Scenario Workshop: The Lynchburg Cluster Redux

This rambling post is about modifying and extending my 2024 mini-campaign The Lynchburg Cluster to turn it more into a sandbox. Do not read this if you don't want to be spoiled. And if you don't care about spoilers you should probably read or skim the campaign first.

I'm currently running The Lynchburg Cluster for the second time. My initial goal for this campaign was to create a sandbox campaign, based on a conspyramid structure.

However, while planning out the campaign, I quickly realized that this would be more complicated than I thought. And since this mini-campaign was supposed to be a submission for a jam I also had to deal with time and space constraints. So I abandoned the idea of a sandbox campaign in favor of a more classical, linear structure.

The main complications with making the campaign a sandbox were:

1. Giving the Agents multiple hooks at once, so that they have a real choice in what to investigate first.
2. Keeping things dynamic and having other parts of the conspyramid be active, while the Agents are busy investigating something else.
3. Not overwhelming both the players and the Handler.

For my second run of the campaign I decided to tackle these problems and run the campaign in the sandbox-style I initially wanted. In this post I'm outlining the changes that I have done so far and what I'm still working on.

The original campaign consists of three scenarios, all connected to the neo-pagan hate group Wolves of Erik. In the first scenario the Agents confront the Nazi metal band Wotans Reich. The second scenario is centered on a fitness grift called Berserker Warrior Program. And in the final scenario the Agents investigate a break-in into an old Green Box and (hopefully) dissolve the Wolves of Erik once and for all.

To combine the scenarios into a sandbox investigation they all have to take place at more or less the same time, so the timeline of events has to be adapted. This is not a huge problem, but all of the original scenarios have some element of time pressure, as terrible events will happen if the Agents are not acting fast enough. I'm not sure yet how to handle this properly. On the one hand the world should not feel static and Wotans Reich should definitely be doing stuff, even if the Agents decided to investigate the Berserker Warrior Program first. On the other hand, it feels unfair to have Wotans Reich summon a Great Old One without the Agents ever having looked into this. I see three options here:

1. Let the events happen as the timeline dictates and live with the fact that the Agents will most likely fail to stop some of the threats.
2. Have the events not be tethered to a specific date in the timeline, rather they are triggered when the Agents are investigating in the correct direction.
3. Like option 1, but add more signposts of impending danger, so that the Agents can choose to react accordingly (like Grim Portents for Apocalypse/Dungeon World Fronts).

Option 1 feels very Delta Green, but also means that a lot of the campaign material might never see use in play. In option 2 the world is too static, as it only reacts to player actions. So option 3 might be the way to go, but maybe I can think of something else.

The next problem is how to feed hooks for all three scenarios to the Agents in an organic way. There are multiple ways to solve this. I went a bit overboard and handled this by adding a whole new scenario that serves as an introduction for the campaign.

In this introduction the Agents investigate the mysterious death of Agent PHILIPP, a conspiracy-era DG agent. PHILIPP has already connected some dots and the Agents can continue his investigation with the information on his evidence board. Also, there are Leng spiders!

My notes for this introductory scenario can be found here. They are written in a bullet-point style, which was enough for me to run it, but your mileage may vary. At some point (maybe after I completed the campaign run) I want to do a full write-up and add it to a revised campaign document, together with the other scenarios.

Also, I'm still working on the follow-up campaign. If you have read The Lynchburg Cluster you know that it only deals with the lowest level of the Karotechia Bishop conspyramid. I already have notes for three additional scenarios that pick up these loose threads, but progress is slow. I hope that my current campaign will give me the motivation to finish this.