It seems like most of the activity around setting-based RPG material is for mega-dungeons, or for whole world settings. However, there's scarcely anything published that's in-between.

I understand the appeal of the megadungeon, both in play as a kind of totemic D&Dism. But I'm personally tired of endless dungeon activity, and there's already all sorts of published material out there for my megadungeon needs.

And yes, a lot of people want a big world setting to run their games in. Kingdoms, cosmology, geographic features. Cool stuff. But most of those books offer inspiration or framework more than usable at-the-table game content.

What I'm interested in is the kind of small-scale setting material found in Griffin Mountain, Night's Dark Terror, the Vault of Larin Karr, Night Below, or Ancient Kingdom's: Mesopotamia. That is, a region that has two or three communities, several diverse geographical features, a cast of all important NPCs, and several small and medium-sized dungeon environments. This kind of setting will typically serve as all the campaign material you'll need to see a party of characters through several levels, or as much as half of their career. They're essentially a mini-campaign and setting book combined.

All of those adventures/settings I cited are highly regarded in the industry, and expensive to track down now that they're out of print. Furthermore, the GMing advice of a most RPG books specifically advocates that GMs should start by building a small part of their world in detail, and then grow out from there. This is exactly what this type of setting book provides. And a setting book in this scale can provide all sorts of hooks and storyline options without railroading.

So why isn't the mini-campaign setting format getting any love today? Why isn't Paizo creating them? Why aren't OSR blogs trumpeting their virtues? Why isn't WotC promoting the idea for D&D Next?

Quote from: Haffrung;635853So why isn't the mini-campaign setting format getting any love today? Why isn't Paizo creating them? Why aren't OSR blogs trumpeting their virtues? Why isn't WotC promoting the idea for D&D Next?

To pick one example, isn't Paizo's Kingmaker series just about exactly what you are talking about?, and isn't Kingmaker one of the most highly rated Pathfinder campaigns, and isn't Pathfinder pretty popular these days? The sandbox looks like it's thriving to me.

Quote from: Haffrung;635853So why isn't the mini-campaign setting format getting any love today? Why isn't Paizo creating them? Why aren't OSR blogs trumpeting their virtues? Why isn't WotC promoting the idea for D&D Next?

Well, I tend to do this, but with a mega-dungeon in addition to the scattered mini-dungeons. But I do it from a sketchbox approach (most setting detail creating randomly in play.) So my blog posts on the topic are mostly about how to randomly roll up mini-campaign settings, instead of a pre-built setting.

I would love to see more mini sanbox settings like Night Below that can be fit together seamlessly.

Because the cat turds surface too quickly?

Several reasons come to mind.

1) GMs can imagine themselves making an small sandbox much more readily than they can imagine making a huge sandbox. Therefore, they see it, say "That looks neat, but I can make one myself if I want to" and then move on.

2) Large sandboxes give the creator room for large conceits. Dramatic world traits and global struggles can go in, and drastic variations from Standard D&D World can be inserted. If you're building a small sandbox, you either have to assume the PCs are never going to leave it, assume the GM is going to be willing to extend it with any conceits you've revealed in the text, or simply not put in anything that would make it too drastically incompatible with Standard D&D World rules.

3) Creating small sandboxes demands more technical proficiency than creating large ones. In the Forgotten Realms gray box, you can get away with describing a country in three paragraphs. You can cherrypick the most interesting or consequential people from an entire continent, hit the high spots of drama, and need only mention the existence of places of interest. In a small sandbox, that kind of vague generalization isn't going to fly. People expect a book they can buy, open up, and run that night. If all you're covering is a 20-mile square patch of land, you need to be providing floorplans, room keys, NPC rosters, specific event lines, and other hard details or else the buyer is going to be wondering what exactly he's paying for. It's not enough to just have a lot of neat setting ideas- you need to execute on a much more basic, table-ready level.

4) The market for them does not look hot. You're not going to attract the people who prefer storyline-based adventures with them, and the sandboxers almost all started their careers by creating exactly the sort of small-scale area you're trying to sell them.

Those are four reasons that seem to sum up, for me, why we don't see a lot of 64-page mini-sandbox supplements.

I just think they are fairly easy to make on your own.

People here seem to hate published adventure modules, but personally for me, designing a good dungeon is hard (which is why I like modules), but designing a small area is pretty easy.

I do the latter, then plug in existing dungeon modules.

And to a certain extent, it often just happens organically when you play a game. The "home base" just gradually develops.

Quote from: Haffrung;635853So why isn't the mini-campaign setting format getting any love today? Why isn't Paizo creating them? Why aren't OSR blogs trumpeting their virtues? Why isn't WotC promoting the idea for D&D Next?

I have no clue about Pazio or WotC, but it seems like they're all over the OSR. Fight On! averages more than one small sandbox per issue, at least among the issues I own. There are a couple of volumes of Points of Light from Goodman, FrogGod has published half a dozen Hexcrawl Chronicles, and many issues of Nod are centered around one.

In part it depends on the size of sandbox you're looking for. ACKS assumes a campaign is built on a 180x240 mile sandbox, and spends a lot of time modeling the economics. I tend to get bogged down in those, and have been playing with the mini-sandbox idea (36x60 miles in 4 pages) that was on a couple of blogs + a forum a couple of years ago. (e.g. http://aeonsnaugauries.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-much-campaign-do-you-need.html, http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=3775)

While free may have a lot to do with it, I am up to 3,203 downloads for Blackmarsh from RPGNow with a hundred+ being added every month. I have to check my website downloads, and that still not counting the half-dozen projects that others used Blackmarsh as a foundation.

Later this year I will be releasing a revamp of the Wild North that will be $$ product so I will see how much that translate into demand for a small sandbox setting.

Quote from: Bilharzia;635870To pick one example, isn't Paizo's Kingmaker series just about exactly what you are talking about?, and isn't Kingmaker one of the most highly rated Pathfinder campaigns, and isn't Pathfinder pretty popular these days? The sandbox looks like it's thriving to me.

I'd forgotten about Kingmaker. And the APs in that series are out of print and going for big money on ebay. So yeah, it struck a chord. You'd think Paizo might looking at doing more mini-sandbox APs. But for now, it just seems to have been another one-off theme, like pirates or horror.

Quote from: SineNomine;635951Several reasons come to mind.

1) GMs can imagine themselves making an small sandbox much more readily than they can imagine making a huge sandbox. Therefore, they see it, say "That looks neat, but I can make one myself if I want to" and then move on.

But if you include maps, and lairs, and NPC stats, etc. I don't see them any easier to make than a dungeon adventure. And there are dozens of those published a year.

Quote2) Large sandboxes give the creator room for large conceits. Dramatic world traits and global struggles can go in, and drastic variations from Standard D&D World can be inserted. If you're building a small sandbox, you either have to assume the PCs are never going to leave it, assume the GM is going to be willing to extend it with any conceits you've revealed in the text, or simply not put in anything that would make it too drastically incompatible with Standard D&D World rules.

Yeah, it's probably more creatively satisfying to create a whole world.

Quote3) Creating small sandboxes demands more technical proficiency than creating large ones. In the Forgotten Realms gray box, you can get away with describing a country in three paragraphs. You can cherrypick the most interesting or consequential people from an entire continent, hit the high spots of drama, and need only mention the existence of places of interest. In a small sandbox, that kind of vague generalization isn't going to fly. People expect a book they can buy, open up, and run that night. If all you're covering is a 20-mile square patch of land, you need to be providing floorplans, room keys, NPC rosters, specific event lines, and other hard details or else the buyer is going to be wondering what exactly he's paying for. It's not enough to just have a lot of neat setting ideas- you need to execute on a much more basic, table-ready level.

This is what I was getting at with my response to point 1. It's a lot of work to create a small sandbox with enough detail to run as-is at the table. Which is why you'd think they would be more popular.

Quote4) The market for them does not look hot. You're not going to attract the people who prefer storyline-based adventures with them, and the sandboxers almost all started their careers by creating exactly the sort of small-scale area you're trying to sell them.

While I agree that you're not going to appeal to the people who want a linear story in a book, a well-crafted small sandbox can support a plot-driven campaign. The key is to have compelling hooks, dynamic factions and foes, and suggestions for how the game can progress through a variety of challenges and stage. It's a mid-ground between the linear story adventure and the pure hex-crawl sandbox.

Quote from: JeremyR;635955I just think they are fairly easy to make on your own.

People here seem to hate published adventure modules, but personally for me, designing a good dungeon is hard (which is why I like modules), but designing a small area is pretty easy.

I do the latter, then plug in existing dungeon modules.

And to a certain extent, it often just happens organically when you play a game. The "home base" just gradually develops.

The ones I'm thinking of include the dungeons. They aren't just a home base and one or two geographic features. The include lairs, detailed maps, mini-dungeons, and in some cases large dungeons. They're campaigns-in-a-box, focusing on a limited geographical area.

Quote from: Naburimannu;636029I have no clue about Pazio or WotC, but it seems like they're all over the OSR. Fight On! averages more than one small sandbox per issue, at least among the issues I own. There are a couple of volumes of Points of Light from Goodman, FrogGod has published half a dozen Hexcrawl Chronicles, and many issues of Nod are centered around one.

In part it depends on the size of sandbox you're looking for. ACKS assumes a campaign is built on a 180x240 mile sandbox, and spends a lot of time modeling the economics. I tend to get bogged down in those, and have been playing with the mini-sandbox idea (36x60 miles in 4 pages) that was on a couple of blogs + a forum a couple of years ago. (e.g. http://aeonsnaugauries.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-much-campaign-do-you-need.html, http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=3775)

I'm thinking of the smaller ones, where you give a detailed descriptions of lots of boots-on-the-ground locales and foes. And as I've noted, it's more than just locations and monsters, but detailed NPCs, schemes, relationships, and plot developments. Everything you would need to run a campaign for 4 or 6 levels.

Quote from: Haffrung;636048The ones I'm thinking of include the dungeons. They aren't just a home base and one or two geographic features. The include lairs, detailed maps, mini-dungeons, and in some cases large dungeons. They're campaigns-in-a-box, focusing on a limited geographical area.



I'm thinking of the smaller ones, where you give a detailed descriptions of lots of boots-on-the-ground locales and foes. And as I've noted, it's more than just locations and monsters, but detailed NPCs, schemes, relationships, and plot developments. Everything you would need to run a campaign for 4 or 6 levels.

If you don't already have it, get Frandor's Keep from Kenzer. The system is Hackmaster Basic but its simple to swap in old school D&D stats. There are several adventure locations, a home base, lots of well defined npc's and numerous interactions going on between them. I highly recommmend it.

Quote from: Haffrung;636048This is what I was getting at with my response to point 1. It's a lot of work to create a small sandbox with enough detail to run as-is at the table. Which is why you'd think they would be more popular.

I do have a guide that some seem to find useful.