Summer is upon us and that usually means that our bi-monthly D&D become less formal. Attendance tends to fluctuate wildly and our play sessions are usually shorter. In past years, we’ve used the summer period to test out new games or new PCs.
This year, most of my players have manifested an interest to keep playing so. In my mind the ‘season’ and the first Primal/Within mini-campaign ended with the last session, setting the table for the next season in August with Paragon level PCs.
So while thinking about this weeks’ game, I asked myself how I could experiment with a DMing style that wasn’t my own. While I excel at scripted adventures and well-thought out set pieces, I still have trouble dealing with improvisation. So I started toying with doing an adventure without my usual prep (I can easily write a 8 page manuscript for a 5 scenes adventure).
When I Twittered about it, some old schoolers, one in particular, started jesting that I was going to the dark side and jumping on the Sandbox bandwagon. The thing is, I’m not interested in doing a classic exploration-based Sandbox game. This actually requires a lot of preparation as you must detail large areas of your setting in order to give your players something to do wherever they go.
Then I remembered an episode in the second season of Avatar called ‘Tales of Ba Sing Se’ where the 30 minute show featured about 5 different stories not directly related with the serie’s main plot arc. I had also recently seen ‘He’s just not that into you’ with my wife and all these criss-crossed stories gave me an idea.
What if I made the next adventure into “Tales of the City Within” and I only wrote the outline of 5 plot lines that would be interwoven, ripe for players to get tangled into?
Then it dawned on me that someone had already written about that very method to create a campaign.
Enter Dave the Game’s 5X5 method.
The gist of the method is:
Take 5 major, distinct quests. Give them an appropriate title. Then, for each of those 5 quests, give 5 steps needed to complete that quest. Each one should provide enough to provide an entire adventure. Give each step a location, preferably spread out all over your map. When possible, make these locations near each other at different points on the other quests. That way, PC’s may decide to work on a different quest after finishing up one part simply because they’re geographically nearby.
As Dave presented it, this gives you about 25 adventures, some of them sharing the same locations. That’s enough for a whole tier in D&D 4e parlance.
Now that’s way too much for my needs. My summer campaign will likely last 4, maybe 5 sessions tops.
But since we usually play 5 scenes per session (2 of which can be combat), I thought that maybe I could use the 5X5 method but with 5 quests made up of 5 scenes each. Instead of just choosing common locations for some of the scenes, I could enlarge the definition to include NPCs or events shared by some scenes.
Thus I could have a 25 elements Sandbox where players could pick up to 5 quests (or get caught in more than one event) and play them through.
So last night I sat down and I brainstormed for 5 quests, I asked for help on Twitter and got served!
Here’s what I got, both from Twitter (user named in parenthesis) and my own stuff:
- A Plague spreads like wildfire through the city, turning people into Zombies
- Some strange people are looking for love in the worst possible places
- An ancestral inheritance threatens to very balance of the City
- Corrupt city board members conspire to control a civilian uprising by poisoning the sewer/water system. Dungeon/City all in one (Josh Dalsher)
- Secret Agent from the Surface tries to steal City’s greatest secret
- A rampaging Dragon bursts from underneath the City’s looking for his Blanky
- The Devil rises at Dawn! Asmodeus makes his move on the City.
- Mutated creatures from the undercity rise up to destroy the Surface Dwellers (Josh Dalcher)
- A slighted council member booby traps the infrastructure of the city, group must find and disarm a series of traps..
- City-wide hazing, a Trollish Rite of Passage
- The All-Spark is in the City! Objects rise up and rebel!
- King of the city swats and kills a subject during a holy day. Everyone can’t stop talking about it (Rpgaming)
- A noble is murdered in the city, he was rumored to have acquired the Helm of Archon days before hand (Kal Agrim)
- Volcano Season is here, the city must prepare its sacrifice for the Volcano lord or the city will be covered in lava (Kal Agrim)
- A Pacifist cheerful Mindflayer prophet shows up and announces the dawn of a new era of Peace and Harmony
- The Prison of Soul’s seal breaks and the undying Archons escape, the 5 parts of the Rod of Divine Sealing must be found and fused together by Magic Fire.
- The PCs must recover a magical artifact from a museum where it has unwittingly been put on display
- Organized Grime: an intelligent ooze masterminds the cities criminal underworld. (cpbye)
- Someone’s planning on tearing down some old buildings and putting up new ones. Too bad the dungeon doesn’t like that idea. (allgeekout)
- 5 Bullywugs named Steve escape into the city. City officials panic about “confirmed reports” of monsters in the sewers (Vulcan Stev)
- vehicles have all been replaced with other-worldly beings intent on our destruction. No one realizes until too late (Vulcan Stev)
- A group of changelings set up in town as the new management, killing off and replacing any who disagree with them (Kal Agrim)
- The local wizard’s girlfriend runs for mayor after winning, she begins collecting souls without his knowledge (Vulcan Stev).
So what I have to do tonight is choose 5 of those and break them down in 5 scenes. Each scene would be one paragraph long and should provide me with enough to let me improvise it (NPCs, goals, complications, PC choices, etc).
That’s quite the challenge but I’m willing to take up the challenge. I’ll have all my battle maps with me, along with a bunch of minis and I’ll have my laptop open to the online D&D Compendium.
If you have more plot ideas or tools that would help me make it to Friday with a game, please feel free to share.
I’m curious to see how it will turn out.
Sounds interesting Chatty! Now would you introduce more than one hook at a time, or as they are wrapping one up, introduce another, etc?
I’d likely make each hook into dancing plot points trying to get the PCs attention and the party would be free to grab as many as they want.
A local auctioneer is in the process of preparing a recently deceased wizards house and possessions for sale. The objects and the house itself are exhibiting strange properties and he needs the PCs help to keep everything in line to get them sold (this adventure could range from “Night at the Mueseum” to some kind of possessed house horror movie). The auction at the end would be a good opportunity for PCs to find/purchase items they’ve been looking for but aren’t normally for sale.
A local alderman was found unconcisous this morning; a small, red creature attached to his neck. It does not seem to be harming the alderman if left alone, but it resists all attempts at removal.
Terrific stuff!
I suggest writing them all out on individual index cards, shuffling them and draw five. The inspiration will hit far quicker and patterns form more easily than if you just try to eyeball the lot in one go.
The results may well surprise you 😀
Best of luck!
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A large bronze staue depicting a hooded humanoid appears in the town square one morning. The robes of the statue are filled with cryptic runes. No one knows who put the statue there, or what its purpose is.
Here is a classic one:
A well dressed foreigner from an exotic locale stumbles into the inn at night and dies of his wounds in the doorway.
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I am real curious to see how your experiement turns out.
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the 5×5 method is quite reminiscent of how adventures are handled in AGON. When you land on a new island, you are given 3 quests that you can do in any order – the GM breaks up the quests into 3 to 5 parts to complete to finish the quest, usually making a few of the parts optional (so you CAN confront the hydra without first getting the elixir of hydra shrinking, but the fight will be harder).
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Thanks for the ideas! I wore my list down to 5 that I’d be comfortable with and I’m now stretching those into 5 scene quests each.
(I may whittle this to 3 if time runs out on my prep)
“This actually requires a lot of preparation as you must detail large areas of your setting in order to give your players something to do wherever they go.”
That’s actually quite false. Read more on the subject, particularly among the grognard blogs out there. If the PCs go somewhere on a whim with no reason to be there and following no leads, they are not guaranteed to find anything worthwhile (but it still will be an adventure, just from the travel and encounters.) Also: what do you think random tables and wandering monsters are for?
And yes, that works in 4E, too.
Be cautious with the multiple hooks… I used a similar technique, although less formal, with the game of paranormal investigator, that I GM with you and the gang. If you remember, you (the players) perceived an urgency and split for the investigation, men did that complicated thing for me.
One thing I frequently use is prepare a few token encounter that is related with the thread. Here is a snippet of my actual game prep.:
“The Ruined city is home of the undeads. This section of the city is in utter ruin and complete section of wall can fall with the slightest push. Nothing of value remain in these ruins it as been emptied a long time ago only death remains. Falling wall make a blast x (x is length of section of the wall) +7 vs Reflex 3d8+4 squares become difficult terrain.
1 ghoul (200)
3 Wights (600)
1 specter (175)”
This was all I had for the scene. An other thing I do is prepare unconnected drops. Be it parcel or hint these are not as related to place as they are related to what will the player do first.
I.e.: In my game I was planning on introducing an artifact. So I had several hint I wanted to give the players before they actually found it. So when they investigate the ruin city first I introduced it right after the undead encounter describe above. “You search the hole area and found nothing. The place as been loot multiple time and nothing remains. As you strike an old lab desk, in frustration of your fruitless search, it breaks. Revealing an hidden compartment that previous looters missed. In it a old journal with […]” Had they investigated something else first they still would have found the journal only it would have been introduce by an other means.
I improvise the interconnection of all these components and the map layout (if one is needed).
As for the prep required for a sandbox game. I would say it depends a lot on your improvisation skills, the knowledge of your world(world building can take a lot of time) and how much your players are predictable.
One of the PCs has a premonition kind of dream or a nightmare(depending of the nature of the event). It can be about anything, a tragedy, a robbery, an attack on the city or it’s leaders.
He can choose to believe it or not, but either way you give him hints during the day that it will happen soon.
Also, you could use this “device” to expose the players to one of the suggestion you got from the Twitter brainstorm.
Like this one “A slighted council member booby traps the infrastructure of the city, group must find and disarm a series of traps.. “
@Jack Colby: That possible, but from what I got from Ben Robbin’s West Marches, he had prepared quite a lot of material. Regardless, as I said, an exploratory sandbox game with travel and random encounters is not the type of game I’m looking for.
@Yan: I will heed your warning. As I look at what doing this entails, I’m starting to fear not having time to have enough playable material for Friday. So what I’ll do is complete one of the 5X5 and if time permits I’ll flesh out others. So this might end up being a classic adventure after all. We’ll see how much prep I can manage till Friday.
As tools to help you run the game go, I find some sort of note-taking app for the computer very useful when running the game improv-style, particularily one that allows for easy cross-referencing.
I ran my steampunk-ish campagin off TiddlyWiki, but OneNote, Evernote etc would probably work just as well.
This means you can flesh out NPCs as the players interact with them. The downside is you might need to take 5 minute timeouts to write down whatever information has just been revealed about an NPC (or whatever) at inopportune moments, depending on level of prep (i tended to run the above-linked campaign very low-prep) and short-time memory capacity 😉 .
just reading yoru post and simplifying it for my own use.. ideas have been sparked thanks!
i get down to :-
1) old threat ( historical enermy, forgtten war, dead wizard, Drow wizards grown up and back for more revenge after his families defeat )
2) new threat ( somethings just move in.brougth in, could be natural or abberant, for me was a magic spell book takes posseion of a local wizard and wants to start an army take over )
3) Balance of power ( cival war, rivalrys, power bases compitions, who to work for, royalist and anti monarciests, the possed wizard would love a civial war to create bodies for his army., so would the drow devided enermy is easy to kill so help the other side )
4) Consquenses of all of the above, eg the whos whats where and why after it over to spark the next generation
5) Passive threat dangerous to all (dragon, giants, volcano, sea, just extra story filler side quests, souorce of info/ help/ danger, )
6) mix it up, (the anti royalist tutors the young monarchiests, or the romeo juliet approch :-))
so the old and the new threats will target groups in the balance of power and that will have knock on effects
meh i ramble to much