggsburgh and blended it with the Greyhawk area of the 1983 boxed set. It was like fitting two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, rounding out edges where they didn’t exactly fit, in some areas, and just letting my imagination run wild and draw whatever came to mind, in some others. I ended up with a fair idea of what the resulting geographical landmarks would look like: rivers, lakes, forests, swamps, hills and mountain ranges. A few surprising elements came up from this process, like for instance the presence of a gulf very similar to the Morbihan I always wanted to use in a medieval setting.

I then placed adventure locations on the map, the goal being to provide possibilities of delves and exploration wherever the PCs decided to go. Some came from other game resources, like Rappan Athuk and Bard’s Gate from Necromancer Games, Clydwell Keep from Paizo, Castle Whiterock from Goodman Games, Brindenford from Monte Cook’s DungeonADay website, and more. Other locations were of my own design, like the Oerthwound (though the name is obviously inspired by Golarion’s Worldwound), the Black Abbey (my own megadungeon project), the Sunken City or the village of Aradon (which is a direct translation of my father’s childhood town in Bretagne, France, along the shore of the Morbihan Gulf I talked about earlier).

Progressively, the Greyhawk area became “my” Dunfalcon area, a region ripe for adventure and exploration.

Once I was done with the map’s hand-drawn design and shaded the various areas with pencils, I scanned it and coloured it all using Photoshop, placed standardized icons for the various locations and landmarks I depicted, and finally added all the names, designations, scale and other components the map required to be complete.

This is the final result:


I now had a complete sandbox. All I needed at this point was a starting point, a base situation for the game to begin. This would be my next step.

Post Scriptum (October 08, 2009): While discussing this setting at the Knights & Knaves Alehouse, the scale of the original East Mark and its adaptation to my Dunfalcon map brought up some interesting facts and comparisons.

The original East Mark fold-up map included Castle Zagyg, vol. 1 – Yggsburgh had no scale included, whereas the Players' maps, later released as an electronic document on the Troll Lord Games website, did indicate one hex equals 1.5 miles. This is in direct contradiction with the landmark references in the original text of the book, which basically imply that one hex equals 1 mile. The corresponding area on the Dunfalcon map I drew is much larger, with about 1 hex of the original Yggsburgh map equating to about 2 miles of the Dunfalcon setting.

In other words, according to the text of the Yggsbugh volume, Darlene's East Mark is about 33 x 50 miles, while the scale included on the Players' electronic version results in the same area being about 50 x 70 miles. The corresponding area on my Dunfalcon map is about 70 x 100 miles.

It's also worth noting that, while trying to retrofit the East Mark within the Greyhawk area, I contemplated the possibility of greatly increasing the scale of the overall map. I was thinking of one hex = 10 miles, originally, but was unsure about the results. I actually had to superimpose a map of Eastern France on the original Greyhawk map to realize the full scale of it all, and finally decided against any further modification of its scale, thus keeping one hex = 6 miles for the final map you can see here.

The Jade Lantern

Spoiler alert: If you are a player of the upcoming campaign discussed here, please do not read any further. This will completely spoil the fun of the game for you. You have been warned.

After I’ve discussed the basic premises of the campaign with the potential players, I usually need to let this all mature and work itself out. I wouldn’t write about it, wouldn’t really try to structure anything just yet, but would rather write down ideas, bits and pieces of inspirations that would allow me later to have a clear idea of where I’d want to go with the campaign.

In this instance, I already had a clear idea of the setting. I knew the game would be run with the vicinity of Greyhawk and Yggsburgh in my own Oerth. I knew I wanted to use elements of DungeonADay and my own designs through the Black Abbey of St. Yessid.

Since Nerissa created an Oriental character, and since she was disappointed that I wouldn’t use Oriental Adventures straight out of the box, I knew I would have to bring a strong Oriental flavour into a very medieval version of the Flanaess. I knew I couldn’t just blend the two. The result would just have weakened both components of the campaign by fusing them into an unrecognizable whole, which was completely at odds with my original goals to experience a vintage gaming experience (1).

I needed a way to actually make both settings coexist into a single campaign. The fact that I had thought of using Oriental components into my layout of the Black Abbey through an old, evil mandarin raised from the dead in the depths of the earth after being smuggled there by pirates a long, long time ago provided me with the seed I needed.

Somehow, the actual overarching quest of the game would be linked with that original lost mandarin buried within the dungeons of the Black Abbey. Rather than a simple goal, however, I wanted the Oriental flavour to carry the campaign in the medieval setting of the Flanaess.

This is when I thought of the Jade Lantern, an artefact that would allow the user to be transported to an alternate plane of existence, some sort of Oriental pocket or demi-plane, to be more precise. There, the spirit of the mandarin would be trapped out of existence. He would seek whoever entered the demi-plane and try to use the visitors as vehicles through the material plane to make the conditions of his literal reincarnation happen.

How would it happen? Who was this lost mandarin I kept writing about?

I would read through game materials of Oriental Adventures, look through Asian myths and legends and would never quite find what I was looking for. This is then, when it seemed like I had to come up with a completely made-up character on my own, that I thought about Lo Pan.

I suppose many of you have seen John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. The adventures of Jack Burton in Chinatown would ultimately pit him against an undying, incorporeal noble who would have been cursed by Qin Shi Huang, the First Sovereign Emperor of China, to live between worlds until he could marry a woman with green eyes.

Though I didn’t have to stick in any way with the movie’s plot, this provided me with enough material to decide to use Lo Pan straight away. He would make a great bad guy, certainly could be shaped into whatever I wanted him to be in a D&D Oerth context. Both Swords & Wizardry's Ruins & Ronins and the original Oriental Adventures would provide me with all the mechanical support I would need. I am covered in that regard.

I’m still not sure what exact components will be needed to allow Lo Pan to come back to the material plane, but whatever they are, the players will need to travel to all the locations I originally wanted to use in the campaign.

I intend to use the Jade Lantern, or rather to let it be used by the players, as a gateway to a neutral ground where they can get advice, side-quests and other experiences in an Oriental setting. This means, of course, that if this is indeed Lo Pan’s prison, and if the players meet him from the get-go, the mandarin will first try to look like an ally and manipulate the characters into helping him.

Maybe the discovery of each of the actual components necessary to Lo Pan’s reincarnation could trigger some other, yet similar access to other realms of existence and other side-quests associated to them. The main reason to spawn such side-effects and side-quests would be to not have the Jade Lantern itself constitute some sort of deus ex machina of the campaign, or a bottleneck of the adventures' design. I don't want the PCs to ever "have to" use the Jade Lantern but to instead feel compelled to do so by the very allure of the Lantern itself.

I’m still debating what these quest components necessary for Lo Pan's resurrection would be. As you can see, the actual brainstorming is still going on. If you have any idea, or input to share with me, by all means do so by commenting on this entry! Who knows what we could come up together?

In the meantime, I’ll keep writing down all the ideas that come to mind and shape them into an actual workable campaign frame.

(1) - Interestingly enough, working with Oriental components in a campaign attempting to reach back the roots of gaming actually is very much in tune with the evolution of the game, as far as Oriental Adventures are concerned, especially from a French perspective. One of the prime individuals who would make OA happen would be François Marcela Froideval, who would later create the French magazine Jeux & Stratégie which itself would later morph into Casus Belli, a landmark on the French gaming scene by all accounts.

Campaign Wish List

I believe one important step in campaign-building consists in an exchange of thoughts and wishes between players and referee. It is the only way to communicate in the clearest of terms what the game will be about, and what the players can get out of it.

It is a win-win situation for the referee.

First, it allows him to know how to reach a certain level of satisfaction from the other participants, and through it, what kind of challenges, and thus entertainment, are required for the game at hand.

Second, it promotes the idea that the campaign is a collaborative effort, and not solely the result of the referee’s imagination. In other words, the campaign before it even starts isn’t the referee’s game, but the group’s game. This is, I believe, central to the idea of role-playing games.

Third, it helps frame the campaign’s original concept into a workable whole, a template from which the game’s components will naturally spring to life.

Case in point: the game I am about to start with Nerissa, my better half, is going to be a Greyhawk campaign combining elements of Castle Greyhawk, Castle Zagyg, DungeonADay, as well as my own designs, through the Black Abbey of Saint Yessid, at the very least.

I know I want to be able to forge my own Greyhawk and not play someone else’s. This means all published Greyhawk materials are sources of inspirations, and not sources of canon. There is no canon in this campaign but mine.

The same logic applies to the game’s system. I want to be able to craft the rules as we go, and in so doing, to get the most out of it. I want to reach back to the roots of the game and make it mine. This is what entices me to use Swords & Wizardry (which truly is a combination of the 1974 original rules and some selected elements of Supplement I: Greyhawk) and build from the ground up.

Nerissa created a character for the Pathfinder role-playing game system back when I was working on Nall-Morrain. Our intention is to just convert the character’s concept into OD&D mechanics. This character, Pei Lin, is of Oriental decent. As I was perusing through AD&D’s Oriental Adventures, Nerissa was enthused at the idea of playing an Oriental campaign. When I told her this was at odds with my campaign goals (the spatial goal of playing within the Free City’s vicinity and all these dungeons I had in mind, namely), she looked sort of disappointed.

This alone pushed me to work on a way to use Oriental Adventures with a pure medieval Greyhawk, to get them to complement each other’s feel rather than blend them. I will talk a lot more about the Oriental components of this campaign later, so forgive me as to the teaser nature of this particular point.

Nerissa wants her character to travel, to experience the world, not only within a dungeon’s confines, but through journeys, outdoors exploration and the like. This goes against a single megadungeon’s approach. She wants some dungeon exploration and wants to kick butt, however. This, to me, suggests a blend of outdoors vs. dungeons, or rather, a journey between dungeons to fulfill an overarching goal or quest.

During one of the many conversations we had about this potential campaign, Nerissa told me she would like it to feature puzzles, dungeon exploration, some NPCs interactions and ways to use her thievery skills. Her original Pathfinder character is a rogue, and I do not want to make her choose between restricting options in a Swords & Wizardry environment - I would rather have her experience the minimalist approach of the rules through the game first rather than force it onto her before it even starts. This is why I plan on adopting a thief character class for this game from the get-go.

The “puzzle” component is interesting in the sense that Nerissa points out here that she wants to be challenged as a player, not a character. As Hercule Poirot would put it, she wants to have to use her little grey cells, which blends nicely with my vintage gaming aims, in that the players are just as much, if not more, challenged than the characters.

NPC interactions imply opportunities for such like inns, caravans, ship crews and the like while the thievery skills imply obstacles such as locks, chests, doors, cliffs/walls to climb as well as situations to charm, pick pockets, hide and sneak. The kicking butt component means just that: combat situations, occasions to just stick it to the adversaries, which rules out heavily investigative scenarios.

It’s actually quite shocking what you can grasp from a few exchanges between referee and players before any campaign elements have been designed. This provides some pointers, aims, campaign elements which all will ultimately help reach this most elusive of goals: entertainment for everyone around the game table.