Difficulties concerning this area of play notwithstanding, most of us manage to create and run rewarding wilderness adventures. The OD&D and AD&D rulebooks offer workable procedures to run an outdoors expedition, and there are multiple approaches to build a wilderness sandbox, from fixed, linear journeys along roads and rivers, to more free-ranging pointcrawls and hexcrawls. Only three ingredients are required:
- An underlying approach to turn the imaginary world into a game space (hexes or squares, connecting lines, visible landmarks) that can be described by the GM and navigated by the players.
- Procedures for outdoors expeditions: movement, exploration, encounters, food and other resources, and so forth.
- Points of interest which give a reason for visiting the wilderness at all, and differentiate going one way from going another way.
However, there is an often unaddressed issue which
makes a strong difference in how actual wilderness-based campaigns pan out.
This is the issue of depth. The
concept of deep and shallow settings is familiar. As the idea goes, you can
generally sketch out a wide campaign setting in broad strokes, or select a more
narrow area, and give it an in-depth treatment where every little corner has something.
Doing both is theoretically possible (Tolkien, Greg Stafford and M.A.R. Barker
did it, and so did the rather less reputable Ed Greenwood), but the resulting
setting may become inaccessible for players, and burdensome or at least very
hard to manage for the GM. The question of depth also poses questions for
campaigns with a strong wilderness component: this is the subject matter of
this post, which highlights the differences between shallow and deep wildernesses.
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| A shallow wilderness: single-layered structure |
A shallow
wilderness stretches far and wide, and its points of interest tend to be
individually small and often unassuming – proverbial “grains of sand”. The Lord
of Crows maintains a castle in hex 1212; 1214 is the lair of 26 gnolls living
in a hilltop encampment surrounded by a palisade; and 1313 is a mysterious
obelisk where wise old crows read glyphs only known to their kind. These are
mostly encounter-level descriptions; they may be free-standing (like the
gnolls) or interrelated (what about the crow motif?), smaller and larger, but
they are about as complex as your usual dungeon room. There is a single "layer" of adventuring: the wilderness itself. That does not mean there are no cities or villages - but they mostly exist on the encounter level, without going into deeper detail. Wilderlands of High Fantasy is of course the main model of this
approach, while The Sea of Vipers – which has partly inspired this post – is a more recent one.
The implications for play point towards lots of
travel across a large number of hexes. Travel-related procedures such as random
wilderness monsters, getting lost, managing food, and so on become an important
aspect of play. Some character resources are going to be less of a going
concern (spells and hit points can be replenished through rest), while issues
like movement rates and daily random encounter frequency can become a bigger
deal. All in all, the wilderness is most
of the adventure, at least for a number of sessions: our large 3.0 Wilderlands
campaign was mostly one long trek from one dungeon (Necromancer’s Rappan Athuk)
to another dungeon (JG’s Dark Tower, although sadly, the campaign ended right
before we got there). There were diversions and stops along the way, but the
game was largely about wandering through the coastal areas of two enormous
campaign maps, and wrecking stuff.
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| A deep wilderness: multi-layered structure |
A deep
wilderness is perhaps better connected to the common D&D experience:
here, the wilderness expedition part is the connecting tissue between other
kinds of adventures, which are substantial on their own. The resulting games
may perhaps be better thought of as multi-layered: there are layers of declining
size and increasing complexity as you drill down from the “overland map” to the
individual hex, and below. To borrow an example from an intermittent campaign I
am running,
- You have a general setting map (the fallen Roman-inspired empire of Kassadia and its early Renaissance successor city states)…
- …but some areas, like “The Forest of Gornate” in the embedded picture, are described in more detail; in my case, as a pointcrawl…
- …and some points on this maps are themselves detailed locations (the town of Mur) or separate dungeons (the Great Cleft; the Villa of Lucretia Vinalli; the Hanging Gardens of Marabundus, etc.). In our case, the Great Cleft has Keep on the Borderlands-style mini-dungeons of its own!
A deep wilderness setting places somewhat less
emphasis on prolonged travel and its associated procedures. In fact, it tends
to anchor players in a smaller area;
by drawing them to local adventure areas and getting them involved in local
conflicts. Once you start getting entangled in the affairs of local nobles, or
drawn deeper into the mysteries of the forest, it makes less sense to just cut
ties and travel to Frabotia, let alone Thrygia or the borderlands beyond the
northern edge of the map. You could play an entire mini-campaign in a limited
area – and we had done so in various corners of the Wilderlands (around Tegel
village, on the Wormshead peninsula, in the wastelands and island realms around
Zothay).
The game can develop a complexity which does not happen as much on a
long itinerary (which tends to encourage episodic play), and the same locations
can be reused to an extent where they become familiar, while they can still reveal
new challenges and threats. Finding out that the hideout of the beast-cultist
was in the Hills of Ligonia all along, or arriving back in Mur to uncover an
insurrection plot involving former friends, is an experience. However, you lose
the magic of long-range travel: there is something liberating about wide,
shallow settings where you can truly head for the horizons to see what is
there.
At this point, I don’t know if our campaign in
Kassadia will evolve in either direction – this is going to be the result of
its natural trajectory – but I see potential in both routes. I would like my
players to see red-walled Viaskar and its places of pilgrimage, and go
toe-to-toe with the savage Harepsi and their rolling fortresses. Yet I would
also like to get them involved in complex local schemes and let them discover
interconnections and hidden details. And here is the dilemma: time and the
natural lifespan of a campaign will limit how much we can grasp; and depth will
have a decisive effect on where our adventures will take us.
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