How I learned to relinquish control and embrace the BrOSR 4- The road to getting started
This post is a bit later than I would’ve liked. I had intended to have a post ready earlier but a bad decision two years ago has been causing me (and will probably continue to cause) headaches and time spent dealing with them. This has been taking most of my energy away from more important projects, like this blog, my shitbrew and even my No Artpunk Entry.
In any case…This blogpost was supposed to be about the things I did to set everything up as well as some examples of things that happened. However, it quickly became way too big, so this will just be about how I set all of this up, with examples of play coming next time.
How it started
At the start of the Border Baronies I made a few mistakes, though I also did things right. I want to go through how I implemented the two principles and the things I ran into.
It all started with my wanting to try out the principles the BrOSR had laid out, to see if there was any truth to the things they were saying. Since I was only running two campaigns and was playing in another 2, I thought this was the perfect time to do so. You gotta run before you can learn to walk, after all.
Some groundwork
I’d a partial campaign setup lying around from the time I’d done a Gygax 75 run, and after searching on three or so hard drives I found that one again. I added it to a hex map and instantly made it way too big. I realised this quickly and decided to ignore anything beyond a 5 hex sphere of the starting town. I added a few landmarks and dungeons, in part based on stuff I’d written earlier but never gotten around to use in a campaign, and partially by using Filling in the Blanks.
Even the five hex sphere proved too onerous for my desperately bad attention span. I decided to listen to the advice GFC had given in his hex crawl video. I created 3x6 points of interest. Three categories (natural, man-made and magical) each with 6 entries. I figured these would easily last me a session or two, and I could refill as required. I populated these in part with self-made things, partially from modules, and a third by generating them. I created rumors for these and created a table for the players to roll on at character generation.
Looking back, I wonder if this is the right strategy. Though it works, I’d much rather be able to quickly roll things up at the table when needed. I should run a few solo sessions where I generate things as I’m going along and see how that influences the pace. Whether it’s fast enough and requires little enough brain power that I can do so on autopilot while handling the table. I know Jeffro does this from the ADnD DMG on the fly, and I don’t see why, especially if you write custom encounter tables for your regions and dungeons, it shouldn’t work. When I’ve done so I’ll post my results
I also created a few factions I know I wanted to be there based on the world. A couple of Barons (it is called the Border Baronies, after all), a few monstrous factions, some wizards. They started out as two sentences; a name, their goal, and how they’re perceived by others. Later on, as required, I statted these out roughly, based on the domains I decided they ruled over and some rolls from the ACKs tables for these things. I left a lot open though. I wasn’t sure yet if I would be running these or players. In the latter case any work I did would get in the way.
Then I wrote up a short document explaining my intentions, and what I expected of players, as well as what they would expect of me. I told them about the factions they could run between sessions, or that they were entirely free to make their own.
They mostly did the latter, thank god. They came up with stuff I never would’ve. A family of inbred wizards claiming to have a line directly back from the king. A bunch of Dunedain-like rangers called the Twig Eaters. A faction of messengers that tried to steer politics by “accidentally” delivering messages between factions too late. Some also chose to run things I’d made beforehand, though they did so in a way I never would’ve imagined.
Mistakes were made
With the benefit of hindsight I’ve now found a few major mistakes I made along the way that I’m trying to correct. For your benefit, as well as my own, I’ll shortly explain these.
Firstly: I made the world too mundane. There was treasure, yes. There were tombs and weird things underground, but I hadn’t made the place Gonzo enough. This style of play needs things to be on the border of over the top. There needs to be an overflow of mysterious things and strange locations for your players to want to go out. I’ve been course-correcting ever since I identified this, but in my fallacious quest for ‘realism’, instead what I did was hiding the lede.
Secondly: I allowed the patrons to be too far apart on the map. I could and should have known this. Jeffro even talks about this in his blogs, how he had to tell his players “stop playing solitaire and interact with other patrons”. Allowing domains to be multiple days’ travel from another encourages this solitaire style. I’ve been putting factions run by me on these borders to try to draw them towards each other, but so far it’s not yet been entirely successful; there’s a few places still too distant. I need to find more patron players to fix this, or else talk plainly with those players that it’d be helpful if they decide to find a way to expand to be closer to others.
Thirdly: I did not have a good method to remind myself to do stuff in the future. There were some patron plans where I was late in giving feedback because I’d forgotten. I made notes, but those still require you to open them. For now I’ve fixed this by adding a bot that allows me to set reminders for myself on future dates. Now, when a patron decides to do something, I can simply create a reminder for, for example, 2 weeks in the future, when his scouts should be coming back. I can then see what they found, and if they would be coming back at all, and report that back to the player.
So how much effort was all of this?
I know that when I type all of this out it sounds like a lot of work, but it really doesn’t need to be. The hex map, the part I’d recommend you to not do, probably took the most time, about half a day. Factions were simple. Creating a dozen of these can be done in a span of minutes and gives you plenty to work with at the start. Dungeon maps I had plenty, and inserting dungeons from other products makes creating interesting places in your world trivial, particularly if you add a note for yourself to ‘alter tone to fit on the fly’ instead of actually doing so beforehand. I’ll talk more about that next time.
Overall, I think that between my general faffing about I didn’t spend much more than a week’s worth of evenings to put all of this together, and if I were to do it again I could probably streamline it. In general prep has been practically a non-issue, but that’s also for next time.
So to anyone who says “this would take way too long to set up to be feasible” I’d say this: this is the campaign I got off the ground in the least amount of time of any campaign I’ve run. Try it out. At the worst it might be something that’s not for you.
Next time: examples of play, but until then count your torches and keep mapping.