There’s a particularly prevalent — but completely incorrect — belief wandering around that sandboxes don’t have scenario hooks.

To the contrary: A good sandbox has scenario hooks hanging all over the place. The successful sandbox will not only be festooned with scenario hooks, it will also feature some form of default action that can be used to deliver more hooks if the players find themselves bereft of interesting options.

For example, a typical hexcrawl sandbox features a rumor table (which serves up some arbitrary number of scenario hooks to the PCs) and a default action if none of those rumors sound appealing (wandering around the map until you find something interesting).

A megadungeon sandbox similarly features a rumor table and a default action (go explore some unknown part of the dungeon).

Prepping this plethora of scenario hooks can be daunting for a GM who believes that every scenario hook needs to be linked to a distinct, unique plot. The trick to a sandbox is that you don’t prep plots: You prep situations. And for the sandbox you’ll be able to hang countless hooks off of every situation. You’ll also discover how sandbox situations “stay alive” even after the PCs have interacted with them (instead of being completely chewed up and discarded).

For example, let’s say you’ve got a dungeon a fair distance outside of town that’s the remains of a Neo-Norskan temple complex. It’s currently being occupied by a Bandit King who has forged together an alliance of humans, goblins, and ogres. He’s also renting skeletons off a nearby necromancer.

In terms of scenario hooks, there’s all kinds of stuff you can hang on this situation: Bandit raids are terrorizing local villages. A powerful magical artifact was stolen from a local caravan. There are old legends about the Neo-Norskan temple and what it contains. Because of the skeletons, there are false rumors that the necromancer lives there. Or that the necromancer has allied with the Bandit King. (And you can salt these scenario hooks into the campaign in any number of ways: Rumor tables. Lore recovered from other locations. Allies of the PCs who are now in need. Et cetera.)

So one day the PCs grab one of these hooks and they go off and they kill the Bandit King and they take the magical artifact he was carrying.

Over and done with, right? Only not really, because the guy who originally owned the magical artifact still wants it, so now the PCs are getting attacked by bounty hunters attempting to recover the artifact. Meanwhile, they didn’t wipe out all the bandits and the remaining goblins are renewing their raids under the leadership of the One-Eyed Ogre.

So the PCs go back to the Neo-Norskan temple and this time they wipe out all the bandits, permanently ending their threat to the region. Except now the Necromancer sees a big, open dungeon complex filled with the discarded corpses the PCs have left in their wake, and so he moves in and animates the corpses as a skeletal army.

Which all sounds like a lot of work, but because you prepped the whole thing as a situation to begin with you haven’t needed to spend more than about 5 minutes “refreshing” this content between sessions: You’re reusing the same maps and stat blocks over and over again. You spent a little time putting together new stat blocks for the bounty hunters when they showed up. And there was probably some light re-keying necessary for the changes the Necromancer made when he took over the complex.

You didn’t have to buy a whole new set of tools every single time. You just occasionally added a new tool when necessary. (And occasionally removed a hammer that the PCs had broken.)

This can be easier to visualize with a location (which is why I use it as an example), but the same basic process holds true for, say, factions in an urban campaign. Create a gang that’s, for example, manufacturing and marketing a drug derived from blood that’s been harvested from vampires and you should be able to use that toolkit to generate dozens of sessions of play.

The other thing that happens in a sandbox campaign is synergy between the different elements of the sandbox: By holding onto the artifact that was stolen from them, the PCs make enemies of House Nobuzo. This unexpectedly earns them a patron in the form of House Erskine, unleashing a flurry of scenario hooks from the “feuding noble houses” toolkit you designed. As the PCs get drawn into that world, they’re approached by a minor house named Tannar: They’re currently allied to House Nobuzo, but their daughter has been murdered by the Necromancer who has now stolen her body in order to transform her into his Corpse Bride. If the PCs can rescue their daughter from a fate literally worse than death, they’ll break their alliance with House Nobuzo and pledge for House Erskine.

After that scenario has resolved itself, you might find that the players are now actively looking for minor houses that they can endear to their political causes by doing favors for them. (Which would organically create a new default action for delivering scenario hooks.)

In any case, once your sandbox toolkits start interacting with each other like this, you’ll quickly find that the sandbox is basically running itself.

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

As with the Yucatan, Thibet is organized in sequences and locations instead of around nodes. Primarily sequences, because this location is largely about journeying deep into uncharted territory in search of a finale.

Speaking of finales, we’re getting near to the end of the campaign so I’m going to refresh our:

SPOILER WARNING

I’m going to do my best to keep things fairly vague at this juncture so that someone casually glancing at these pages won’t have the campaign spoiled for them, but since we’re also nearing a critical juncture it wouldn’t take much to spoil yourself.

MACEWAN: One thing you won’t find in my remix notes is the explosives expert MacEwan. This is nothing personal. By this time in the campaign, my PCs had become so completely well-versed in explosives that they had no need for MacEwan and I didn’t bother prepping him.

HIGH ROAD, LOW ROAD: One big shift I did make is bifurcating the first sequence so that the players have a choice of the route they want to follow. This is designed as a pretty straightforward incomparable: One route is fast-but-dangerous; the other route is slow-but-safe.

There’s a sequence of photographic props designed for each of the routes. If you’re playing with the poster maps, you can put these travel photos directly onto the map in a rough sequence pointing towards the mountain.

THE RAVINE: In a similar fashion, I’ve tweaked the design of the final descent into the Devouring Ravine. Regardless of which method the PCs use for destroying the Liar, there is now trade-off between going deeper into the ravine (which makes it easier to destroy the Liar) and staying higher (which is safer).

As written in the original campaign, the Devouring Ravine is cripplingly difficult. For my remix, I tried to take the “auto TPK” quality out of it (primarily by treating the entire descent as a single Mythos experience, so that the maximum Stability loss gets capped). But, in practice, I discovered that it’s still too tough. I’ve talked in the past about the numerous hard limits that the GUMSHOE system has which severely limits your flexibility in scenario design. In this case, the scenario drains out the Athletics and Outdoorsman pools of the PCs and then auto-kills them.

When I run the campaign again, I’ll be re-visiting these mechanics once again. Without doing a thorough analysis, I’d suggest (a) getting rid of the auto-kill climbing mechanic and (b) reducing the Athletics climb check difficulties by 1. Also: If the PCs make ANY attempt to gauge what they need to do to destroy the Liar (and they have the appropriate skills), I would make it clear what the trade-off is between going deeper and staying higher. After they’ve made the initial inquiry, I would also offer appropriate spends to give them specific number (the Liar’s inertia and/or the number of explosive charges required at each level of descent).

FINAL VISION: I’ve shifted the wording in the Final Vision provided by the Liar in order to obfuscate that it’s revealing the completion of a sacrifice. This is deliberate. I want to give the players a chance to discover that idea for themselves instead of having it handed to them. I think it makes for a more powerful “oh shit” moment. (It’s a problem if they don’t realize it, of course, but there’s a thematic Get Out of Jail Free card programmed into the final chapter of the campaign.)

PROP NOTES

DIORAMA: There’s a large number of “mystic paintings” in the diorama material for Thibet. I wanted to strongly instill the sense of Mt. Kailash (and its surroundings) as a holy place, so that the contrast between that and what’s lurking inside the mountain would be as large as possible.

You may also note that a large number of diorama elements actually feature Mt. Kailash. This presumes that, by the time the PCs are coming to Thibet, they already know that the Maw of the Mouth lies within the mountain. If they don’t know that — for example, if they’ve built up a theory that the Maw must be somewhere else in the region since the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities didn’t find anything on the mountain — you’ll want to hold back those elements so as to avoid tipping your hand.

Go to 3.2 The End

In 26 years of play, I have literally never seen PCs voluntarily surrender. Admittedly, beyond a certain point my villains largely stopped asking.

The only time I’ve had PCs taken prisoner is because they’d been beaten into unconsciousness. There was one incident about 3 years ago where a single PC got separated from the rest of the party and was captured (the rest of the party ended up using a wish spell to rescue her). The previous incident was about 4 years before that where all but one of the PCs were captured (the other PC was somewhere else at the time that the rest of the party was beaten unconscious).

Recently, I was running Eternal Lies, a published campaign which, on two occasions, expected (but didn’t require) the PCs to be captured. In one case, the PCs simply avoided the entire situation by staying three steps ahead of the bad guys. In the other, the NPCs whose “vast numbers” were supposed to make them surrender got hosed down in a hail of machine gun fire before they had a chance to even open their mouths and demand the white flag.

There was one group about 4 years ago who briefly discussed surrendering because they were near death and had been cut off from the surface by a half dozen giants and an entire platoon of orcs. They decided that it made more sense to literally cut their own heads off so that the elven wizard could stick them in a bag of holding, turn invisible, and fly them out to get resurrected. (Surprisingly, that worked out for all but one of them.)

Whenever I see a published adventure that requires the PCs to surrender, I take it as a very strong indication that the product was never playtested. (In my more cynical moments, it also makes me suspicious that the author has never actually played an RPG.)

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

The Yucatan marks a shift in the organization of my notes for the campaign. Form, in this case, follows function. Whereas the other locations up to this point in the campaign are designed as mysteries (which are best handled by a node-based structure), in the Yucatan the PCs are primarily concerned with mounting an expedition to discover the lost ruins of Chichen Xoxul.

Therefore, the node structure is foregone and I’ve instead used a collection of sequences and locations to organize the material. The exception is minor miscellaneous investigations, research, and preparations that can be undertaken when the PCs first arrive in the Yucatan. (These have been grouped together as Prologue: Merida.)

This is one of my favorite sections of the campaign. And it was, in fact, while reading the conclusion of the Yucatan location that I became resolved to run the campaign. For the most part, I’ve merely contented myself with enriching and expanding the material (particularly around the mythology of Gol-Goroth), but there are a few key changes to keep an eye out for:

LOCATION OF CHICHEN XOXUL: In the original campaign, the location of Chichen Xoxul appears to be something of an open secret. (There even seems to be a standard location where people park their trucks before hiking out to see it.) That seemed a little strange to me, so I’ve made it a little more remote and I’ve made its location a little more mysterious. (The PCs still shouldn’t have any real difficulty finding it. There are, in fact, multiple ways for them to track it down. But hopefully it will feel like they’re actually tracking it down, and not just grabbing a brochure from the local tourist bureau.)

GOLXUMAL vs. GOL-GOROTH: In the original campaign, Golxumal is an alternative name for Gol-Goroth and also the name of the moon where the Xoxul live. Because I was working to incorporate global Gol-Goroth lore into the campaign, I decided to completely separate the two terms: Golxumal is the moon. Gol-Goroth is the Mythos god. (Although a few Western scholars do screw it up in the handouts.)

RESCUING FRANCISCO DE LA BELALCAZAR: I’ve specifically made it possible to rescue Francisco de la Belalcazar. (The PCs might manage to release him back into his own time, which could theoretically change history. More likely is that they’d bring him back to contemporary times, which could lead to an interesting interchange between Franscisco de la Vega and his distant ancestor.)

EXPEDITION GUIDELINES

I’ve added a set of detailed guidelines that will allow the players to actually plan their expedition. It’s nothing too extravagant and it shouldn’t turn your campaign of Lovecraftian horror into a session of Wilderness Expedition Logistics, but it should give just enough meat to give the PCs some meaningful decisions in Merida. The key elements are:

ORGANIZING: Any character with Outdoorsman can efficiently organize an expedition. Alternatively, a guide can be hired to provide the expertise. If not, add +1 to any Credit Rating spends associated with the expedition.

SUPPLIES: 1-point Credit Rating spend per week of supplies.

PORTERS: 1 porter per investigator and guide. For an expedition lasting longer than three weeks, double the number of porters. 1-point Credit Rating spend per porter. An Interpersonal ability is necessary to keep the porters well organized, although a guide will also generally take care of organizing the porters.

NAVIGATION: Outdoorsman can navigate to generally known locations. Local guides can provide guidance. For unknown locations, additional skills and/or spends may be necessary.

These costs can be reduced through the application of other skills (like Bargain, for example). Detailed notes are given in the prep notes.

MEETING GOL-GOROTH

At the end of the Yucatan location, the PCs have the opportunity to “meet” Gol-Goroth. In the published campaign, the initial moment of telepathic contact is a horrific experience during which Gol-Goroth goes rummaging through the minds of the PCs and they all collectively share a set of memories as he yanks them out to look at them.

And then I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be cool if that’s how Gol-Goroth communicated? If he existed on such a completely different plane of existence that the only way for him to actually interact with a human being was by shuffling around their own thoughts?

In the end, I designed the encounter with Gol-Goroth around three techniques.

MEMORY MANIFESTATIONS: The investigators’ psyches are intermixed and tangled as Gol-Goroth paws through them. The idea that he’s attempting to communicate either comes from a gestalt of these memories or by transforming/combining them. (Go around the table and ask each player to share a memory of the specified type from their investigators’ past.)

VISIONS: Gol-Goroth simply shows them a vision of what he wants them to know.

APPROPRIATED BODIES: Gol-Goroth takes control of one or more investigators and speaks through them. (A technique I discovered during play – and which, therefore, isn’t represented in the remix notes – is to break up the declarations made through appropriated bodies and give them to each player to read aloud.)

As you’ll see in the remix notes, each major concept that Gol-Goroth wishes to communicate is packaged using some combination of these ideas. (And it’s actually quite trivial to improvise additional interactions if the players take the conversation in unexpected directions.)

My players encountered Gol-Goroth quite late in the campaign, which meant that the revelations of various memories and thoughts were a penultimate culmination of everything that these characters had experienced and a final exploration of all the aspects of them that had been developed through play. But the scene would probably play just as well near the beginning of the campaign (as a way of developing depth that would be explored through the rest of the campign) or the middle of the campaign (as a pivot point in that development).

PROP NOTES

PHOTOS OF THE SPAWN OF GOL-GOROTH: The idea here is that each player gets a different photograph of what the Spawn looks like without showing the other players. (Once the characters have a chance to compare notes, it’s fine if they flip the photos over.) This worked particularly well in my play-thru of the campaign because one of the PCs peeked around the corner, saw the Spawn eating corpses they had left on the Plaza, said “nope, nope, nope”, and skedaddled back to where the other PCs were waiting. The players thought the reason I handed her the photo face down was because they hadn’t seen the creature yet, so I got an inadvertent double whammy of having one of the players try to describe the horrible thing they had seen and then, later, revealing the “you all see something different” gimmick.

PHOTO OF THE PYRAMID: This is a really cool photo of a heavily overgrown Mayan pyramid. It is not, however, a perfect rendition of the pyramid at Chichen Xoxul. (Most notably, the backdrop behind the pyramid should be a thick and tangled jungle. It’s also a little too small, the structure on top isn’t quite right, and the observatory slits aren’t present.) Even while giving the proviso that “this photo isn’t 100% accurate”, I still found the photo an effective way to shake loose the popular image of modern Chichen Itza in the minds of my players and replace it with the image of a truly ruined complex. (This was important for me because I wanted to strongly contrast it with the image of an immaculate temple complex during the observatory sequence.)

I also used a small, miniature version of the Chichen Itza pyramid that I purchased while vacationing there about a decade ago. Having the 3D representation was a nice reference and then it lived on the gaming table for the rest of the campaign as another memento of their journey. The closest version I’ve been able to find online is a model kit of Kukulcan, which is really cool but considerably more expensive.

Go to 3.1 Thibet

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

I’m afraid I need to preface the remix of the Mexico City locale with a hard truth: In my opinion, this section of the original campaign is a big mess. Despite some really interesting ideas (that are largely left undeveloped), it’s easily the weakest section of the entire campaign.

First, it’s heavily overwritten. There’s a lot of meandering about self-evident contingencies, but there’s also a lot of bizarrely out-of-place GM advice. For example: “Eternal Lies is performed on the soundstage of your imagination. It is not played out on location in Mexico City, 1937. When conjuring an imaginary Mexico City for your adaptation of Eternal Lies, remember that your dramatic interpretation of Mexico City must, foremost, serve your story.” At this point you’re 260 pages into the book and at least 6-8 sessions into the campaign. It feels really weird to be saying things like, “Hey! Remember that the thing you’ve been doing for the last two months is totally a work of fiction!” Or to say things like this: “Keep all of that in mind while you’re making choices for Gonchi, because when you’re playing the role of Gonchi, you’ve also got to be playing the part of the Keeper still.”

Ignoring the fact that I consider some of the advice in this chapter to be flat-out bad (like explicitly telling your players that a particular prop is really important, so they should make sure to pay attention to it), you’re still faced with the fact that it’s curiously banal.

Second, it’s structurally weak (featuring a long, tenuous string of linear clues with little redundancy and a lot of faith-leaping). It’s also structurally bloated. For example, when the PCs are trying to track down a band of musicians, there’s a sequence where they have to go to a bar, have a conversation with a specific NPC, then get invited to a party, have another conversation with that same NPC, and then finally get introduced to the band. Later they’re supposed to get captured by the bad guys and tossed down a pit lined with mouths. Then they’re supposed to walk across a room and fall down ANOTHER pit with a Mouth in it.

You’ll note that these curious redundancies are absent from the remix: The bar and the party are conflated into a single interaction. And there is only one mouth-filled pit in the bad guys’ lair.

Third, speaking of mouth-filled pits, the conclusion is a bit of a disaster: In order to play out as written, it requires the PCs to be captured and thrown into the oubliette. But there’s no reasonable way to actually arrange for their capture. The scenario then explicitly breaks the normal rules for handling Stability checks, implementing a custom system which is impossibly brutal and essentially guarantees that the PCs will be wiped out. The author then seems to realize he’s made a mistake, because he includes an entire section dedicated exclusively to discussing how to railroad the PCs back out of the trap you’ve railroaded them into in order to avoid the inevitable TPK.

Fourth, there’s Elena Alcatruz. I thought about renaming her Mary Sue, but that felt a little too on the nose. Elena is this completely inconsequential and irrelevant character who is stunningly beautiful, utterly charming, versed in every subject the PCs are interested in, and literally the most amazing person they will ever meet. She receives the largest write-up of any NPC in the entire campaign (including three unique, detailed outfits), it’s suggested that one of the PCs should fall in love with her, and “if the Investigators (or their players) look forward to seeing her again in a future scene, you’re playing her just right.”

As a result of all this, Mexico City is probably the most heavily altered location in my version of the campaign: Entire scenes have been dropped, clues have been added and many have been redirected. It’s the only location where I recommend laying the book aside during the game and running strictly from the remix notes.

PROACTIVE NODES

One thing that will probably leap out at you about Mexico City is the large number of proactive nodes. When you’re running the location, don’t lose track of these: There are five proactive nodes and some of them (like Gonchi Del Toro or Brooks’ thugs) can even be used multiple times. Given that there are only eight static nodes (and three of those already include variations of the thugs in their own right), you won’t want to wait for the PCs to settle in before hitting them with the proactive stuff.

In many ways, these proactive nodes are the defining characteristic of the Mexico City location and set it apart from the other cities of the cult: Brooks has eyes and ears everywhere (and many of them are watching each other). Between Gonchi, the thugs, the birds, a second round of thugs, the shooter in Node 3, and then the thugs who attack La Paz, the entire city should pretty much just scream Brooks’ paranoia.

DE LA LUZ SONGS

One new addition to the Mexico City location that I’d like to call particular attention to are the additional De La Luz songs I developed: In the original campaign, there’s only one recording of Leticia de la Luz and its effect is fairly minimal. To this I’ve added “Cancion del Cuco”, “Armonia de los Dioses”, “Caricia de los Labios”, and “Grunido de la Montana”. Each of these has their own unique effect, which is summarized on a reference sheet (pg. 5 of the remix notes).

The conclusion of the Mexico City location, instead of being based around the oubliette, is instead based around Leticia de la Luz and the Major Mouth influencing the PCs through the alternating use of different songs. There’s no specific script for this: Play it by ear (pun intended) and keep switching the songs up while using them to best effect.

PROP NOTES

A LOVE POEM FOR LETICIA: I’m particularly satisfied with how this creepy-as-hell poem turned out. I’ve included a file for printing a 5.75″ x 4.5″ envelope. The poem is designed to be printed on matching stationary, but it’s relatively easy to print it on any size paper and trim it down. (You can skip the envelope, but note that it’s the primary clue here: The return address points to Brooks’ penthouse.)

LA PAZ MATCHBOOK: Print this onto cardstock and then cut it down to the size of a matchbook cover. It’s then relatively easy to rip the cover off a book of matches and staple the new cover on to replace it. A text file included in the props packet gives the address you’re supposed to write inside: La Cruz 29, 3°, 18. (That’s how addresses work in Mexico: It means #29 on La Cruz street, 3rd floor, Unit 18.)

LINER NOTES FOR THE NEW ALBUM: Separate files are given for the front and back of this handout. As detailed in the included text file and the scenario notes, there’s a crytography key that you can give to someone making a Cryptography spend. That should give them enough information to translate the text.

PHOTO OF DOMINGUEZ AND HIS CREW: Here, again, there’s a text file noting what needs to be written on the back of the photo.

VICTOR CORTEZ BUSINESS CARD: These are designed for 8471 Avery Business Cards. (You could also print them on cardstock and cut them down to business card size.) I filled the whole sheet with them because… well… why not? And then I developed the idea of Cortez compulsively handing them out to everyone he talks to.

Go to 2.5 Yucatan