About 5 years ago I started getting back into RPGs and was delighted to find a thriving DIY scene utilising the editions of D&D upon which I had cut my teeth — B/X and BECMI. This was 2015 and of course the OSR scene was already long established (for some people it was just a continuation of the campaigns they'd been playing since 70s, 80s and 90s) but for me it felt fresh and exciting and more than a little weird.
Because I was very much alone in this labyrinth, a lot of energy that would otherwise be spent on game prep — or actually playing — ended up going into innumerable worldbuilding experiments. One of the posts that I returned to again and again was this one by Bat in the Attic:
http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-make-fantasy-sandbox.htmlWhile it probably goes to depths that I don't think I would bother going to now, what's great about this huge series of articles is that it presents a formal procedure: follow the steps and you'll end up with a sandbox in which to drop a party of adventurers.
I wanted to include something akin to this in the first volume of PARIAH but the limits of a 64 page zine put paid to that notion fairly early on and the project was sidelined....
Until now!
Now the time is right for me to put something back into the world and to present:
Setting up a Proto-Neolithic Sandbox Part 1: the Base Map