Building the Campaign Milieu

07 Mar, 2025

There's lots of discussion online about the size of the sandbox, and I have a general sense that there is a trend towards minimalism among OSR gamers. I laid out my ideas about gamemastery in my last post, and I would definitely summarize by saying that I am by no means a minimalist, but instead I would call myself a pragmatic maximalist. I am well aware that my sandbox ¹ is absolutely ginormous, and that most of it will never be seen, but I'm not doing this out of any sense of obligation. Part of my reason for making it so big is because I enjoy the process, which I will explain below. Also, by centering it on the capital of the Empire, I can explore the themes mirroring real life political and social tensions in California, upon which the Empire is based.

The three goals I have in mind when designing my sandbox:

1. Present a living, breathing world where player choice matters.

I think player choice is the most important part of RPGs, after imagining an exciting scenario and playing a role of a character within it. And while you can have important choices and consequences in a typical "trad" style game ² I think this style leads to GM burnout and also ends up limiting the players in some un-fun ways, as I mentioned before. While there are some really great adventures keyed to my map, I will probably never run most of them. In my last fantasy campaign I often boasted to my players that if they wanted to they could run off and let the evil wizard do whatever she wanted to that corner of the world. But they knew I was running a highly edited version of Red Hand of Doom and that I wanted to run it. They were never going to leave even if it made perfect sense to do so. We had fun, but they didn't ever really have a choice because they didn't want to ruin the "DM's story." But I don't want to write a story. I want to play a game! I want to find out what's happening right there, in the moment. By doing the map the way I have, I have no idea what the players will latch onto. They may never even leave the Keep placed conspicuously on the Borderlands. But if they don't, then that's the story - it's my job to make it interesting.

2. Create a compelling, realistic fantasy world that doesn't devolve into "mudcore."

I've been working on my setting for a long time and it was just a couple years ago that I realized I had kind of subconsciously made my setting out to be a lot like California and the surrounding states ³ so all I did was make that much more explicit. I wanted to base the region off of the place I know best - Central California. I've spent my entire life here and I think it's a pretty cool place with a ton of geographic variation and interesting social, political, and economic stuff going on that is ripe for adaptation. To create my maps I use a program called Worldographer, which allows for nested maps - I have my 72, 24, and 6-mile ⁴ hexmaps all in the same file. I can tag locations on the map, use layers, and a ton of other cool stuff that makes my maps highly adaptable to whatever I need to do. So I scanned my old hand drawn map and set it as the underlay on Worldographer, filled it in with hexes of appropriate terrain at the 72 mile scale, then zoomed in. Once I had that, I fine tuned the results to be to my liking. My last fantasy campaign had been set in a small archipelago very far from the "core region" of the setting so I hadn't really done a lot of work making it gameable. I wasn't looking for a 1:1 geographic recreation, but more of an impressionistic interpretation stretching from roughly the Bay Area in the northwest to Sequoia in the southeast.

3. Link various seeded adventures together so that an overarching narrative naturally arises.

Once I had a map, I needed a ton of adventures from basically all editions of D&D as well as from retroclones like OSE, BFRPG, etc. I had a lot of general ideas about the setting, but the adventures really helped fill in the smaller parts of the setting - for instance, there is a recurring demonic invasion in this one particular county - the result of a long familial feud between the count's lineage and a rival house. I know there are guidelines out there, such as in the AD&D 1e DMG about how dense a milieu ought to be but I wanted to shoot for a 3:1 ratio - for every 3 hexes there's 1 with significant content. The rest will be populated using random encounters and other tables. The "minor" hexes might have a single session's worth of adventure or less and are perfect for people to put down their stronghold, while "major" hexes contain a module, Dungeon/Dragon magazine adventure, or something similar. This was...a long process, but I had fun and learned a lot while doing it. I keep a huge database of all the modules, adventures, dungeons, and so on in Obsidian. Each keyed hex has its own note, which is cross-referenced to a big table. I skimmed each adventure before keying it to a hex, so all I need to know is shown in my summary at the top of the note for the hex it's in. If the players bite, they can tell me they want to go there next week and I'll prep the adventure. I am using another book by Kevin Crawford for domain-play called An Echo, Resounding which advises me to have four towns to every major city and also to plant defined resource areas around to make the map something like a fantasy 4X game map once players start getting to that level. ⁵ The idea is that while there are lots of one-off adventures, many of them are part of a series of modules. Lots of modules have loose ends for the GM to tie together with others, and I'll use these to create a story from the players' actions. The faction system from Worlds Without Number will also really help with this, as it effectively simulates having groups operating in the world that aren't really connected with the players.

An aspect of the game that ties into all three of these goals are the random encounter tables. I've divided up the map into six different subregions and have blended together or created from whole-cloth my own encounter tables. I use a method I picked up from a blog that I can't remember the name of where I make a 3d6 table but roll an additional d6 to determine if it's the monster itself, its lair, spoor, tracks, or merely traces. Originally, I believe it was 2d6 but I wanted to throw in more options and put the really wacky stuff at the 3 and 18 ends. Typically people do random encounters by terrain type, but as I said I grew up here and the animals you run into in the Sierra versus the Pacific Coast Ranges are entirely different. Additionally, I'll be randomly determining weather ⁶ using Reddit user KorbohneD's 4 Season Weather Table with some alterations, since it basically never snows in most areas that my game is based on.

I think that about covers it. What are the guiding principles of your campaigns? How do you build out the campaign region and fill it with quests for the players to go on? Let me know on Bluesky.

Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies.

Footnotes