My Railbox attempt

Player's map

Inspired by Stirges suck. I ran across that post a few weeks back while researching for one of my tales, I started using the slackbox idea to make the locales and adventures for my heroes. After realizing that I was putting waaay too much work for a few short stories, I thought maybe I could throw my hat back into the DM ring. I haven't DM in a decade now. Usually when I DM I either take the lazy way out and run a module or I spend way too much time plotting out an adventure to railroad my players through. I say railroad because I always tried to set up almost every possible scenario so I could have fall backs for when the player, inevitable, turned left when they should go right. I was basically writing a choose your adventure book, instead of allowing for player imagination, I was basically writing the story that I would use in some of my tales. The players were basically allowed to choose which directions the characters would go but in most cases, I already had that mapped out. Let me tell you, it was way too much work.So I hated to DM.


 Now the idea of running a sandbox scared the hell outta me. I knew that I would never be able to plan out every situation in a large enough area to make sandboxers happy. But I also know that a long time ago, more than ten less than twenty years, I had a friend living with me. He and I would alternate DMing our two characters, his was a dwarf and mine was something weird (they usually were since I'd gotten bored with the standard a long time before then). All we had was the three core books and The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting for 2nd edition. So using this map we started our characters out. Now we were both pretty busy at the time so we played about an hour every couple of days. So with almost no prep we relied on storytelling and random encounters. We had a freakin blast. It was the last time that I remember having fun as a DM.


 So I said," Screw it." I called Eric up and asked him if he would mind me trying out a sandbox campaign in Ganth. He said with a little trepidation," Sure." Right now, it's not in the BIG BOOK of GANTH yet, but we'll see how it goes. It's not my place to tell you what's in that book, so far, but maybe this will be a sneak peek. I do plan to have a few random tables(including some adventure hooks), npc names, lair locations, and a couple dungeons ready. The dungeons will be drawn, hopefully in some unique ways, and have a few key encounters but I'm going to try flying without a safety net. We'll see how it goes.

Krixen's End

 The players will start off in Krixen's End as recently released slaves. I allowed no clerics or paladin's, since they wouldn't survive the slavery. The character's also start off as third level characters for this railbox. The were originally first level when they were captured and sold into slavery, I decided to say after five years in bondage they gained the extra levels. So ends the rail part of the box. Now on to the sandbox version.


So far the guys have chosen to make a dwarf thief and human illusionist. Both are neutral evil, we'll see how that works out. We could use a couple more players but as of now these two will have to learn to survive. Let's hope Eric and Nick make some interesting tales.


 ALSO, as a side note, there will still be Tales coming. I'm currently writing up the first few parts of The Fall of Wynter. Hopefully, I can get the first post up in the next few days.