A bottom up sandbox campaign is a structure where a referee creates a starting location with a homebase for adventuring and places for the characters to explore, fight monsters and get loot.
This is a principle that can be seen at work in the Gygax ’75 challenge, based on Gary’s famous 1975 advice for campaign creation. The “bottom” here is the starting dungeon level, intended as the starting point from which the campaign emerges.
Travis’s article got me thinking about the design process required to make a bottom-up campaign work. It’s not just that you start at the bottom, by creating low level encounters suitable for starting adventurers. The starting point is essentially a small individual “atom” of the game world, considered in isolation from the wider campaign setting.
Atomism was something I studied quite a while back in philosophy. As soon as I made this connection to RPGs, I started seeing atomism everywhere in “Old School” gaming.
What is Atomism?
Atomism is the principle that you can divide a whole into individual units and consider any one in isolation from the other units. At its extreme, any “atom” could be removed or replaced without affecting any other unit. Any relation it does bear to other atoms are entirely external to its identity.
An example is probably helpful here. For a husband to be a husband, they need to have a spouse. Taking their spouse away has a fundamental impact on their identity. But whether or not they wear brown shoes seems neither here nor there; they could just easily be in green shoes. It’s “external” relationships of this latter sort that characterise atomism.
