Thread by @VentureSatchel

Prepping a sandbox #ttrpg campaign is wrecking my health.

In the past, I'd outline ~5 adventures, drop ~2 hooks on the party, then sprinkle the rest liberally throughout my notes with a "hooks to other adventures" section in my encounter template.

But this time around...

First of all, my map's too big. I used a planet-generating algorithm to produce geologically realistic continents, and I'm so in love with it, I just can't "kill my darling" like I'm supposed to.

But let's come back to that. Primarily, I just don't know what to put in the world.

Ben Robbins' seminal "West Marches" blog post suggests overlapping "layers of history", and he even invented a tool for it: Microscope, which I've been playing for years, and is *not* my problem.

I just don't have enough friends to play separate games of Microscope and D&D!

So instead I've been collecting inspiration — fact and fiction, from history books (rise and fall of Chinese, Persian, Macedonian, Korean and Roman Empires) to adventure review podcasts — and combing through my old RPG texts but it's not gelling.

It's not improving my notes.

This campaign is shaping up to be a cautionary tale about biting off more than one can chew. I justify my efforts two ways: 1) reminding myself I enjoy the labor, and 2) reassuring myself that the players will notice and appreciate the verisimilitude.

But I do I? Will they?

Let's talk about the map being too big.

An adventuring party can hike 16 miles a day while a galleon sails 120. A more-than-bountiful hexcrawl might comprise 1,000 4-mile hexes (32 miles across, or one night's camp) or scale up to 24-mile hexes, ie one night's camp per hex.

The excellent board game Tokaido places four Inns between one end of its "East Sea Road" and the other. On a maintained road, an adventuring party might go 24 miles a day. That's one Inn per road hex in civilized lands (no banditry afflicts the East Sea Road)!

Our real-world Silk Routes (née Road) spans 4,000 miles, passing through the treacherous including the Gobi Desert and Pamir Mountains. Neither paved nor Inn-studded, such an itinerary could take parties eight months or — with nominal random encounters — an in-game year!

So, what are some mistakes I can make trying to incorporate the grandeur of the ancient world into my #ttrpg campaign?

Probably the worst thing I could do would be to try and flesh out each of twelve million 4-mile hexes in a 3,000x4,000 mile grid.

I thought I was being good by narrowing the scope of my world to only the one continent. Really, I should narrow it even further: at least to only one region. But even at this scale, each hex is roughly a galleon's day wide: size enough for our more-than-bountiful hexcrawl.

So, narrowing further — to the scale of a hexcrawl, or a West Marches game — I'm left with only a blank hex, and none of the wild worlds inspired by (and inspiring!) the broader topography seem to fit inside of it. This seems to present a paradox.

I've liked to "joke" that my next campaign would be set in this textbook image of terrain types, or this topographical map of Idaho, and I probably SHOULD be constrained to such things. After all, the players aren't geologists; they're sword-and-sorcery-wielding adventurers!

🙟 In fact, I could do worse than to:
1) plunk that textbook image onto the hex,
2) scatter the nodes of a 5x5 campaign matrix across it,
3) drop a few hooks on the players and
4) open when2meet.com in another tab.