I have a regular thursday group I play RPGs with - at first D&D 5e, but we've been branching out - and I've finally gotten a chance to start a campaign of Grave.
I've talked about how much I like the system before on this blog, but by this point I'm actually a few sessions in and I wanted to record how things have gone so far. Not only is this my first time with the system, but it's my first time running a real honest-to-god sandbox game - no plot, no predetermined story, just a world and a bunch of little adventure hooks. Until now the closest I've done is run D&D-likes in a sort of middle ground, where between sessions sometimes I'll ask players what they plan to do next, but all of those still mostly had overarching predetermined plots. They've come close, and we had fun, but I'm going all in on sandbox play this time, and it's gone great so far.
The setting
Grave is explicitly designed for Dark Souls inspired games, so I figured I'd rip off the main gimmick of dark souls and have the setting be defined by a cycle it's stuck in, of constantly fading and then being reborn. After a few hundred years the world starts to decay, corruption spreads, and someone has to gather up the souls of the strongest warriors in the world and use them in a ritual to start the cycle over again - and the next Age is themed after whoever ended the previous age. The setting's currently in the tail end of the Age of Spiders.
The players are undead, which show up around the tail end of every age with an instinctual drive to kill all the demigods and rebirth everything. Stuff like souls as currency and players being undead are part of Grave's mechanics, and I wanted a setting designed around the premise, and so far it's worked out well.
The sandbox
A lot of my other attempts at a sandbox have boiled down to linear stories where the players just follow a predetermined path until it ends and then they pick another linear path. I've concluded the reason they end up like this is because of the way I hand out adventure hooks. I'd give out too few, and the ones I did give out were usually too big to ignore - very little room for the players to decide what adventures they wanted to go on.
Here, I went with a different strategy. First, I slapped one big but very open-ended and optional quest in front of the players: Kill all the demigods that rule the land, here's where they live. Or don't. The world won't end if you blow off the quest, it's just something your undead gut is bugging you to do, to give you something to work towards to get you motivated. If you do want to, there's five of 'em, they're all in different directions, and they're all way higher level than you are so if you wanna take em out you need to figure out how the hell how to first.
Then: supplement the one big quest with a bunch of smaller, little adventure hooks, mostly from a rumor table. The rumors provide little bits of info about the surrounding area and what can be found in it - "some say X treasure can be found in Y area, north of Z", etc. Since I'm running an OSR system where you mostly have to find new spells, weapons, and souls (XP and currency) in-world to progress your character, treasure hunting becomes much more appealing than it ever was in my 5e campaigns - I've never had players so motivated just by greed, in a good way.
The thing tying everything together is a hexmap, which I'm new to. When I ran 5e I'd always just waive travel time, but the hexmap is the thing that makes everything here work - the world is laid out concretely enough that I always have a solid answer when a question is asked. How long does it take to get from point A to point B? Let me look at the map. 3 days. What does that entail? Exactly this many random encounters. This structure is critical for ensuring interesting stuff happens - more importantly, it's for ensuring interesting stuff that I didn't come up with happens, because coming up with stuff constitutes effort on my part and feels... deliberate. In worse cases, contrived. The hexmap fixes that.
The players
I'm running for my thursday group, which has three players: an Actor who really likes to lean into the roleplay and get into character, a Schemer who's always getting his character into trouble and poking and prodding at everything in my games, and an Audience member who's pretty passive but always shows up on time and always happy to be there. It's a good group, with good chemistry, where I very rarely get silence when I ask "what do you do?". I'm just going to refer to them with the titles I've given them here, for their privacy.
The Campaign!
I started off with essentially a prison break. There are factions who support the status quo and therefore don't want the current age to end, and undead are by default sorted into wanting the age to end, so the status-quo faction rounds up wandering undead and locks 'em up (which tends to be more effective than killing them because of the whole multiple-deaths mechanic that Grave gives to PCs).
So the PCs wake up in a cave filled with mostly empty coffins, one of them actually currently locked in a coffin. We do the thing where everyone introduces their characters - Actor is playing Slaine the Unforgiven ("the unforgiven" is what they rolled on the big d50 table of titles Grave has. Did I mention Grave has that? It's cool as hell.), a big burly fighter-type whose player asked to reflavor Slaine's two-handed weapon as a big frying pan so she could be a chef (obviously I said yes). Schemer is playing Temple the Bold, an ambitious dwarf who gets to shoot lightning since he picked a homebrew class tied to my setting. And Audience Member is playing Jin the Inheritor, a desert warrior with a little bit of spellsword flavor that gets to teleport around.
Slaine died within 20 minutes from sticking her head in a hole and there turning out to be a monster inside. The players need to unlearn bad habits, but Grave's multiple lives make it a good system for new players who need to do that unlearning.
Jin died near the end of the session in the big fight where they broke everyone out. The exit was heavily fortified with watchmen, a couple tower-mounted ballistae, and a big gate that required a turn of two people turning separate cranks near the gate simultaneously to open. I, also, need to unlearn bad habits - this gate was essentially a big combat encounter, a boss fight, that I didn't really include any way to bypass, and the NPC allies in the dungeon were primed for a fight. But defaulting to combat is a bad habit. It's something the players should only ever opt into because of how lethal it is. Entirely my mistake.
The ogre they bribed to help them died in the fight. The entire lead up to the fight ended up being a very good little tutorial for OSR play - lots of very dangerous encounters the players managed to make the most of instead of rushing into combat. They took to it very well.
That was the tutorial. There to get the players acclimated to exploring and dealing with random encounters with mostly just their wits. Once that gate was open and they got out into the wider world came the sandbox. They found their way to a town and I broke out the rumor table, and they must've spent an hour or two just scheming based on the results of the table and the big quest with the demigods I laid out in front of them. Debating where to go, what to do, what to bring along. I know a lot of people think of that stuff as the part you slog through to get to the actual fun, but I live for it. It means decisions. And making my players make hard decisions might be the most fun I get out of GMing.
Schemer, in my 5e games, was always the crazy minmaxer who'd get so damn excited about the absolute bullshit he could pull off with the right combination of character options. At first, he was a little disappointed that Grave's system meant he couldn't have the stuff he wanted for his build unless he stumbled upon it, but I responded "no you don't, figure out where the stuff you want is and go get it yourself" and he said "we can do that??". And then it all clicked for him and since that moment he's been an ambitious bastard. He's already saying concerning things about building an airship. It's great.
One of the things the players rolled on the rumor table told them about a dungeon rumored to have a small fortune of souls (which for them means money) hidden at the bottom, guarded by something terrible. The whole session at the outpost, they'd been lamenting their lack of funds as they looked at all the potential hirelings they could recruit, gear they could use, rations they were running out of, every little expense being a tough decision. Which was fantastic - it means they're going to be greedy as hell. That's what I want in a game economy; always more stuff to motivate you. I never want a situation where players have a pile of money and no idea what the hell to do with it all. That means they disengage and treasure stops motivating them as much. Once my players learned where a ton of treasure was, they all resolved to head there next session.
Anyway, the thing down there was a medusa. There's a lot of treasure in this little catacomb, very tempting, so I wanted an equally nasty monster to go with it. In a game like Grave where deaths are more lenient, a medusa turning you to stone - a fate worse than death - is the perfect survival-horror monster. The players make their way through the woods to the catacombs, a place used to store the bodies of some long-forgotten civilization in the hopes the bodies would rise as undead when the age neared its end, and this is where they got to experience tracking torchlight for the first time.
Unfortunately Grave's rules for torches are extremely lenient - you can fit five in a single item slot and buy five of them for a single soul each (for context, weapons range from 100-300 souls). They're absurdly cheap and take up very little space. This is bad - it means they're no longer an interesting decision to make, just a tax. I'll have to increase the price of torches going forward.
After a few hours of very careful dungeon crawling with lucky results on the random encounter table, the players reach the bottom and encounter the medusa. It's by no means friendly, but doesn't like to engage up close; PCs can still attack in melee (poorly) while not looking at it, but attacking from range is nearly impossible without getting a glimpse of it. After a tense conversation, it decided to let them get killed stealing from the actual guardian of the treasure - a big stone golem posted near the most prestigious person buried here, in a room filled with souls for her to take should she ever rise as undead.
The golem patrols the treasure room and is programmed never to run too far from it, even to chase intruders. It's immune to most attacks and incredibly sturdy, so the PCs can't do much to it. It's also much slower than the PCs, so it can't do much to them, either - so they figure they can essentially kite it infinitely while they take whatever they want, running into the treasure room, stealing some souls, and then running back before the golem catches up (since it wanders back to the treasure room the moment it exceeds its patrol range).
After the second cycle of this, the golem's limited intelligence decides to block the entrance to the room instead of sit in it until a PC arrives. I'm also rolling encounters and tracking torchlight the longer they do this. So it isn't quite as reliable a strategy as they first thought. In the end, with how much they'd run into down here, they elected to leave the dungeon with their riches and return later after figuring out what to do about the golem.
This is good! It means the players are un-learning the habit of "this is the content the DM set in front of us, so we're doing it" (a habit I encourage in more linear campaigns, but here I'm ready to tackle the daunting task of pre-making an entire region to explore before asking the PCs where they want to go) and instead learning that encounter balance is their job. I don't scale encounters to meet the party, just set powerful monsters where they should be, and if the players bite off more than they can chew, they suffer the consequences. So seeing them internalize that mindset, and decide themselves what they're confident they can tackle, is a win for me.
That was the end of last session. There's more to explore in that dungeon and in the surrounding area, more dungeons to find scattered around the region and more rolls to make on the rumor table once they regroup at the outpost. I have no idea what's in store, in a good way. This whole sandbox thing, all the tables to roll on to find things out instead of having me just decide what happens, is like winding up a big complicated rube-goldberg machine and watching it go off. I made the machine, but I have no clue what results will come of turning it on. All I have to do between sessions is expand the regions I've laid out.
A nice thing about making players track rations is it makes exploring harder the further you go from civilization - the further you go, the more rations you need, and you can only carry so many. So as the GM I make all of the adventure sites closest to the outpost first, since that's the place they want to keep returning to between adventures and (at least at first) don't stray too far from for fear of running out of food. Now that they have a good bit of treasure, that might change, but we'll see.
