The little sandbox of destiny

Why more OSR games should be small sandboxes like N3: Destiny of Kings

Ask anyone for the most iconic D&D modules from the days of BECMI or AD&D, and you’ll get a lot of answers. None of those answers will be N3: Destiny of Kings.

That module, published for both AD&D 1st edition and 2nd edition, is a bit of a bland one, compared to the adventures you could be having in the Caves of Chaos or in the Temple of Elemental Evil or wherever. It’s unlikely to have left massive impressions on many of those who played it.

Like most adventures written by the D&D author Stephen Bourne, it was a mission-based adventure, where you are sent on a quest by a nobleman or his representative to stop some evil. The evil, in N3, is another nobleman. Though there is an evil sorcerer, he’s also another nobleman, not someone more iconic like the Shadow Lord from Bourne’s X11: Saga of the Shadow Lord. There are monsters in random encounters and a few set encounters with supernatural creatures, but it’s mostly a very human set of encounters.

And now that I’ve told you why it doesn’t seem special, I’m going to tell you why more people writing adventures in the OSR style should write modules like N3.

My basic argument is this: N3 is a small, contained sandbox that gives players a quest to do while not dictating how they should go about doing it. If you’ve ever hankered for a module that allows complete player choice or player autonomy, while being easy for a GM to run, take a look at N3. It’s a great model (if imperfect in ways that I’ll get to).

The module may be pretty much ignored by most gamers, but here is why it shouldn’t be.

(I've tried to avoid outright spoilers, but this post is primarily aimed at GMs and game designers, so if you are planning to be a player in a game using N3, there may be some mild spoiler-ish points.)

The AD&D 1e cover is a bit strange and shows a scene that some groups may not get to, but players in one of my games used it as a visual aid when they got there, and it’s a lot cooler than…

…the truly generic cover of the 2e edition, which is probably entitled “Man on Horse.”

Not just an illusion of choice

In order to explain what makes the module so good, let me just give a quick precis of it for you.

The king is dead! The prince, his successor, traveled to a shrine in a northern province to prepare for his coronation, but he never returned. His uncle, who previously tried to usurp the kingdom, may be involved. So may the local duke. Go find the prince!

The module has one or two more twists up its sleeve. (The coronation symbols may be in danger as well.) But it is fairly straightforward: Go find the prince!

What’s not straightforward is how to do that. The module makes no demands on you in that regard. You could head up toward that shrine the prince was visiting. You could ask around at the duke’s stronghold. There’s the abbey, where the prince would be coronated once he’s found. You can go there to confer with his ally, the patriarch.

The map of the province (the duchy?) is nice and small. The movement rules given in the module, which have a higher rate of movement than the usual AD&D rules, have your horses flying across the map, as well. There are a few places to go, and you can generally get from any place to the closest places to it within a day. This isn't a module where camping will probably be necessary.

Wherever you go, you'll find something interesting. And wherever you go, what you'll find will almost certainly drive you to change your plans and might make your antagonists change their plans. It's not just a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with the option to go to a few different places. Where you go can change how you'll approach other places and people and how those places and people will react to you.

Most importantly, none of it is hard for a GM to deal with. You have only a couple of factions to deal with, and they are easy to keep track of. You always know what the PCs are going to be encountering and how to run it.

And when I have run N3, it was clear that the players felt a real level of autonomy. They could do what they wanted, where they wanted to. There was no plot that I was going to shove them into. There was, as Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian blog would put it, just a situation.

But I can get that at my local store!

Okay, you might say, but that's any sandbox. There are quite a number of good sandbox modules out there. Why should I care about this one?

Here are the reasons I think this one is special and why I hope a few more like it either exist (I don't know of any but you might, so tell me) or will soon be written:

1. The player have a clear sense of purpose and a clear sense of choices. There are sandbox modules with lots of great hooks, but because there are so many, that leaves them very wide open for the players to choose to do anything. That can be great for a long campaign and for producing the feeling of an expansive world.
   But in one specific way, that can deemphasize player agency, in the sense that the players don't viscerally experience how much control they really have, since they have no real demand to accomplish anything specific. Even in an outstanding sandbox module like The Evils of Illmire that does have some main throughlines and quests going on in its little world, there are many other things for players to get involved in. They won’t necessarily feel the power of their choices.
   In N3, on the other hand, it's very clear to the players from the outset how many choices they can make in approaching the one main quest of the module. They see that they have one job to get done but that there are many ways for them to try to get it done—and that how things go will be all up to their choices.
   One element that adds to that sense of real choice is that there is a player-facing hexmap in the module. While that wouldn't be appropriate in some modules, it works really well in N3, where the module isn't about exploration of the hexes but about traveling between a few discrete places (including some hidden places that you uncover not by hexcrawling but by investigation in other known locations). With the map in hand, the players get to point to a place and say, “Let’s head here and see what we can find.”

   

   This player map turns out to be incredibly fun. It’s not complicated, but it has just enough choices for players.

   .

2. Everything on the map has to do with the single quest. There are some great sandboxes that have main throughlines. For example, both In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe and Through the Valley of the Manticore have “main” quests. But many of the locations in those settings also have nothing or little to do with the main quest. That's great for extended play, but it again dilutes the focus of the players.
   In N3, every location is related to the main quest. That means that the whole thing functions as a quick, mini-sandbox full of decisions that are all about “How do we accomplish one thing?” In that sense, N3 is closer to a small single-location sandbox like the WFRP module Night of Blood than it is to a big overland adventure, even if it technically is an overland adventure.

3. Any direction the players head changes the story. In some modules that have multiple locations for players to travel to, what they're basically doing is just gathering enough clues or experiences to go through the route that the designers have set up. You'll see some modules with flowcharts for how the adventure might progress to the expected end. (Some Symbaroum adventures, for example, have made me sad because they take this incredible setting that should be the ultimate sandbox and set up a very linear adventure.)
   While N3 does have a little “how the adventure ends” section (the silly answer to that is that it ends with a jousting match, if your players are brave), that's basically just one scene at the end. But the entire bulk of the module is arranged so that entirely different things happen depending on where you decide to go.
   In one game I ran, the players decided right away to head in a direction I hadn't expected them to. (The module is totally designed to allow that and still be easy to run for the GM.) That meant that they learned about one of the schemes of the antagonists earlier than they might have, and they also got an inkling of some of the other secrets of the scenario earlier than they would have if they'd taken a different path. That ended up changing what they were interested in doing as they went to other places.

4. It's short. There are some incredible sandboxes full of massive amounts of material. The Evils of Illmire is one. We're all waiting for the Dolmenwood Kickstarter. But those are little worlds that you can play in for months or years, with hundreds of different situations to get involved in. And on the creation side, the idea of designing a module as complete and large as one of those is beyond daunting; they are works of years.
   N3 is much smaller. A group can finish it in three or four sessions. A designer can imagine writing a comparable module in days or weeks, rather than years.

5. It is about investigation and political intrigue, but the players mostly just use regular dungeon-crawling and overland travel. The module is about finding a missing person and dealing with a political situation, but it doesn't require high-level GM skills like investigation or political modules often do. This isn't Power Behind the Throne.
   Instead, the investigation is about sneaking around castles and shrines, looking for someone. And the politics of the situation is something that the players can consider when they are making their decisions about where to go and what to do, but they don't need to engage in intense roleplay with a cast of hundreds.
   Still, even though they only engage with the investigation and politics through dungeoneering and wilderness travel, the players do get a lot of the satisfaction that comes from investigating or engaging in politics. They don't just fight enemies; they figure things out.

Please write this, please

So here's my pitch to the supremely creative folks writing OSR modules: write some stuff like N3.

That is, rather than always trying to write a full, multifaceted sandbox along the lines of The Evils of Illmire or Dolmenwood, write a few small, constrained “sandbox adventures” like N3.

I've bought a number of smaller zines that were clearly attempts to create sandbox settings with a large number of factions and sites and environments. And the authors’ creativity is just bursting out of them, when you read them. Yet in the confines of these small zines, there really isn’t enough gameable material.

I'm sure lots of GMs take those zines and make sessions out of them, but I'm also sure that that takes a lot of work on their part.

(Some smaller zines do manage to cram in totally gameable sandboxes, of course. Desert Moon of Karth is the obvious example.)

I'm just going to suggest that the intense creativity that went into some of the zines I'm thinking about could have been used in a different way, with fewer settings and factions and doodads and with the addition of a relatively simple quest, and they would be much more usable for more people. They could become as popular as some of the beautiful “pure” sandboxes out there.

I'd just suggest that N3: Destiny of Kings would be a good example of how this has been done. Please make more like it, folks.

Get writing now!

Ways to make it better

The main point of this blogpost was to plead for more modules like N3. But if you're interested in playing N3 itself, I do have a few suggestions of how to make it better for your group, based on what I ended up doing.

I'll be getting into quasi-spoiler territory here, so if you're going to be a player in a game of N3 (especially if you're a player in one of my games!), you may want to tread lightly here.

However, I'm just giving a sketch of what I changed. Though I'd be happy to share more of the details with anyone interested when I have time to type them out, part of what I like about N3 is that it felt so easy to fix all of my own—and I’m sure you could do it just as well. The bones are good, even if you want to rearrange the flesh. And you may have better ideas for the details than I did. So I’m going to just give a sketch here.

Here are my general changes:

1. I made the political plot more interesting. Without mentioning direct spoilers, I can say that I changed who the exact bad guys were and what they were planning.
   One thing it caused was that the already non-linear setup was even less linear. It eliminated the “this is how the module ends" section, because it meant the GM has no way to know even in general terms how it will end. Also, it makes everything less humdrum.

2. I either eliminated the module's random encounters or made sure that I only used entertaining ones that had some relevance to the setup. Just throwing in “10 berserkers” for no apparent reason seemed pointless.
   (I was running N3 in Cairn, as well, and that led to me needing to decrease the difficulty of the random encounters and lessen the numbers of enemies. But reviewers have said that those encounters are too hard in AD&D for the stated levels, anyway, especially since the cover of the module and the inside of the module contradict one another in regard to which levels it is for.)

3. I made some NPCs and some locations more fun. Making an NPC demand that the characters smear a salve on his pustules before he'll give them information is just more fun than him not requiring anything. Making the shrine into a Wizard of Oz “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” scenario seemed better than the module’s “booming oracle voice that comes from a magical rock.”

4. A big change: I added a time element. Generally a hexmap only matters if there's some reason to care about how long it takes to travel from one place to another. In N3 as it is written, characters are unlikely to run out of food as they travel, because they can always get from a town to an inn and back in a day, and there aren't many destinations in the wilderness. There is no stated deadline for the quest, either.
   By adding a time element to the evildoers' plans (including making them move around the map on a schedule), I made how fast the PCs travel matters. Adding the time element also means that the GM has no idea at what point the PCs will interfere with the evildoers and that means that the GM has no idea at the outset how the module will end—which I think is a good thing.

5. I made everything on the map have a direct connection to the quest. In the module, there's one encounter in one location with a spirit that just serves as a trap that an evil henchman can lead the PCs into. But as written, the spirit and its backstory have nothing to do with the main quest.
   I changed that, making it so that the spirit has a connection with one of the main political players in the scenario. The encounter with the spirit can then change how the PCs think about that person.
   This was good for a couple of reasons. First, since everything else in the module has a direct connection to the main storyline, this unifies the whole module. But it also adds to the sense of investigation for the players. By skillfully talking down the spirit (as a player in one of my games did), they can find out something interesting about an important character, which feels like an accomplishment.

Here's hoping you enjoy N3 if you do play it. If you do know of a module that has similar qualities, please tell me. And if you don’t, start writing now!