Jon Peterson’s book The Elusive Shift captures some of the discussions around campaign creation that took place in the early days of the hobby. This serves as interesting context to Gary Gygax’s influential 1975 article on the topic. Something that stood out to me is its account of Tim Waddell’s division of campaign creation into 4 levels, also written in 1975.
Achieving the first 3 levels of Waddell’s levels is surprisingly simple. In fact, the quick start Gygax ’75 method blasts through all of them. Level 1 is just a dungeon, level 2 consists of a few dungeons and wilderness hexes; level 3 is having at least 1 town on top of this. Level 4 though is certainly a steep jump, consisting of:
“several completely mapped towns, plenty of interesting townspeople, rumours, legends, history, etc. A total fantasy world”
In 1976, Dan Pierson in Alarms and Excursions #14 was seeking something similar (p133):
“A campaign: thousands or millions of square miles of mountain, forest, plains, and ocean; the conflict of empires, or slow attempts to put small states back together after a great war … your characters struggling in a vast setting for power, wealth, good, evil or whatever.”
Waddell describes himself as having only achieved 2/3rds of level 4, showing it to be a vastly more challenging undertaking than the first 3 levels. He acknowledged that a level 4 world would require “hours upon hours of work by a ref with a reasonably fertile imagination”.
My previous post looked at features of the Gygax ’75 method that minimise the workload of campaign creation. This is partly through a free mix of gonzo elements, with only weakly conceived “external” connections between these. In my own campaign, I’d like some of the depth that comes with a developed “4th level” world. But I also want to have my cake and eat it, avoiding the accompanying explosion in workload.
It's nearly 50 years since these issues were raised, so perhaps the task has been “solved” already. What I’m going look at specifically is how a materialist perspective can contribute to efficient campaign creation. I’m posting this as part April’s blog carnival - hosted by Codex Anathema on the topic of On creating elements for a setting.
The Gygax ’75 challenge is a quick-start method to get a campaign running from scratch, based on Gary Gygax’s famous 1975 article. The challenge is to follow Gary’s advice and complete its 5 stages in 5 weeks, although Gary’s original article claimed this can be done in a week. This blog post will consider features of Gary’s method that makes this kind of speed possible.
In this post, I am going to lean into an atomistic interpretation of Gary’s method. Essentially, this means building up a setting from individual “atoms” which have only a weak, external relationship to each other (as discussed in this prior post). I’m not suggesting that this is the “correct” interpretation, or that a single, correct interpretation even exists. But it might be the most efficient way to follow the method.
Travis Miller at Grumpy Wizard recently posted a summary of his article for the Gary’s Appendix II zine on Gary Gygax's principles for campaign creation. Travis refers to this as a bottom up sandbox approach:
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.
