Stranding the Wilderness - Part 1 : Dungeon Stranding
In Death Stranding, you take on the roll of Sam Porter Bridges who is American, a Porter and builds Bridges (both physically and metaphorically)... Look Death Stranding isn't a masterpiece for its plot's subtlety. When the game begins, an apocalypse (that's honestly too complicated to explain here) has left America fragmented and disconnected from one another. It's up to Sam and other Porters to deliver important packages and link up the spectral wifi of the Chiral Network by traversing this apocalyptic and ghost-filled terrain. Hmmm traversing deadly and barren terrain... maybe you see where this is going already.
As you play the game and walk the same routes as others, those routes slowly form into dirt paths that are easier to traverse and provide guidance for newer players. Any bridges you build, or recharge stations you lay down can also be used by Players you'll never see in game, and in turn you may encounter a vital zipline that another Player laid down for you. Add to this a Dark Souls-esc message system, and the ability to pool resources to build full highways and you get a landscape that is unique to its Players' network and a game that is quietly quite cooperative.
Which of course brings us to Dungeons and their Dragons (and Tabletop Wilderness exploration in general). But first, let's get some definitions out of the way first:
Domain Play : This is the part where the PCs start being in charge of Strongholds, Bastions, Castles etx. Players are amassing hirelings, constructing buildings, and leaving their mark on the world. (I've talked a little bit about this in my WILD blog post, but I've always thought games would benefit from letting you get in on this action earlier and at a smaller scale, then work your way up to being a warlord if that's your thing).
Wilderness : This is the big ol' open overworld a more old-school campaign may take place on. It's Outdoor Survival, the Hex Crawl, etx.
Strand-type Game : A game that allows for passive cooperation between parties who aren't in direct contact, who lay out "strands" across an open world for everyone's benefit. The term originating from how Hideo Kojima originally pitched Death Stranding.
There's also another big elephant in the room we need to clear up: This'll probably only work and be interesting if you're running for at least 12 people. (Not all at once of course) Taking another queue from the old-school, our Stranded Wilderness will be a persistent campaign world that a variety of groups can drop in and out of. In fact it's this dropping in-and-out that's going to give this Hex Crawl its unique texture.
With that out of the way let's get to the meat! The Wilderness should be deadly, hostile, and strain resources. The Towns should be (relatively) safe, allow you to resupply and rest, and be a spaces Players largely operate out of. The Dungeon should be full of loot and the most deadly (valuable) quarry a Player can find. Thus (in essence) the Wilderness (as it does in real life colonial and adventure capitalism scenarios) becomes and optimization problem : What is the fastest way to get from the Town to a Dungeon? Let's take this horrid example I made using one of tabletop's finest tools Hex Kit:
Players start in the bottom left town of Keepsville and have gathered enough intel to know there's a dungeon on the top right. Rumor also has it that the forests are host to highly aggressive giant wasps! Feeling brave, Group A goes straight through the forest to get to the dungeon and accidentally kicks the very literal hornet's nest. Meanwhile Group B goes around the mountain and is barely able to stretch their supplies for the return trip. Both Groups know something's going to need to change to truly milk the dungeon for all its worth, and to bring their best to its lower levels. Enter pseudo-domain play!
After clearing the wasps in the forest Group A is given a Hero's welcome and sell all the Wasp parts for quite the profit. The group decides to reinvest all these earnings into building a road directly from Keepsville to the dungeon, should make travel easier right? (As long as no bandits ambush you)
After selling their Beholder Eye (and nearly starving to death on the return trip), Group B is relieved to see there's a road leading all the way to the dungeon now. However an issue remains: Group B picked up a map that foretold of magical treasure on the Dungeon's fifth floor, and even with a road carrying that many rations back-and-forth is going to be a huge time and money sink. Plus Group A has talked about tithing the road so they can ensure there's guards (and thus no bandits) on it. This won't do at all. However the road is far from useless! Instead Group B uses the road to transport all they need to start their own village right outside the dungeon which'll become their base of operations.
At this point the higher levels of the Dungeons are getting picked clean pretty fast, so Group C decides to open a little trading post to help them flip a profit faster and give their Alchemical Chef a safe place to cook.
Meanwhile Group D has just taken their first steps into the Wilderness and after some horrible luck on the road to the Dungeon they're relieved to hear from a trading post merchant that there's a nearby village (the one Group B built) that they'll be able to rest up at!
Even in this most barebones example, we can see how Players have Stranded the Wilderness with the Domain tools they were given, and both enriched their own interaction with the map and new Players' first steps into it! They've also continued classic colonial cycles like overhunting and deforesting all without an explicit reward incentive. They've permanently changed the landscape and the dungeon, and paved the way for even deeper more dangerous delves ((Maybe that legendary on the 5th level is so deadly you really would need all these groups to cooperate to get through it)).
Hopefully this has helped sell you on Stranding the Wilderness! In the interest of keeping this short I broke this out into 2 Parts - The next part will go over some construction projects, time costs, etx and be of more direct use! (I'm going to try to keep it system agnostic-ish so we'll see how it goes) I'll see you there when I post it~ [[ Which might not be for a while sorry 3: ]]
One Last Bit of Theory : PvP. So this is one of those things I keep mulling over and over. In a truly open game, a Player could walk into another group's town and just start killing everyone and raise the whole place to the ground. Something about that rubs me the wrong way, in part because it's not a scenario I as a GM am interested (or would find fun) to run and in part because it's generally just a jerk thing to do. I keep thinking about whether I want to explicitly set the expectation that this practice is frowned upon or take the CD Projekt Red approach of tolerating it to a limited degree before throwing something horrible at the offending Player(s) (but that isn't very Blorb of me). I'm open to ideas and suggestions so feel free to leave a comment!
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