Sandbox Campaign, Week 1: Zombie Bombs and Shadowy Figures

This summer, I've started running a sandbox campaign.  This is my first time doing such, as I tend to have a central plot that drives the story (Choo-chooo! All aboard the Plot Railroad!).  I am excited about the prospect of letting the characters guide the story completely, taking the main plot out of my hands but still  letting me infuse the game with mini-stories and adventure hooks.  I keep telling the players, "You can do anything you want.  Well, you can try to do anything you want."  That is quite freeing for the GM as well, because there is no plot-critical event that must happen, no NPC that must be encountered, no monster that must be slain, no player character that must survive.  Not that I ever really force that stuff in anyways, just that there is a greater air of freedom in this campaign.

I'm running the campaign about twice a week, and I figured I would post short updates here for your reading pleasure.

The story begins in the Shatterwald, one of three major forests spilling down from the slopes of the Frostspine Mountains into the northern reaches of the Kaldish Empire.  The Shatterwald itself is located within the Margravate of Brackenburg, one of the princely realms within the Empire (drawing heavily from the historical Holy Roman Empire or, if you are more familiar with fake history, The Empire from Warhammer).

Cast of Characters (level 2):
Sigurd Karlsson - LG human cavalier.  Youngest of three children begat by a Valsc raider from the north and a Kaldish woman from the southern coast.  Ran away from home at 15 to pursue a life of chivalry and adventure.
Daphne Elias - CN human carnivalist rogue.  Has a pet monkey, Pascal, who does most of the dirty work for her, so she can claim innocence if caught.  Twin sister of Kat.  She and her sister come from Naxidos, my pseudo-Byzantine campaign setting.
Kat Elias - CN human bard.  Twin sister of Daphne.  Became a bard to charm health inspectors at her father's sandwich shop.  Plays a bouzouki.
Zel - CG human druid.  Has a Roc companion, Cameo, because every good adventuring party needs a man-sized bird.
Rikkit - CN(?) goblin sorcerer.  Very secretive; wears black robes to hide his identity (on account of racism).
Monty Bearbriar - CN dwarf fighter.  Has a deep and abiding love of ale, turnips, killing, and sleep.
Crow Dance the Panther - CN human barbarian/oracle.  A Turzar from then plains north of Naxidos, he spends most of his life in the saddle and has no love for mankind's precious "buildings" and "shelter."

The party (sans Crow Dance) found themselves in the Boar's Head Inn one afternoon, a homely place that sits on a lesser road bridging the forested gap between the Great Forest Road and a cluster of minor villages.  They chatted with the innkeep, Finley, for a while as I occasionally mentioned the mysterious black-cloaked figure in th corner of the inn, hoping one of them would ask Finley about him and I would get to say "He's one of them rangers - dangerous folk.  What his right name is I've never heard, but around here he's known as Spider."  But alas, no one took the bait.  Perhaps his impact was dulled by the other mysterious, black-cloaked figure in the other corner (Rikkit the goblin).  Shadowy inn-corners tend to attract such characters.

Eventually, Spider intervened in Monty's drunken antics (vomiting/rolling in the vegetable garden) and the players learned that he is a ranger working with the Church of Death, tracking down rumors of undead that have been cropping up in the villages out here.  Sure enough, the party soon detects an uproar outside, and they find a passel of villagers fleeing up the road.  Their pursuers are a team of skeletons armed with cudgels and military forks, killing the villagers as they flee and forking them into their fast-zombie-horse-driven wagon for use as necromantic raw materials.  The party defeats the undead interlopers and learns from the villagers that a necromancer invaded their village with his undead troops and started killing and reanimating the population.  Suspicious of the black-cloaked death-worshiper in their midst, Monty stealthily fires a crossbow bolt at Spider but is prevented from finishing him off by the rest of the party.  The party almost flees, but decides to fortify the inn and hold off the undead horde there so as to better protect the villagers.

The Boar's Head Inn

What I expected to happen: the party would board up the inn and use it as a fortified position, spending the night fending off zombies as they tried to break in.  A zombie would crawl through the chimney and emerge flaming and terrifying.  Zombies would try to claw through the roof.  The occasional imposition by a skeleton archer or a ghoul would liven things up.  Eventually, the party would have to give up one of the floors and retreat to a Last Stand.  It would be all dramatic and cool as they faced down the necromancer and the remnants of his horde, their backs to the wall and nothing to lose.

What actually happened: the party filled the cart (left over from the last battle) with kegs of the more flammable alcohols in the inn and put the goblin, the roc, and the spit-roasted boar in there as bait.  They used bar tables to fortify the vegetable garden, and those with ranged weapons broke out the top windows as firing positions.  The horde of 28 zombies slowly approached the makeshift cart-bomb, where the nervous goblin stood, torch in hand, ready to fly off on the roc.  From the garden, Kat cast a ghost sound of screaming villagers at the cart, hoping to entice the zombies, but Rikkit had no idea what was going on and was so freaked out that he took off and dropped the torch early.  Since I figured this bomb would not instantly detonate, I rolled initiative for the bomb and kept the result secret, an aspect which added some nice tension for a bit.  Zel cast entangle on the zombies to keep them in place around the bomb.  When it went off, it incinerated eight zombies instantly and created a 30-foot circle of burning wood and flesh.  The party continued fighting off the undead horde from outside the inn, taking potshots with arrows and jumping in enlarged and swinging while Sigurd charged around on his horse and Rikkit flew around on Zel's roc.  A troop of eight skeleton archers soon arrived, followed by four ghouls and the necromancer himself, but the party fought on bravely and defeated their swarming foes.

The next morning, Crow Dance arrived on the scene.  Seeing a pile of charred corpses, he decided this was his kind of party and quickly set about looting the necromancer, which the others had forgotten to do after killing him.  He walked into the inn wearing the necromancer's black cloak and carrying his staff, briefly startling the gathered adventurers before setting in one of the unoccupied shadowy corners.

After acquainting themselves with the new character (through the interpretations of Kat and Daphne, the only characters with whom Crow Dance shares a language), they decide to set out westward to investigate the village whence came the undead horde.  (Spider the DMPC, meanwhile, sets off south to make a report to his church and carry Finley's insurance claims to the Margrave at Brackenburg.)  The party walks for a day before coming on the charred remains of the village, where they find hobgoblins poking through the rubble.  They charge down on them, bursting through ashen hut-frames and destroying them with lance and blade.

When the party make camp that night, however, they discover that Monty and Cameo (the roc) had come down with Ghoul Fever from their injuries the previous night, and they decide to rush north to Castle Morbis, the nearest place where they can definitely get a remove disease spell cast.

My Thoughts: I like the freedom and the open-map exploring possibilities that the sandbox-style campaign provides.  It is fun to improvise with what the characters are doing and take their actions to their logical conclusions.  I had an adventure hook prepared for the day, but I didn't even get a chance to throw it at the party because they were already taking things in their own direction.  With the plot-freedom come new play dynamics, as seen by how the players' actions at the end of the session are being driven not by the needs of an overarching plot, but by the very real need to get their party members cured of a terrible disease.

There is also a much higher concentration of Chaotic Neutrals in the party than I have ever seen.  I wonder if this is a result of the freedom of a sandbox campaign, or just a coincidence.

Anyways, more gameplay updates coming next week.  I hope to get more gaming content articles out too, sometime soon, but I am busy preparing for college in England next year (and playing Baldur's Gate).

~your sandy d20 despot