Some sandbox design notes

Plot: I’d like to quash recent insinuations that there is going to be a string of quests for your characters to follow, which would lead to you “beating” the module. It’s not to say that the module is non-narrative, but we should work with the narrative that the systems give us. And if the systems are good, they will provide us with a wide variety of challenging situations that force us to make interesting decisions. The design concentrates on the environment and various agents in it, modeling them at a few different levels of abstraction (highly abstract for MPOP numbers, travel points, etc., and more specific when everything is spawned and loaded up in-game), as opposed to a programmatic design, which is essentially a series of tasks, which is the approach of a traditional RPGs. In pencil and paper play, programmatic design is a matter of necessity, as it takes a lot of time and forethought to conceive plot well enough to run it.
In any event, a programmatic design would limit my monster population system too much. Say I had a quest which was, “Go get such-and-such from the skeletons in yonder cave.”, which would be given to fledgling PCs. But before the low-level party gets to the cave, a high level party stomps through it and cleans out the skeletons, in enough time for the much harder bugbear population next door to move in. When the low-level party gets to the cave, they will likely be eradicated many times over, striped naked by the ferocious bugbears, wondering why they had been sent there… not good design.
Also, I think I can get much more game-play out of the work I (we) put in on the module, because each new monster population, new area, new quest item, new henchman, new magic item, new spell, etc. has a combinational effect with everything else already in the module and hakpak. So we’re expanding the module geometrically rather than just adding x hours of game-play.
This is not to discourage the idea of plot and quests. One good way to think of the module is as a medium for interacting with the other players.
For instance, Ryan asked me if his friar should start saving gold to build a parish. Not a bad idea at all. As you’ll find, though, Caer Mabon is on the fringe of an utterly chaotic land, and gets completely overrun weekly. Your characters aren’t dealing with isolated pockets of goblinoids and undead, the overrun Shield Lands is a sea of anarchy (in a Mad Max kind-of-way). Not a great place to build a church. So on to answer your question, Ryan: around ninth or tenth level (called “name level” in first edition) your characters will receive the accoutrements of a powerful character of their class. So you will receive a parish in a more civilized area, likely in Critwall or Willip, which will exist in-game.
(For now, though, Ryan, it might be fun to start insisting that the other PCs come up to the roof of the tower to, “…praise Saint Cuthbert for our recent victory.” And lead them in some kind of prayer/ritual.)

Level limits: I’ve been kicking around the idea of putting a level cap on our game, probably between 10th and 14th level. I foresee this improving play. A few points on this:

• Characters wouldn’t be forced to retire when they reached the level cap… however there would be a big liability to adventuring with them, because death would surely mean losing a level, maybe two.
• This danger would encourage players to keep a portfolio of characters, leading to more variety in role-play.
• Magic items would be tremendously valuable to high level characters because, after a certain point, it would be the only way they could expand their power.
• Say a mid-level party runs across a dragon and decides that only high level characters could deal with it… so the old crew needs to come out of retirement to deal with the threat. That’s the kind of story situation I looking to incite.
• Players could write conversation trees for “retired” characters so they could still be present in the game even when they are out of the action.
• I’d write some kind of “legacy item” system to both aid and restrict the passing of items between PCs of the same player. The first edition Oriental Adventures book has rules for a player running a succession of characters built into its honor system.

Super-Characterization: Ryan asked me about importing character portraits into the game. A well chosen character portrait could do wonders for characterization. It’s very simple. Send me a 240x400 pixel JPEG, and I’ll do all of the conversion and installation, and include it in the next hakpak update.