A Series of Unfortunate Events

Sometimes you find some great ideas by just traipsing through forums. Like this post by Pseudoephedrine:

Instead of numbering hexes with a four digit set, use X:Y where both X:Y are ranges from 1 to the maximum value of some die type (a d10 for a hundred hex map, a d20 for a 400 hex map, etc.). You draw up a list of generic events that represent an external force somehow influencing whatever normally resides in that hex.

Then, instead of predetermining the hex locales where these events will happen, you roll 2dwhatever with one determining the vertical coordinate and the other the horizontal coordinate whenever you feel like, with the event happening in that hex.

So, for example:

Event: A black dragon (HD7) swoops down to burn anything it finds - people, monsters, buildings and PCs.

You roll 2d10 and get 7 and 9, so in hex 7:9, a black dragon comes swooping down and attacks the village of Bumburg (having already determined prior to play that Bumburg is in that hex). If the PCs are in that hex, well, great. If not, well, they can always stumble across the effects later. Perhaps a month later in game, you roll again to see where the dragon swoops down this time. And so on.

I think this a very efficient and simple way of making a game world feel organic and evolutionary rather than static. Ideally, you would want your table of events to be a bit more detailed and linked to the geography of the hexmap, of course - so, to continue with the above example, you would have something like:

Event: A black dragon (HD7) swoops down to burn anything it finds - people, monsters, buildings and PCs. It's lair is d6 hexes to the [compass direction corresponding to second d6 roll where 1 = North]; roll again if the result makes no sense (e.g. it's in the sea).

And, of course, you (or at least, I) would want something more rigorous than just rolling such events whenever you feel like it. I'd probably draw up a table of 100 events for the campaign area, and assume a 10% chance per day of one of them happening. Instant organic random campaign happenings!

The Relationship Hexmap

Following on from yesterday's post, and drawing from ckutalik's interesting sequence on Top Secret and network linkages from earlier this year, I did some thinking last night on how to come up with a conceptual hexmap for non-geographical sandbox play. This post is just a summary of my preliminary thoughts - it's basically some rough ideas.

What I want, and what I envisage, is a hexmap revolving around interpersonal space rather than physical space. Instead of the players exploring a geographical area hex by hex, with encounters and events taking place as they go, in the Relationship Hexmap they explore a network of interpersonal relationships instead.

The key to this, as I see it, is that it has to retain the elements of what makes a hexmap work when you're using it for a D&D-esque sandbox. It has to be loose, it has to allow for random events, and (crucially) the GM shouldn't have any preconceptions about what will happen.

This last point is probably the most important. What I like about a fantasy sandbox is that, although the DM has set up the basic framework and scattered the thing with interesting locales, it's as much a voyage of discovery for him as it is for the players. This means that, although there needs to be some pre-existing information on the contents of each hex, it should be as vague and nebulous as possible until the players discover it.

Maybe it's best to give a physical example of what I'm talking about. Here is a small relationship hexmap that I came up with this morning when I should have been working. (Something about drawing it using paint's "crayon" feature appeals to the inner child in me.)

 

First off, an explanation of what all the pretty colours mean:

• Blue blobs are actual sentient entities that have agency in the game world. Each could represent an individual, a gang, a corporation, a cartel...really anything that could forge communicative or personal links with another blue blob. For the sake of this hexmap, I'll call them "people", but remember this could refer to one person or many people in one unit.
• Red lines represent a strong, positive link between two people - basically, where an alliance, agreement, or mutually benefecial relationship exists. It could be love, it could be a military alliance, it could be a free trade agreement - anything you can think of.
• Orange lines represent contact. Simply, two people linked by an orange line have had some sort of communication with one another, whether regular or not. It could be they've just had one interaction in the distant past, or it could be that they're in regular email contact but the relationship is not positive enough or close enough to be "red".
• Yellow lines simply represent awareness. The two people are aware that the counterparty exists.
• Arrows are used to indicate whether contact, or awareness, is one way. Yellow and orange lines usually work in both directions, but in some relationships one party is always contacted by the other and not the other way around (a spy who recieves communiques via encrypted SMS messages, for example), and sometimes a person can know about another person without the same being true in reverse. Arrows indicate this.
• Black lines represent hostility. They are the opposite of red lines. Here, an antagonistic relationship (open or covert) exists.

So how does all this work in actual play? The answer is that I'm not sure yet, but my basic thoughts on how it might break down are as follows:

• First, the GM draws up the hexmap in a random(ish) way, as I did this morning. I haven't decided on who any of the blue blobs represent yet, or why their relationships are the way they are. I just had fun with crayons.
• Second, the GM picks a number of the blue blobs and gives them a personality, history, and description. It doesn't have to be all of them, and in fact, it shouldn't be. Around half will do. This is the equivalent to the way in which a D&D DM draws up a hexmap but only details what's in some of the hexes - the rest will come as and when it is necessary.
• Third, a handful of the blue blobs/people are selected as the locus points at which the PCs could "start" the campaign. As with a fantasy sandbox, there needs to be a beginning point, but it would be too restrictive to select one blue blob/person and say "You know this guy and he tells you [x]" (although the Mr. Johnson routine is fine if you're into that sort of thing). I imagine that most Cyberpunk sandbox campaigns begin with the fixer-types using their streetdeal skills to find contacts and rustle up jobs. This could give them a number of different "leads" (each being a separate blue blob). 
• Fourth, the immediate relationships (orange, red, yellow, black) around those locus points are fleshed out in a bit more detail. 
• Fifth, the GM puts in some "other interesting information" relating to each hex. I imagine this introducing some sort of temporal element to the process. For instance, you might write that on Day 5 of the campaign, Person 0402 will attempt to assassinate the head of Company 0503. Or, on Day 8 of the campaign, Person 0307 will be contacted by Person 0402 in relation to Gang 0607.
• Sixth (and this is hazy) there need to be random tables changing the nature of the relationships on the map. At various points in time, the GM needs to be rolling dice to find out what is going on on the map irrespective of what the players are up to. I'm picturing a table of stuff like "relationship deteriorates because of X" or "communication breaks down because of Y".
• Seventh, profit.

I imagine it working especially well for investigative play - for instance, if the player characters are police, engaged in corporate espionage, that sort of thing. This is fitting, since I cribbed a lot of the ideas from ckutalik, who in turn cribbed ideas from Top Secret.

Anyway, more on this to follow as I ruminate some more.

The Cyberpunk Sandbox

Trollsmyth has been doing a series of hexmap-related blog entries lately, and what can I say? I have a case of sandboxitis going on.

There are a million and one blog entries about making sandboxes "out there" in the blogosphere. (I recommend these three in particular: by Rob Conley, Chgowiz, and of course ars ludi). It's as you would expect - the OSR has sandbox play as its totem, its modus operandi, its raison d'etre, and a whole lot of other words in Latin and French.

But these sandbox articles are all to do with fantasy, and D&D in particular, which has from the beginning been designed for sandbox play - in particular, for the kind of hex-based, hexcrawl adventure which the OSR recommends. All well and good, but for those of us who have swallowed the Kool-Aid and accepted the One True Way of Sandboxism but who want to apply it in other genres of games which we enjoy, there are some problems with the assumption of a hexcrawl and its associated mores. (The exception to this is, perhaps, Traveller and maybe post-apocalyptic Gamma World or pleasingly bastardised versions of Rifts.)

After fantasy, my go-to genre has always been Cyberpunk. Actually, in my gaming career, I've probably had more 'face time' with Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun (the latter to my slight shame) than with D&D. So naturally my thoughts turn from time to time to the notion of Cyberpunk 2020 in the sandbox.

The crucial thing about a CP:2020 campaign is that it is a) usually urban and based in one city; and b) it is set in the future. You don't hexcrawl in that sort of environment - a taxi, subway train or gyrocopter can take you anywhere you want to go, and all the information about everywhere is available online (except the top-secret stuff, and probably not even then). So the hexmap has to be conceptual rather than physical; the surprises have to come from interpersonal relationships and behind-the-scenes shenanigans as well as vast amounts of tables of random events, because there is nothing geographically interesting about the actual physical space of the setting. So where rumour, conflict and player-motivated change are important in the D&D hexcrawl, in the CP:2020 hexcrawl they are everything.

Because I like a good project, I'm going to do a trollsmyth-esque series of posts on developing a CP:2020 sandbox setting over the next couple of weeks, interspersed with my usual ranting and miscellaneous musings. And so it was written, and so it shall be done.

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.