My Sparkling New Campaign Idea - Part I: Concept

I'm starting to think about maybe considering the possibility of just perhaps running a PBP or PBEM D&D Rules Cyclopedia game, so I can try out some of my recent crackpot ideas. The Big List of Things I Want to Include/Experiment With (TBLOTIWTI/EW) is as follows:

• I want the campaign to be sandbox; There Shalt Be No Plot Arcs.
• I want the flavour to be a kind of heady brew of Old School dungeoneering, Lovecraftian weirdness, Planescape-inspired philosophy-with-clubs, and 2nd Edition AD&D above-ground high-fantasy wilderness adventure.
  
• I want it to embrace randomness, thus:
• There will be random encounter tables galore, with a light smattering of random flavour event tables into the bargain.
• There will be no Rolling of 4d6s and dropping the lowest or Rolling 3d6 and assigning to taste or any other such nefariousness; Stats will be generated on a "3d6-in-order, create-a-character from-there-and-make-the-most-of-it" basis.
• I want to include rarely used (at least by me) monsters that my recent foray into the 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual has unearthed, such as:
• Giant Crayfish (of course)
• Crabmen
• Aarakocra
• Kenku
• Medusae
  
• Blink Dogs
• Displacer Beasts
• I want there to be henchmen and hirelings - see this post, which Sham coincidentally made at the same time I started thinking about the idea.
• I want there to be an Adventuring Guild.

The last item is one I haven't brought up in this blog before, but it's a concept that has slowly been growing on me over the last year or two. Until recently I'd been keen to pooh-pooh the idea that adventurers actually thought of themselves as a profession; most of my games had involved 'ordinary folk' being thrust by the vagaries of chance into doing whatever they were doing - or, at the very least, ex-soldiers and wandering tinkers and the like who were 'adventuring' in an unselfconscious way. I still prefer that type of campaign, I think, but I'm ready to toy with the idea that there is a class of people in "Blah Blah World" (I haven't thought of a name yet) who see themselves as Adventurers with a Capital A and treat it as an actual way to make a living (and get rich, or whatever).

I'll expand on this concept some more in my next blog entry; there are lots of ideas floating around inside my head (mostly to do with the Adventuring Guild's internal politics, rules, tax/fee systems, and Library of Adventuring) but I need to get a better fix on them before I start committing them to (digital) paper.