Review: The Midlands Low-Magic Sandbox Setting

"Every time a GM reads boxed text, an ad-lib fairy dies, and we’ve too much blood on our hands already. Paraphrasing and natural speech from the GM keeps players guessing what’s pre-planned, and what’s off-the-cuff-I-totally-planned-that awesome. And we wants that awesome, precious. We wants it." - Stephen J. Grodzicki

In a nutshell: System-neutral OSR setting and scenarios, 365-page PDF from Low Fantasy Gaming, $10 here at time of writing.

Intentionality

When the Aslan Route campaign finishes, I'm thinking of turning to picaresque sword and sorcery for the next game, and for that I'll need a steady supply of short adventures. This has 50 of them, and is a very cost-effective way of buying them as a bundle.

Further, as it's written by the same author as Tales of Argosa, Stephen J. Grodzicki, I thought it would shed light on the Argosa setting, and it does.

What You Get

Three versions of the book, one with a parchment background, one with a plain white background, and one "update for Low Fantasy Gaming Deluxe"; I don't have LFG, but it appears to have been the precursor to Tales of Argosa.

The first third of the book covers the The Midlands low-magic, points of light sandbox setting; Argosa is the formal name of the region. It begins with the author's definition of what a sandbox campaign is, namely a mysterious open world where choices matter, adventures are episodic, and you can rotate the position of GM around the group if you like.

This part also contains names and common sayings in the various languages of the setting, details of the region's history, geography, cultures, religions, and main settlements, maps of the region and its cities, a discussion on the dark and dangerous nature of magic in the setting, random NPC quirk tables, and 50 NPCs to use on the fly. Also present are some player options such as preset gear by class, variant classes, party bonds, as well as GM tools, a settlement generator for lesser outposts, random encounter tables and homebrew monsters; at a glance, I'd say most of these were adopted into the later Tales of Argosa rulebook. I particularly like the table of random pre-generated taverns.

The latter two-thirds of the product contains 50 episodic adventure sites and situations, arranged by geography (forest, city, mountain etc.), backed up by a rumour table which lets you select randomly from the list.

Each adventure begins with a box of rumours and hooks to get the PCs involved, then details of the site or situation. Some have maps, NPC or monster stats, depending on what the GM needs to run the scenario. The maps have no grid, as the author argues it's easier to add a grid if you want it than remove it if you don't.

The adventures are a mixture of dungeon crawls, mysteries to solve, and so on. The author notes that they were mostly playtested with 3-4 players, which is what I usually have. In line with OSR principles, these adventures laugh in the face of encounter balance; you're expected to know when to talk, when to fight, and when to run. Looking at them in a couple of different ways...

• There are 6 set in cities, 8 in forests, 3 in ice and snow, 6 in jungles, 8 by lakes or rivers, 8 in hills or mountains, 7 on plains, and 6 in swamps.
• There are 5 out-and-out dungeon crawls, 6 manhunts or bounty hunts, a tournament, a heist, 2 missing persons cases, 12 treasure hunts, 5 escort missions, 4 clear out the monsters jobs, 4 mysteries/creature features, a mercenary ticket, a diplomatic mission, an escape, and one with a monolith in it that I couldn't quite classify.
• There are 30 that could be dropped into Hyboria or the Dread Sea Dominions as they are, 10 that could be modified for that purpose with a little effort, and 10 that I think are too much work; this last category generally includes monsters that I don't think Robert E Howard would have used, so I don't either, but YMMV.

What I Think

The setting is deliberately left unfinished, so that each GM can make it their own; add, drop or change whatever you like. However, the author has clearly been running this setting for a while; my impression is that he began with D&D, and at his table it gradually mutated into first a set of house rules, then Low Fantasy Gaming, and finally Tales of Argosa. The breadth and depth of his vision are impressive, and the GM tools rival those of Sine Nomine Publications - high praise indeed.

What I bought it for, however, were the adventures, and here I got 40 usable adventures, each good for a session or two, for roughly eight quid; call it 20p per adventure, and where else can you get an evening's entertainment for 4-5 people for that kind of money?