Building A Campaign Part Two: Fleshing Out The Sandbox

 Welcome to Building A Campaign Part Two: Fleshing Out The Sandbox, wherein resident Altered Worlds Press writer and dungeonmaster Bryan continues his series on building a sandbox campaign for the AWP game night crew's home game.

In case you missed it, read the first part of the series here.

After gathering my cobwebs and putting some initial ideas together, I still needed to create more details for the cities and villages of Yawning Bay. Missing elements included NPCs (non-player characters), city locations, factions and their agendas, etc.

 When creating NPCs for a campaign, I find they usually spring from the imagination based on either the needs of the adventure or from the locations I have already created for the sandbox. Location-based NPCs are the bread and butter of any good role-playing in a sandbox campaign. I didn't think that most of the NPCs would see battle unless I set them up specifically as an antagonist, so I decided not to write up specific stats for them. I focused on what would affect their interactions with the heroes -- gossip, motivations, and adventure hooks.

What locations did I need to populate The Yawning Bay Campaign? The cities and villages surrounding the bay, certainly. In the largest city, Farum, there were a number of places that needed inhabitants, as did its smaller but wealthier sister city, Pernaus. After that I needed to create the two smaller outlying fishing villages, Terem and Ichthys.

As I didn't create maps for these cities and didn't want to go to the trouble to define every nook and cranny of each city, I had to determine places of interest, who lived there, and what adventure hooks or other functions they might offer to the players.

Here's what I came up with for Farum:

City of Farum

The Frog's Grog (Dockside Bar) -- Abner Tul, retired adventurer, can be found drowning his sorrows in cheap grog here (see Stonehell linked quests).

The Wizards' Convocation (Fledgling wizard's college) -- Mages of the convocation (Gul, Kalidori, and Sidieri) will attempt to recruit any PC arcanist to help them with forming the college. They are especially interested in magical items and artifacts, and may be interested in purchasing these from PCs. They have heard of 'The Plated Mage' of Stonehell, and his laboratory rumored to exist below. They will offer a reward for information and evidence of him and his machinations.

The Yawning Bay Mercenaries' Guild (Job postings, mercenaries for hire) -- This is a good place to link more protection style missions, like guarding merchants' caravans, and other work for hire. Also good for when PCs need hirelings (as found in the AS&SH rules).

Oturo's (Inn - luxury suites for merchants and visiting dignitaries) -- Innkeeper Oturo charges an arm and a leg to stay here. Perhaps he has some rumors about difficulties the merchant caravans have been having (link to hobgoblins creating a base in Stonehell, accosting people on the road, etc.)

The Old Fortress (military, seat of government for the region) -- Commander Lethe (current governor of the cities). Lieutenant Meera will appear at the gate if PCs attempt to contact the governor. She will have missions for the PCs for gold and information, including the investigation of the old imperial watchpost ruins (infested with hobgoblins that give merchant caravans trouble).

Heath the Leatherman's Shop and John Smith's Forge -- No quests here, but plenty to sell (and some money to buy).

Burdick's Oddities and General Store -- Burdick will buy and sell anything for the right price (this is where PCs sell their dungeon goods most of the time -- Burdick has a large clientele looking to buy whatever adventurers bring out of the dungeon).

The Whalebone Inn (Common fare and low cost rooms) -- Probably the best choice for beginning characters to use as a cheap place to rest and eat -- only commoners' food available.

 Selway Stables -- Stowing and grooming mounts during city visits at reasonable prices.

Temple of Apollo - Previs Glarr, priest of Apollo. He and his acolytes are vain and self-righteous in the extreme, though holy items and spells cast might be purchased through this temple. The two active temples here have a vested interest in converting worshippers of the old religions, and making sure the temples of old are not revived.

Temple of Artemis - Jerusha Arkhand, priestess of Artemis. Cold and calculating, Jerusha will offer aid in the form of healing, spells, or holy items in exchange for goods and artworks taken from Stonehell Dungeon. Like Previs, she is bent against any of the old religionists, and has seen little success in converting the folk of the small fishing village of Terem.

Temple of the Old Gods (Abandoned) - Perhaps the PCs could encounter followers of the old gods and help them recondition this temple as a future mission. See also: Temple of Lunaqqua quest on the world map.

In addition to these locations and NPCs, I created a whole section of Stonehell-linked quests that would need to be linked to an NPC or other surface interaction, such as:

THE RETIRED ADVENTURER. Abner Tul drinks at The Frog's Grog in Farum. He is a retired Knight of the Scale who has knowledge of the first three levels of Stonehell. He warns of the "horrifying plants" below, and claims to have lost friends there. "The blood-red dandelions! The cloying heat!" Will also point the party toward the other surviving member of his adventuring party, their mapmaker and thief Hoyle. He now lives in a hovel on the coast several days south of here. (Map note E.)

In practice, I adjusted this quest when it came up in play due to the needs of the story. I ended up saving much of Abner's information for Hoyle to give to the players, including the warnings and information that Abner was supposed to have held. Instead, Abner played the drunk, and pawned the players' questions off on his old comrade Hoyle, who I decided was in a far more sober and happy place in life (despite his poverty) to speak to the PCs.

You might have noticed that I assigned a faction to Abner Tul (Knight of the Scale), and that there are a few other factions naturally popping up as I create NPCs. The new gods faction, the old gods faction, the Wizards' Convocation, and the government / military. Though in creating some campaigns I start by creating factions and how they interact, I decided that in this one I would start with the characters and imagine their motivations, then assign those characters naturally to factions when necessary.

For the smaller villages I wrote paragraphs of description rather than separate location descriptions, as I figured they were so small they would only have a few features, a few major NPCs, and a couple of adventure hooks that I could add to in the future. Here's the one for Terem Village:

Terem Village: A fishing village with a very small and insular population. Extremely independent and poor. There is a village longhouse that doubles as an inn and pub. Otherwise, this village of about 350 minds their own business. The village headman is Cal Tarnley (65 years old, Fighter 2). His sons, grandsons, and other village families are no strangers to violence, often having to fight off denizens of the sea to save their catch, boats, and lives. There is also a home with a sign dedicated to Lunaqqua here, though they have no temple building. Possible quest hooks: Dan Tarnley, 15, went exploring and hasn't been seen in two days. Tessa Soderstrom feels called to be a priestess of Lunaqqua (she and her family live in the dedicated house) but needs help finding the goddess's ancient temple in the wilderness. She has a large gold medallion that she was led to that can act as a key to the priestess's chamber inside the abandoned temple (map note U).

Something else to note is that I don't always have time to flesh out every location that I have an adventure hook to lead to on the map. So I expect my players to give me a heads-up when they are going to go after a surface location at least a week in advance so I can prepare the new adventure location for them. But I'll admit that sometimes I'm simply not prepared for what the PCs do, so I just wing it. I grab a map, have my monster manual or bestiary ready, and throw something together on the fly.

I was glad to have set up two different quests for Terem village. The players went after the first quest, to find Dan Tarnley, the first week, and I was able to wing that quest in the session they chose to follow it. Then I prepared the following week for the cleansing of the Temple of Lunaqqua, found a great map, and keyed it for monsters (daemons! yikes!) and treasure. Both of those sessions were fantastic, and some of the best I've run for the AWP game night crew during the entire (one year and counting!) campaign.

Well, I've covered quite a bit of my process for creating The Yawning Bay campaign with you in this post. This is similar to the process I will be using to create published adventures for Altered Worlds Press in the future. In fact, I've got several ideas percolating that will soon see print. Looking forward to sharing those with you. In the meantime, we'll continue to share interesting insights into our home campaign. More to come, including the current cast of characters, some retelling of adventures, and some newly recorded chronicles! Thanks for reading, and happy adventuring!

AWP