Setting Up My Sandbox

By: Unknown on 09:55

I spent part of the morning stocking my numbered hexmap of the Midrealm, the portion of my world of Cinder where adventurers are supposed to start play. I grabbed my collection of the Dungeoneer, the magazine Paul Jacquays edited back in the day. (He wrote big chunks of it, too.) Most issues have at least one D&D dungeon. I then placed each dungeon somewhere on the map, putting a small 'D' on the map itself and putting in my key something like 1234 - Simpleton's Tomb (Dungeoneer Journal #23). It took maybe 30 minutes to flip through the mags and find spots on the map, and now the Midrealm already has 8 crazy dungeons without me putting pencil to graph paper. I also noted 6 hexes containing Frontier Forts of Kelnore, but I'll have to go back and dice those up with the fabulous Frontier Fort stocking charts.

I'm still trying to figure out how many of my old TSR modules I want to drop onto the map. Some of them I strongly associate with past Greyhawk or Mystara outings. On the other hand, I think I would drop the Keep on the Borderlands and In Search of the Unknown into any campaign if I was starting with a group of newbies. And I've got all the adventures from the pre-Dungeon issues of Dragon magazine on the CD-ROM set. When I was a kid I never used the Dragon adventures because all my players read the magazine as avidly as I did. "The Temple of Poseidon" immediately springs to mind as on Dragon adventure that would be fun to import to Cinder.

Of course, I plan on adding my own dungeons and lairs to the mix. This is just an easy way to get a leg up on stocking a big wilderness map.