Deeps of the Gyre - A Dying Earth Campaign

As I explore how we create narratives in TTRPGs, I became interested in the narrative sandbox approach, which I've written about previously. Sandbox style games are an outgrowth of the Old School Renaissance (OSR) culture of play which prioritizes player creativity above character ability. A principle of these games as well is that there is no fixed narrative - story arises from what happens at the table, not from some pre-established plan that the GM has mapped out.

The narrative sandbox approach is a natural evolution of the OSR playstyle. In a narrative sandbox, the GM presents factions, hooks, and opportunities and the players decide what to explore, who to interact with, and how. The decisions the players make shape the factions of the world. Maybe that mysterious cult becomes an ally and offers the PCs quests that will help them resurrect their dead god. Or maybe the PCs believe another NPC who warns them about the danger of this mystery cult's god and the players decide to take them down. In a narrative sandbox, it's up to the players. 

The appeal to this approach was apparent to me, a busy GM, blogger, and author without enough hours in the day for all the creative projects I have tasked myself with. In a narrative sandbox approach, I can focus my prep time on just what's needed for this session. I don't have to worry about how the player's decisions might change the events of the big picture story, because there is no big picture story. I don't have to plot out branching plot arcs to account for the players' possible choices. And perhaps most importantly for me - it keeps the game fresh and exciting. I don't know what is going to happen or where the story is going to wind up. That's up for the players to decide!

I decided for my narrative sandbox to lean into a "dying earth" setting, channeling the weird science fantasy energy of Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, early Miyazaki, and early editions of D&D itself. The idea was to have a world that looks like fantasy on the surface but starts to look quite a bit weirder once you scratch through to what's beneath (both figuratively and literally, since ancient underground megastructures called Deeps are spread throughout the world). 

I pillaged maps and setting elements ruthlessly from Kevin Crawford's masterpiece, "Worlds Without Number." I stole tables and plot hooks from Leo Hunt's "Vaults of Vaarn." I pulled inspiration from Luka Rejec's "Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City." And I mashed these up with ideas swiped from Vance, Wolfe, Miyazaki, and a few of my own to create my hacked-together setting - Deeps of the Gyre.

Choosing a system proved more difficult than I had anticipated. The old adage that "system doesn't matter" may be true in the cosmic sense, but it felt pretty relevant when I tried to decide how to run this game. I looked at more than a dozen different game systems, trying to figure out what might make one better-suited for the campaign I had in mind. In truth, any of them would have worked but each had its own pros and cons. My goals were to run a game that featured the following elements:

• Fast combat - no hour+ long combat encounters
• Inventory management/encumbrance as a constraint but simplified, forcing the players to make decisions on what's worth carrying
• Backgrounds as an element of character creation, to serve as a roleplaying hook and/or tie-in to the setting rather than a mechanical incentive
• Class-based system with classes that felt appropriate to the dying earth fantasy setting
• Travel and hexcrawl procedures in case the players want to go do wilderness exploration
• Compatibility with lots of different content so I can drop in adventures or creatures from many different sources, minimizing my prep time
• Optional rules for things like retainers, followers, downtime, etc.
• A system that was not reliant on skills - players should rely on their creativity rather than a roll of the dice to overcome an obstacle
• A system that did not use feats or similar powers, thereby reducing the temptation to min-max to achieve a certain outcome. In my experience it is all too easy in such systems to "optimize out the fun," seeking optimal builds that eliminate randomness or risk/reward decision-making by trivializing the threats (cough--5e--cough).

For this blog, I thought I would share some of my observations regarding the systems I evaluated. Please keep in mind that, with the exception of Shadowdark, I have not played most of these systems - my assessment was based on a read-through only. And my thoughts are not intended to be a criticism of these games, just indications of what I wanted for this campaign in particular compared to what I thought that game offered. 

Worlds Without Number: WWN was a strong contender since I was planning to use so much of the setting information already. I also like the magic rules, the way backgrounds integrate into character development, the easy adaptability to existing OSR content, and the detailed systems for downtime, factions, etc. However, I felt that the gestalt method of building characters by selecting Foci created a situation that created "winner" characters and "loser" characters through choice optimization and min-maxing. I also worried that the combat rules had too many action economy decisions and which could result in slowing play.

Shadow of the Demon Lord: Character progression in SotDL is more like a branching tree than a gestalt menu of options - for this reason it seemed to me less ripe for min-maxing and more about establishing a character identity. However, I ultimately decided against it due to the strong tie-in of its mechanics to the existing setting which was very different from the dying earth setting I wanted to run.

Black Sword Hack: Black Sword Hack was a strong contender and a game I definitely want to run one day. I liked the idea of origin and background defining your character, rather than strictly class. I liked the simplified mechanics of the usage die for tracking resources and the doom die as an event progression mechanic. I appreciate the simplicity of the mechanics - the rules are covered in basically three pages. It also had some neat mechanics for creating your setting. Ultimately I decided against it because it was a bit too streamlined for what I was looking for. I felt like Black Sword Hack would benefit from someone with more experience running OSR style games that I had, someone whose experience and knowledge of this type of game could "fill in the blanks." In any case, I hope that is me soon since I would really like to try this one!

Mausritter: Mausritter is a game that reads like a masterpiece in design to me. The mechanics are super simple, like Black Sword Hack (and Cairn, and Into the Odd, and Knave). What's nice is that the game carries this simplicity into procedures that these games often lack, like simple procedures for adventuring as well as simple, straightforward GM tools like procedures for factions. My only issue with it, besides it being classless, is that you play as mice. Cool concept, but doesn't fit with my dying earth setting.

Vaults of Vaarn: The aforementioned Vaults of Vaarn was a strong contender because the setting is so cool and weird. But like Cairn, Into the Odd, Knave, and Black Sword Hack, the lack of character classes, progression mechanics, and the minimalistic rules felt too streamlined for what I wanted for the game, and again like with Black Sword Hack, I wasn't sure I had the experience to fill in the blanks in the rules and procedures. But for worldbuilding content and random tables, this proved a useful resource.

Shadowdark: I love Shadowdark, having run it several times, so it was naturally a strong contender. It is class-based, has the old-school sensibilities regarding danger, exploration, and player creativity, is easy to learn, and combat is a breeze. However, I opted out of Shadowdark because, while the game is awesome for dungeon crawling, it didn't have as robust of procedures for things like hexcrawling, urban adventures, or faction play, and had a limited number of classes. Some of those concerns are addressed by the "Cursed Scroll" zines released thus far, or could have been hacked on, but I wanted a system that would do most of the work for me. I anticipate with the release of the Western Reaches campaign books and additional Cursed Scrolls later this year, that I'll be a lot more inclined to revisit Shadowdark for a larger-scale campaign.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: DCC is a game I've heard a lot about but never played. I read over the free preview rules and liked a lot of what I saw - it's class-based, combat seems pretty simple, it harkens back to OSR philosophy in playstyle, and it has plenty of fun weirdness like critical hit tables and randomized spellcasting tables. DCC also has the benefit of having a published Dying Earth setting based on Jack Vance's books. It was a close call, but I opted out of DCC for a couple of reasons. One, because it is based on D&D 3e rules, conversion of much more common B/X content seemed like it might be more work and two, because it seemed like a lot of big books with lots of reading. I imagined my players hunting through the rulebook trying to find a table for a particular spell and how that might grind that game to a crawl (and not the good kind).

Old School Essentials: OSE is the game that I looked at early in my process and then dismissed. I dismissed it because it is a retroclone of B/X D&D, a game I played as a kid and a game which I felt I had "moved beyond." I also hated the idea of dealing with descending armor class and the idea of "dwarf as a class." However, as I examined all of the other systems, the problems I kept having with them kept being the things that were good about OSE: It has simple, clear, and robust procedures for dungeon and wilderness exploration. It is class-based and lacks the sort of min-maxing character creation decisions that plague later editions of D&D. Combat is quick. Skills are deprioritized in favor of player problem-solving. Exploration is incentivized over combat. And subsystems like saving throws and racial abilities which seemed byzantine when I was a kid seemed much less challenging when I read them now. And by choosing the Advanced rules, I was able to separate the decision between Race and Class and have many different Class choices for my players that I could use to make the game feel appropriate to the setting. And since D&D at its roots is influenced by the dying earth books, it didn't feel weird to pull the classic fantasy classes like magic-users, thieves, bards, and fighters into the setting.

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My players took their first steps into the Deeps of the Gyre last week and things are already getting interesting. OSE's rigid character creation rules seem to have already created some tension (players used to 5e or Pathfinder were less than thrilled about rolling 3d6 down the line for their ability scores!!!), but I'm hoping that after a few sessions, the unfamiliarity of the mechanics will smooth out a bit and the players will enjoy the charms of exploring and creating the story in a narrative sandbox. 

As I run more sessions and get more comfortable with OSE, I'll likely have more to share about this campaign. For now, I'm excited to be revisiting the rules from the very first RPG I ran back in 1988 and finding out how that system works just as well now as it did back then, if not betterthanks to 35+ years of GM experience.

If you've had experience with running a dying earth-inspired game, tell me about it in the comments. Or if you think I grossly mischaracterized any of the games above, let me know what you love about them!