ICONS Supporting Cast #1 - Billy Mack

(A lightning strike of inspiration during a drive into work this week)

Billy Mack -  A Detective Down in Texas

Prowess - 4 (Good) He's a tough customer

Coordination - 3 (Typical) Average in this regard

Strength - 4 (Good) He's a big guy

Intellect - 4 (Good) He's not super book-smart, but he's canny

Awareness - 5 (Excellent) He has good instincts and senses from years on the job

Willpower - 5 (Excellent) he doesn't give up easily

Stamina - 9

Determination - However much the DM says

Origin - Natural

Specialties - Investigation (Expert)


Powers
None!


Qualities
"Knows Exactly What the Facts Is" - He's a non-nonsense kind of guy who has a knack for cutting right to the heart of things. This can be tagged to help figure out a mystery or to for a flash of insight to get out of a dead end or even when hit by some kind of beguling power

Connections: Texas Law Enforcement

Motivation: "Ain't Gonna Let Those Two Escape Justice" - He is a determined, dogged pursuer of criminals and does not give up easily

Challenges
Enemies: Billy Joe and Bobbi Sue, a pair of armed and dangerous criminals

Bad Luck: Somehow sometimes his quarry just slips away

Description: He's a Texas detective so this is pretty simple: Suit, bolo tie, boots, cowboy hat. He carries a pistol and a badge and drives a Chevy Tahoe police model. For a younger version use Timothy Olyphant, for an older one Tommy Lee Jones pretty much defines the role.

Points-wise he's under 30 so he's more of a connection or a personified opponent for a hero who's brushed up against the law somewhere. He could also serve as a sort of rival who comes into town on a case that the heroes get involved with, starting some kind of competition to see who can solve it first.

Thoughts on the 40K RPG's

Apparently these are pretty popular right now and I've had a chance to look through the first three:

Dark Heresy: You're a fairly low-powered group of characters working for an Inquisitor rooting out heresy inside the Imperium. This does very little for me because while Inquisitors and their personal retinue are interesting, the guys that work for them at this level don't do as much for me. Plus, the things that you're investigating can get very powerful in a hurry and I suspect this would play out a lot like a Call of Cthulu game. I'm sure some peoepl would be interested in that but not me, and I think the popularity of this game was largely due to it being the first 40K RPG ever released rather than the awesomeness of the premise. Beyond this, I just don't think the spirit of 40K is in sneaking around uncovering mysteries - that's too much 90's conspiracy x-files game. The 40K part of the story begins after the planetary governor has turned to chaos and declared a rebellion and the sky fills with marine drop pods streaking towards the planet.

Rogue Trader: You're the command crew of an an interstellar trading ship sent to the borders of the Imperium with a warrant to trade and interact with Xenos cultures. Now this one is interesting - tons of freedom to do as you wish, enough power to not be overwhelmed the first time you find something interesting, and all of the cool background of the 40K universe to play in. It does have a bit of the Star Trek problem in that one player is supposed to be the ROgue Trader and theoretically in charge, but I don't think this would be a major issue most of the time. I like this one a lot.

Deathwatch: You're a Space Marine, from one of just about any chapter, and you've been assigned to an all-star team of space marines that deals with alien threats, primarily through violence. This is the highest powered game - marines have 20 genetically modified implants and organs, extensive training, access to the best weapons, and then they get power armor - and is centered around commando raids and assaults on things. It's a very military flavored game, but it also looks to me like it would be a lot like a super team - some rely on their "natural" talents, some are gadgeteers, and some have psychic powers - where dramatically overpowered beings invstigate and solve mysteries using a lot of violence. The small size of the team, differences between the chapters, personal rivalries, and competition make this a little different than a Traveller merc unit or even a Twilight 2000 player character group.

There's a 4th game out now called Black Crusade that deals with playing chaos marines, traitor marines from a civil war a long time ago. I haven't seen it yet but I assume that (much like the Chaos Marine Army in 40K itself) it caters to those players who want all the badaceness of the Marines without having to play the "good guys" - Heh.

The mechanics are the same as the Warahmmer Fantasy RPG second edition from a few years ago so it's pretty much all a percentile-based roll-under system. It's not as flashy as some, but it works, and the DM is encouraged to use a simple list of modifiers to run the game, from a -60 (Hellish) to a +60 (Trivial). Character stats are rated on a percentile scale and then skills allow a character to use the related stat to roll for a task. There are also Talents which are similar to Feats in d20 games, allowing a character to do something outside the normal rules. The whole thing is fairly clean and for the most part does not get bogged down in a bunch of subsystems or special exceptions.

I have to say I was pretty happy to see that these were finally coming out when they were announced. A 40K RPG has been a dream of many of us who have played 40K for a long time, and many, many homebrew efforts have been made, from custom systems to GURPS to Savage Worlds. Basing it off of the WFRP mechanics keeps a certain level of flavor (since the miniatures game 40K was based on and is still similar to Warhammer Fantasy Battles) and makes it fairly easy to translate the vast list of creatures and gear from 40K over to the RPG. The vast amount of lore in the 40K fluff gives the DM a lot of material to use for a campaign too. This is especially true if one has had some of the various side games published over the years: Battlefleet Gothic yields a lot of information on how ships and systems and fleets work in the 40K universe. Necromunda covers a lot of background on Hive Worlds and Gangers. Even going back to the original Rogue Trader game book that stated the whole thing gives a lot of information on creatures and terrain and general weirdness that might be encountered. The interlocking web of support of both useful game material and background details is probably only rivaled by D&D campaign worlds and maybe published universes like Star Wars and Star Trek. There's a ton of it, and when you get out to the more fringey material like the old Realm of Chaos books, there's a pretty good chance more recent players won't know anything about it.

So am I starting up a game of one of these? I'd like to, I'm just not sure where to fit it in. It will likely become one of the rotating "when we feel like it" games with the Apprentices. We have made characters for Deathwatch, and we will do the same for Rogue Trader, and we will play at least an introductory mission to get a better feel for it. After that, well, we will see.

Thoughts on a Middle Earth Campaign

Barking Alien had a good post on Monday here, particularly the part about playing a game in someone else's universe - it's worth a read

I like the closed vs. open description, that's not a bad way to visualize it. I tend to think of it as a question of whether I can work within the movie/show/book or do I have to work around it?  Star Trek is one I can work within because there are other interesting things going on in parallel with whatever show or movie you're watching - the rest of the universe is shown, not just mentioned and the plot of the typical show or movie doesn't fundamentally change the universe. It's hard to define in specifics but LOTR in contrast, is one where I feel like I would have to work around the main story because the plot does drastically change the environment.

In the specific case of LOTR I think my best option for running a middle earth game would be to set it quite a while after the end of the trilogy. At some point within 100 years or so the wizards are gone, most of the elves are gone, and the fellowship is all gone. Set it in the time of Aragorn's son's first few years and there's a new feeling in the world and with the passing of the heroes of the third age it's time for a new generation (cue theme music). There are still plenty of nasties in the world and there are plenty of good normal folk threatened by them - who's going to stand between that lingering darkness and the innocent and defenseless? Beyond the orcs and trolls there is old magic to be rediscovered and old cities of dwarves and men and elves to be reclaimed. It's a time of expansion, rediscovery, exploration, and pushing back the frontiers!

This approach lets you use all of the background material and lore and the races and cultures of middle earth without that feeling of playing second fiddle to the main story. I think "what happens next" is a nice way to make all of that relevant but not confining. Plus it's customizable to taste - want more connections with the big story? Set it in the later years of Aragorn's reign, make sure Gimil is still alive and Legolas is still around and maybe a couple of the elderly hobbits are still upright. Regardless, Treebeard and TOm Bombadil are going to be present for quite a while so even if you go later they can still provide a link.

With a theme of exploration, rediscovery, and a crusade against evil you have a reason to have adventures all over the map, moving through familiar areas as you do so. A nice range of character motivations fits in here from curiousity or restlessness to greed or vengeance against those orcs that wiped out your family. The type of adventures could include anything from dungeon crawls to cross-country pursuits to discovering and hunting down a dragon that's come down out of the north.

So that's my best take on how to make a LOTR game that would work for me. I realize you aren't going to be rubbing elbows with Frodo or Boromir, but for me that's not the attraction of the world anyway. I can see the armchair Tolkien scholar having some problems with it, but they're going to have problems with pretty much any game unless they can accept some compromises, and there's really only one big compromise here; Everything you know is in the past. Once you can get past that, then it seems like we could have some fun with this.

Sandboxing Rifts

While researching for my latest mania I realized that I ran and odd kind of sandbox back in the 90's for Rifts of all things. I think Rifts might be a decent game for this kind of approach, better than I had thought at first anyway.

The concept for the campaign was that the PC's all started out in one of those quasi-coalition towns in Post-Rift Arkansas. A local mage was recruiting for an expedition to Detroit, where he was convinced that he would find some ancient magic items in the collection of a wealthy collector from the time before. The plan was to travel cross-country in a Behemoth Explorer robot (pictured above) with a crew of adventuring types, explore things along the way (and sell that information later) and then dig into the ruins of Detroit.

I gathered some real world atlas pages of the travel route, slipped them into sheet protectors, and marked them up for apocalyptic damage, rifts and ley lines, and interesting locals. I knew the course the 'bot would travel, so I stayed within 100 miles or so of that course for any kind of detail and made some notes on what else might be off the edges.

The beauty of this approach is that the trip was going to take a few months to get there and presumably that much to get back so you get many sessions of sandbox exploration -with a moving map- but there is an overarching goal at the end for players who need a plot to work off of.

The giant robot follows all the rules of a typical West Marches/Sandbox Town - it's safe and nothing really happens inside it as that's where you go to heal/repair/learn new spells/accuse each other of being idiots. The interesting twist (other than having a base that moves) is that it can be attacked! Especially if the players start some kind of trouble and lead their enemies back to it, which happened once and spurred one of the biggest fights of the campaign, leaving the bot mobile but pretty heavily damaged. They learned form their actions, but they did enjoy getting to unleash some of the big guns and bigger missiles on the thing, so secretly I don't think they regretted it.

Managing players was easy enough - somebody can't make it? They're sleeping on the bot. New character? They are passing through the same area / a local / running from the law/ suffering a mechanical breakdown and agree to help out on the expedition. There was payment up front and at the end of the mission as this was a job, but money in Rifts isn't always a huge motivator, but XP's and knowledge, gear, and interesting types of ammunition (nuclear weapons) can be.

It was an interesting array of characters like the crazy who was severely claustrophobic so she slept in a tent bolted down to the top of the robot and the glitter boy who liked to drive his own truck alongside the bot (with his suit in the back). Along the way they fought demons, raiders, giant robots, vampires, superheroes, renegade wizards, and in a gladitorial arena somewhere in what used to be Tennessee.

We did eventually make it to Detroit (and among other things they nuked Windsor - sorry, but they had a good reason) but the game fell apart before we could make the trip back.

Looking back I think this kind of game works pretty well with Rifts because the power levels are all over the place and while rapid ground and air travel is easily arranged, enemies have all of those options too. Limiting things to a set region might work too but the moving base opens up more and keeps them from mapping everything from the air on Day 1.

One thing with running Rifts of any kind is forget about balance - it doesn't really matter. In a sandbox game the less powerful characters can actually shine as the Wilderness Scouts and Rogue Scientists have an environment where their abilities are extremely useful. That said, having a giant cannon with a range over a mile and a swarm of missile with double that range ready to go is still very comforting. In fact it gives your weapon-heads plenty of room (and likely plenty of reason) to cut loose. Yes the system can be a mess but once you stop trying to fix it things get easier to live with and the DM and the players can have a lot of fun.

Yeah...

... I went ahead and signed up for the playtest. Why not?

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120109

Taking the Easy Way Out - with the Force

So we have a slight kink in the schedule this year because someone decided to go and have ANOTHER baby, due in May and no, not at our house as four is quite enough.

Gven this, and given that I'm still working out how to run a West Marches game for D&D (shhhh - they don't know yet) I offered to run a mini-campaign of 8 to 10 sessions from Jan to May. Options I threw out were Deadlands, Star Wars, Supers, Warhammer, and a 40k RPG. Top 3 responses were Star Wars, Supers, and Deadlands, pretty much in that order.

Since I have done something like this before that was pretty well received I decided to go with Star Wars. I'm sure the new MMO has some people fired up about it and the release of the movies all over again should stoke it further. So interest is decent and because I've been playing around with Saga with the apprentices the system is not totally new to me which should help us get more done.

Then, having blindsided myself with a campaign out of nowhere (wasn't planning on this two weeks ago) and agreeing to start it in two weels or so I realized I needed a concept and I didn't have one. C'mon, I've been reading that huge Deathwatch book and every blog post about west marches, megadungeons, and sandbox games I can find! How the heck did I come up with Star Wars?

Anyway, I realized that given the momentum mentioned above, and that since it's not the first baby, the interruption might not be terminal to the campaign, so more than just a one-shot I needed it to have some future potential. KOTOR is a big deal right now with the new game and all but I'm not very familiar with it and I don't really want to compete with it directly. The Clone Wars could be a blast but I haven't tried to put anything together for those either. Rebellion Era is the place we've played the most but I want to do something a little different and I'm tired of unfreezing Jedi. So I'm copping out and using the published "Dawn of Defiance" campaign from WOTC.

Why?

One, it's "Rise of the Empire" which is fresh because there aren't any movies or AAA video games coming out about it. It has stormtoopers and star destroyers, but there are still renegade Jedi running around too, so I get the best of both worlds.  

Two, it's about the beginning of the Rebellion, so my players will feel like they're part of a major storyline and not just holding the bag for big doings over there by other characters.

Three, it's probably the major common ground set of adventures among Saga Edition players - quite a few people have run and played it, netting us that "shared experience" thing I ramble on about sometimes.

Four, it's made up of 10 separate adventures that will take the PC's from levels 1-20 if I want. The first one covers the first few levels and should be perfect for our Jan-May timeframe, and if we decide to keep going then I have plenty of material to work with. If not, we still have a complete adventure finished and a premise established for a future game down the road someday.

Five, it's published and ready to go and has some nice supporting material (especially since I'm running it a couple of years after everyone else), so I can focus on the mechanics and working in character details rather than plotlines.

I have at least one player excited. Since he played in my old game referenced above he's already thinking about making his new one that character's father - there's some "retroactive continuity" for you in a slightly different sense. I've read through the advanture and it looks good so here in a couple of weeks we should be firing it up and of course I will post up details here.

Motivational Monday

Organizing an Open Table: West Marches vs. Megadungeon

 

As I investigate this further I came back across some of the megadungeon articles I have found on other sites and the discussion therin (Best are on the Alexandrian here and here) and realized that was also a valid approach for what I want to try. So here's my internal debate, for anyone else who might be contemplating the same thing.

West Marches: Open Table, Player-Directed, Wilderness Exploration (Breadth)

Megadungeon: Open Table, mix of player and DM direction, single-site exploration (Depth - almost literally - HA!)

My goals here would be to

A) Avoid some of the scheduling hurdles we have faced as even with a fairly dedicated group twice a month has been our average and I think we can do better

B) Bring in some new players

C) Get more use out of all those books on the shelf - play more!

Now the West Marches game that originally started this fire with me stuck to some very strict rules -  1 character per player, no quests from NPC's, and no adventures in town. Some of the original D&D campaigns which inspired the megadungeon type of game did not follow this - players had multiple characters, could gain information and missions from NPC's, and could get into fights and other adventures in town. Figuring out these kinds of ground rules has a huge impact on how the game will work and I have to nail them down before I can send out any information about the game, regardless of the dungeon vs. wilderness question. Let's look at them in order:


One character per player?
I like this idea as it gives everyone a definite identity - "Jim plays a Wizard". It also aids focus - Jim is going to want to be the very best wizard he can be. However I know that over time players may want to try different types of characters and limiting them to one may decrease their interest in playing the game. In old school D&D it was easy enough to make a new character that this wouldn't even be a time issue. WIth 4E character creation is more involved, but with a character creator it really doesn;t take that long if you walk in knowing what you want to play. Plus I would probably require players to show up with a character ready to go, maybe even emailing it to me in advance. So I'm leaning towards allowing multiple characters.

No Adventures in town?
I still like this one for West Marches as there's a whole region to explore. I also really like the "adventure is OUT THERE!" philosophy in general. The town/homeland is safe - it's where you go to spend your money. Out there is not safe, and it's where you go to make your money. For a megadungeon game I can see the town being a handy option for a break from the dungeon - bar brawls and breaking and entering a rival temple or guild - that kind of thing. Right now I'm leaning towards No Adventures in Town.

NPC quest-givers?
This is a tough one as an exploration game almost demands various legends and rumors to jump start interest in the more distant regions/deeper levels. While this could be handled as "you heard it in a bar" type rumor generation, I like the idea of giving the PC"s some social options in town. If they curry favor with the high priest of Thor, he might tip them off down the road about an ancient champion of Thor who went into the dungeon in search of a certain magic item and never returned - and he was also carrying a Hammer of Thunderbolts. It's not a mission from the PC per se as he's not asking them to do anything - he's just informing them. West Marches started people off with treasure maps which gives everyone a specific goal and is a good explanation of why someone would come to the new region in the first place and then relied on player discoveries to fuel further expeditions. I like that approach too but I'm not sure I can completely ditch the handiness of the NPC legend-dump too. I am fine with skipping direct NPC quests though - I think that takes away too much of the player-driven aspect. If the players are sweet-talking or intimidating leads out of NPC's that's still player-driven in my mind and with 2E/3E/4E gives them a mechanically useful arena for their social skills.


Now for the setting considerations:

Wilderness:
Advantages that I see here are the wider locations and environments available - forests, mountains, lakes, all with smaller to medium sized dungeons dropped in as needed. There is less chance the players will get bored with the playground. Plus you get to use the overland travel rules which opens up interesting choices about mounts, campsites, spells/rituals, and the weather. Travel and encounters take on a more three dimensional aspect too as there is no roof over your head! It also alleviates some character concerns - more with older editions than 4E, but still lingering - as all characters work well outdoors but druids and rangers and outdoorsy types in general lose some effectiveness in a constant dungeon environment.

Possible downsides: It's less predictable as a party can go anywhere compared with the limited entrance routes to a dungeon, so there is more general prep work involved. It's also easier for a party to get in way over their head as they stumble into a higher level area. In a 4E game I wonder if some of the attention paid to travel plans might detract from the enjoyment of a session as it's not often explored in this edition.

Megadungeon:
Advantages include focus - there is no question what we're going to do tonight, we're going into the dungeon! Things are also more structured as if Orcus lives on level 20 there's no way for the party to get to him directly from level 1. There will probably only be one known entrance at first, making it _really_ easy to roll out the campaign. That also means I can outline 10 levels or so, prep the first 3, and then run a few sessions before I cover more - I don't even have to decide that Orcus is on level 20 at the start! I also think it's easier to manage a set of dungeon maps game to game than it is to manage a wide-open wilderness over time.

Potential negatives that I see for an open megadungeon game include it being an old-school kind of thing which somewhat limits its appeal, and players potentially getting tired of the whole dungeon thing after a time. It's really a matter of what is standard - this way would be mostly dungeon with some unusual stuff dropped in. Wilderness is a variety of stuff with some dungeon dropped in There are also the impacts on outdoor characters mentioned above. Odly enough I think that the lack of wilderness travel might be a downside with these players, as old-schoolers tend to enjoy that stuff more than many of the new-schoolers. If you don't have to go anywhere you miss out on the main use of some of the cooler spells and magic items.

I do like the idea of a mega-dungeon campaign, but I am still leaning towards a wlderness game for 4E because I can add as much dungeon to that as I want, whereas it's hard to add in miles of forest to a dungeon, even a really big one. Some kind of Underdark wilderness map with mushroom forests, underground lakes, and magma rivers might be an option but I don't want to start there. Maybe the next one can go there. Since my last campaign was a limited geographic area I kind of like the idea of making overland travel a larger factor in this one. For the Megadungeon, there's an old school con around here later this year and that might be a better place to find some interested players rather than starting cold. Additionally I'm not sure about running two open games at the same time as they might interfere with one another scheduling-wise. I'll probably start the 4E one and see how that goes and then consider my options down the road a bit.

West Marches - Opening the Table for Different Games

The other core element of a West Marches game (see yesterday's post for the first one) is the Open Table - the idea is to not have a set time to play and to not have a set group of players. Instead, players can get a group together and schedule something  anytime they and the DM are available.


One consideration: It seems like online play would make this even easier to schedule by a) eliminating travel complications and time and b) opening up the pool of players beyond the local area, but I haven't done enough of that to want to try and run a game like that just yet.


Genre considerations:

Fantasy is again the go-to option here because one of the concerns is having a large pool of available players. It doesn't get any larger than the D&D crowd and fantasy games in general. Structurally it works well because you can have an "expedition" that consists of a few guys walking around or riding horses together. Then once they get "back to town" there are no further constraints on the group to remain a group.

Sci-Fi - probably the next biggest pool but traditional sci-fi games usually involve a ship, and typical sandboxing involves going to different planets. There is no good way to manage Player A on Ship A and Player B on Ship B unless you assume we have a bunch of one-man ships (not very satisfying IMO) or we all go back to base every time or everyone is a captain and can decide where they want to go. I kind of like that last idea, especially in a Star Trek type environment, but there are other issues there. You might say that if the knights and wizards can go back to town every session then why can't the ship go back to base every session? Well, part of the attraction of sci-fi is the ship, and one of the things ships do is break down or get damaged. If you get into a fight and the hyperdrive gets taken out, well, you're stranded somewhere until it gets fixed, and so is your character. I'm not saying this is insurmountable but it works against the structure of this type of game. I'm thnking that maybe you could manage it with a "call in the dreadnought" rule to bail you out from an untenable situation (it's a big pure-combat ship that is expensive to operate and useless for exploration so it sits at the starbase until someone needs help, either through gratuitous use of photon torpedoes or a helpful tow) but there would have to be some consequences to doing so - maybe you get a reprimand or after 3 calls you get demoted to a smaller ship - something that doesn't take you out of the action but isn't anything anybody wants to have publicizied. The characters on different ships problem is just an additional obstacle that fantasy doesn't have - it doesn't mean it's not worth trying however.


PostApocalyptic - this is pretty close to fantasy. Most travel is by foot or at least on the ground, and the players could be leaving from a fortified city, a hidden underground base, a beached aircraft carrier - there are lots of ways to have a secure "town" to go back to, and all of the positive reasons for playing it in fantasy work here too.

Western - same thing here. If you can come up with a good concept then having everyone operate out of Fort Somewhere at the end of a new rail line works just fine. You're on foot or horseback for the most part so it ends up working a lot like fantasy. It does make the inclusion of some Native American character types a little tricky but I think it still works.


Steampunk - you might run into the ship issue from above if you have a bunch of people exploring by balloon or dirigible of some kind. Otherwise I don't see a lot of structural issues here.

So as long as the setting sets an expectation that the characters will be individuals on foot or mounted or driving a ground vehicle of some type then we're OK with players coming and going. Even there I can see travel becoming an issue if mounts or cars are damaged or destroyed, but at least then it's still physically possible to return home - it's just a question of time. When a method of transport becomes the only means of returning to the home base AND is a destuctable thing, then we have a problem because it potentially locks in a group of characters when the players may not be able to reassemble. One solution to this is my "everyone-is-a-captain" concept where if 4 or 5 ships are out exploring a system together it mitigates the chance that the party will be stranded - surely someone can beam over survivors and then warp out - right?


The biggest problem I foresee (and it's not genre-specific) is that the players must be free to group and ungroup at will and choose their own destiny. If the characters are part of a military, government, or corporate organization then this could be a problem, whether it's Star Fleet, House Kurita, or the U.S. 7th Cavalry. I can see ways to work around it in some settings, less so in others. In a Western or Steampunk game the characters might be outside experts, freelancers, or on detached duty. For a Trek game the concept could be that in the newly opened Zeta Quadrant the players are all ship captains and their experienced command staff can decide how to investigate this vast new frontier and follow up leads as they please, rather than being micro-managed by a remote command structure. Post-Apoc games avoid most of this, as do fantasy games, so it's not likely to come up there but it's something to think about regardless.

I think a mechanical solution to potential bog-downs has to be in place, even if it's as simple as Jeff R's escape from the dungeon table. An ironclad rule that forbids session spillover prevents a lot of headaches for this kind of game. Plus the potential severity of the results provides additional incentive to get back to town in a timely fashion. I think I would probably take a hard line on this - even if the entire party (and the DM) agree that they could gather again the very next day to pick up where they left off, I would still lean towards closing it out and starting fresh the next day. Kids get sick, cars break down, wives get cranky, and hey, what if someone else wants to join in?


It's interesting that this is probably the less-common of the two elements, yet it seems to have fewer potential complications. As long as you have a means of scheduling things, I don't think the kind of game matters a great deal. Once you've decided to sandbox things, adding this in really doesn't change much in-game other than the return-to-base rule.


Idle Thought #1: Of course, you could just play fighter pilots/mechajocks/space marines/jedi stationed on board the Heart of Gold. Since it simultaneously passes through every point in the universe you could all deploy to anywhere and everywhere for each mission, the rejoin on the next jump. "OK this request indicates that a Space Wolf team accompanied by Darth Greedo and Sir Guinness of the Round Table  is making an orbital drop onto Greyhawk looking for Leman Russ, who may in fact be the divine being known as "Kord" on that world. Alright let's roll to see where you land..."

Idle Thought #2: If you want a stationary home base I think the home planet of the Timelords from Dr. Who might do it. All characters must fit into a League of Extraordinary Gentleman type theme but with time period no longer an issue. Heck, universe might not be an issue. Run that as the Ultimate Sandbox! No hexmap - you can go anywhere, anywhen, with anyone. Maybe rule out straight-up superheroes -that's a little too obvious - but anything else. Of course then you get into system questions and that could be tricky, but it's fun to entertain the notion. "This session it looks like we have Colonel Steve Austin, Colonel Mustard, Colonel Sanders, and Colonel Sherman Potter and we're headed for the ice planet of Hoth..." Typically this kind of campaign would be driven by DM plots (Save the Chronoverse!) but this would be the anti-campaign to that - "Nope, the Gallifreyans have no mission for you, just some accomodations and a Universal Gateway." I think for sanity's sake I would want a week or two's notice and a description of where the group wants to go, but even with that it would be a tremendous test of improv skills. Pretty sure I could work up a theme song though: "We're the time guardians who don't do anything..."

West Marches - What if it's not Fantasy?

There are really two main components to a West Marches game:

1) Sandbox play - an open adventuring environment with no "plot complications" imposed by the DM

2) An open table - players are free to mix and match and come and go as their interest level and schedules permit


I want to focus on the sandbox element in this post, and look at genres and best fits. One of the common themes I've seen in reading about various sandbox games is that they tend to be some flavor of D&D and the ones that are not are some other flavor of fantasy game like RuneQuest. I assume that some of this is due to fantasy games being more popular but I think some of this is also a structural limitation inherent to certain types of campaign. So let's look at some of them.


Beyond the open environment a sandbox game generally requires a motivation for characters to go exploring - there has to be some payoff for doing so. D&D offers experience points, gold, and magic items, which are the whole reason you go dungeoneering anyway, so it's an obvious choice and our baseline. Any level-based game could start from a similar place by offering XP's for exploration -and possible combat and diplomacy as well. You wander around, you level up, and keep finding danger and interesting situations.


This is something you could create with Traveller  (and is the main drive behind Stars Without Number) and really any game where you have an unexplored region and a group of characters that can ... explore it. Fantasy and Sci Fi both seem to work for it - besides the previous mentions I can see it working with Star Trek, Star Wars, Mechwarrior, Rogue Trader, and even Mekton. What's the reward? Well, XP's of course. The chance to use some of your big guns without some outside authority cracking down on you - "Imperial regulation 11539.17 outlaws the use of nuclear weapons on a planetary surface - you will now be vaporized". Meeting new races - "Borg? Like Cy-Borg?". Naming planets after your character - "Welcome to Sparacus Jonesworld". New technology - "They call it a Star-Trigger". Old technology - "They call it a lightsaber". F-r-e-e-d-o-m to roam as you please without being assigned missions from Star Fleet Command every week. You can usually find a good reason for any player and character.

Post-Apocalyptic games work too - Gamma World, Twilight 2000, and Darwin's World all lend themselves to it, for mostly the same reasons.

One genre I am not sure about is Westerns. The core of the Sandbox game is the blank map - typical cowboy games have much of the map filled in already, so I'm not sure they would work. I suppose you could try using "Fort Safehaven" as the base and have the party out exploring Indian Territorry as the game, but it feels more forced to me. You generally do not have aerial travel though, which at least keeps it viable and leads me into a related genre.

Steampunk is another type of game I wonder about - you still can have some unmapped areas of the world like a fantastic Africa or a hollow world, but once you get into aerial travel then you lose another core element of sandbox gaming: the danger of the hexcrawl. In a sci-fi game you may travel by spaceship, but the assumption is that dangerous things may exist in that same space that your ship travels through. In a conventional planet-bound game aerial travel avoids much of this danger, at least enough to change the flavor of the exercise, and a steampunk game invariably has some kind of aerial travel available. Allowing players to sidestep much of the danger just kills this kind of game in my opinion, as the focus shifts from exploration of the area to hitting the high points and determining the optimum sites to loot. Going into a game like this with the intention of haivng the players fly around for most of it could be a fun chalenge to undertake and a refreshing change of pace, but I think I need to level up my dusty sandboxing skills before I would want to try it. There is also the issue of rewards. Unless you have some kind of magic/psychic/powers and artifacts to go with them then you're back to loot and XP's - which may work just fine for some groups.


One campaign concept I had years ago might get around some of these issues. My pitch was "Cowboys on Mars" which was to be a hopefully entertaining fusion of Deadlands and Space 1889 using at one point GURPS, and then at another point Savage Worlds. In short it was going to have steampunk tech, cowboys, and funky powers, all set in the 1880s. Space 1889 does have fairly common methods of air travel, especially on Mars, which lessens the usual travel dangers but a) the natives and the rivals have air travel and powers too, upping the danger almost back to where it should be and b) It's a whole frigging planet! I originally had some plotted stuff to kick it off but figured a large part of it would be a sandbox type exploration for loot and knowledge and possibly power - "Shotgun" Slim Durango, usurper-king of the tribes of the northern dust-plains - that kind of thing.

Horror is my final "maybe" genre. I generally see it as something that gets layered over another- fantasy, modern, sci -fi - rather than a separate genre of its own, but you could set a game in an earlier time and make expeditions ito the wild neccessary for survival and not looked-forward to - gathering food, perhaps - rather than a voluntarily loot-seeking activity. Players might know that "going outside" means strange visions, strange creatures, shared dreams - or any or all of the above. Maybe it's a colony world on a distant planet. Maybe it's a base near the Eye of Terror. Maybe it's something like Dark City or maybe the characters are normal survivors caught up in something like the battleworld form Secret Wars and left behind and forgotten after the big fight. It's workable, but I think there are better choices for a true ongoing sandbox game.


There are really only two genres that I think have real problems with a sandbox campaign:


Cyberpunk is typically a high-knowledge setting so you're not likely to have unexplored territorry or unmapped regions. They also tend to be centered in a particular city, dropping travel distances down to hours at most. You could try to rig up some kind of hexcrawl through a city but your tech player is likely to just pull down a satelite map and auto-nav to where they need to go - and they should! It's part of the genre! "Exploring unknown territorry" doesn't really come up a lot unless you mean in the virtual sense or the  limits of humanity sense. Why not set it on a new space colony? Because you're still going to have orbital satellites and air travel and remote operated drones and a bunch of other ways to kill the mystery and sense of exploring the unknown. When the tropes of cyberpunk don't support it and most of the settings and systems don't support it, I don't think it's worth pursuing when there are so many better options out there.


Supers is the other type of game that just fails as a sandbox. One, they're usually set in the modern day so you don't have much unexplored territorry to work with. Two, supers go way past aerial travel and get into weirdness like teleportation and time travel making the dangerous travel element a non-factor. Three, supers is an inherently reactive genre - they take action when a badguy starts something, so at its core it's a plotted type of game and there's nothing wrong with that - it just makes hex-crawling an unlikely activity for superheroes. You could strand them on an alien planet and take away their powers but at that point you're pretty much playing D&D or GURPS anyway, and it's probably a side-trek, not the focus of the campaign. Plus what's the payoff? These characters generally aren't looking for loot or magic items - they're looking to fight the good fight! One final consideration is that the mechanical systems that usually go along with supers tend to have them wired in to an existing society - Dpenedent NPC's, Group Affiliations, Enemies, Rivals, Day Jobs - all of these mean that it's difficult to separate the hero from the typical environment.

So what would I run? I have to admit I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of an open-table-everyone-is-a-captain Star Trek sandbox. I'm not sure I could ever get 10 people to play it, but I do like the idea. Second choice would probably be a PA game using some version of Gamma World, just because that's always been a thing for me. We'll see how it all shakes out.