My two semester-long sandbox campaign has come to its end. Set in the lands of Sha, a vaguely ancient Mesopotamian setting I built last summer, I built a 48x48 hex map and ran the campaign in Whitehack. The core group was about 6, including myself, and we totaled around 26 sessions, give or take a few lost to bad note discipline. It was great fun, and I'm very appreciative of the players who entertained me and hopefully were entertained themselves.

Truly, I think my excitement and dedication levels started to wane about 15 sessions in. They didn't fully go away, and I think I had enough of the sandbox filled in that I could quickly plan each session in about twenty minutes, no matter where I was at on any given gameday. I also often over prepped for one session, which led to a no-prep week which was helpful in recharging. The campaign did pique my interest a little more towards the end, when the players went down one longer adventure hook and I could plan a little more linearly. This was probably somewhat evident to my players, but seemingly not enough for them to care all too much.

I probably made my sandbox a little too big. Lot of empty space and regions without much going on, which meant that getting anywhere with my early travel rules took 1/3rd to half a session. This probably wouldn't have been a problem had my sessions been a little longer, which I sort of figured out by the end. I changed my hex crawl rules to move two spaces per turn instead of one, which sped the game along. In a lot of ways, this was actually a pro— one of our greatest achievements, in which the party raided a cave of Kua-Toa to steal a magic staff, happened only because of a random encounter roll. Perhaps in future campaigns, I should be a little fluid with these things, using the best set of rules for any given session/scenario.

Whitehack is fun. I must admit, I rarely read the actual rules of any given game that I play; most OSR games play similarly enough that it doesn't matter. It didn't matter much here, accept I had some rules-reading players who caught me on a few things. Either way, the character creation rules are why you play Whitehack, and it is every bit as freeing as one would think. I think it's a very group-dependent system, though. I can definitely see some groups not enjoying all of the freedom, and creating characters takes too long for any smaller 1-2 session adventure in my opinion. Next time, I'll probably be using it as a toolkit, though. A GM could use the base here, create some hard-coded options and run like that.

I only have a few complaints; The deft rules feel a little under tuned, and it's hard to help players determine what good attunements(The Deft's power system)would be. Magic costs are nice and a good negotiation, but one of the standard ideas that matter at the start is that specificity in miracles should make costs cheaper. In practice, this was hard to adjudicate, especially with the guidance listed for each health cost. I also had a player switch to the brave halfway through after we had a character death. in hindsight, I should not have allowed it. Not that it was broken, but because I typically do not call for many rolls, which means they did not get to actually use the unique tools much.

Finally, I wish there was more guidance on magic items. Tip that I learned: Don't give out plus 1 swords often. If you do, don't let them be give a general damage buff. This probably subsides as levels go up, but we only got to at most level 4.

Sha is basically a Mesopotamian city-state. I wanted to build a world where gods were material parts of the world, acting upon it for whatever their divine needs are. The most important god came up the least unfortunately, as the city of Sha was founded a score before the campaign by those called by a goddess to build a city free of slavery and kings.

I came up with a lot of details on the fly. At one point, there was a mole-man in the dungeon. At the table, this eventually led to a mole-man village full of earth bending moles in the mountains. This approached worked better than expected, actually. Things felt fluid and held a lot of interest as new lore got built by player interactions and random encounter rolls. I don’t think I’ve ever played by the seat of my pants quite this much, but it was a roaring success.

If I were to give it a go again, I'd aim for a more closed-loop setting. I left a lot open for further exploration, but I spent more time coming up with completely new elements than exploring the paths I thought we would explore. If that's the inevitable, things might as well be more tied together in the first place. There was also a lot of fun stuff that my players just… never even got to touch upon? I’d like a way to at least tease what’s going on over in those unexplored hooks rather than them being empty holes in the game world.

Sha is going on the shelf, for now. I’ve written down everything I could think of about it in my notes, so eventually it’ll see some use once again— I really enjoy bronze age Mesopotamia.

My goal for next year is to pull together a consistent group for shorter 5-10 session campaigns, which seems to be my sweet spot. When I started getting into the OSR, it was mostly from burnout caused by untreated ADHD and the trad/neo-trad styles I had previously spent my teens working with. I think I’m going back towards that direction, mostly in campaign structure. My last experiment mixing the two went exceedingly well for a Cyberpunk 2020 game. It would also be fun to have a group of people willing to also DM short games.

I got a few ideas in my mind at this point for future campaigns. I like the idea of an interdimensional prison mega dungeon which sort of blends city structure and dungeon structure (Side note: Book of New Sun is great, not only as a stellar story but also to mine gonzo ideas from). I also want to create something in the style of Kidnap the Archpriest by Skerples, but instead of a heist it’s a mission to kill a vampire, heavily styled after Vampire Hunter D’s universe. Genre-mixing is one of my favorite things of late, and D’s world is a strange mix of dark fantasy, science fiction and western.

At the end of the day, I just want to play more games.