Sandbox Between Stoplights 3: Themes, Tones, and Musical Memory

Sandbox Between Stoplights 3: Themes, Tones, and Musical Memory

Hello, I'm Josh. In the last episode, I decided on an eschatological alien invasion as the inciting action, or chaos engine, for the setting. I want to mention quickly that the setting's chaos engine might end up being different from the party's, since the players will more-or-less direct their own plot in the sandbox we're building now.

I also decided that the plot is not the genocidal alien attack, that's only the backdrop. This might sound like a silly distinction, but it's important because the players can't meaningfully effect the final outcome of the alien invasion, so I want them to have a lot of control over their own story. Simply; the aliens will eventually win, the party will eventually die, and the players will be given the freedom to create or find their own motivations along the way.

Obviously, I want to give the players the most fun, exciting, and lifelike environment I can. To do that, it's time to pick the last major boundary for the campaign: the main themes and tones. Despite how bleak the premise sounds as I have explained until now, I’ve learned not everyone interprets everything the same way.

Rather than leave it to chance that everyone will kind of feel the way I do, I'm going to intentionally choose the predominant ideas and themes I want to explore. Once I start gathering my players, I'll make sure to be very clear about this to anyone interested so they can decide if this is something they really want to play.

I see this setting as obviously tragic, and I want to spend time lingering in tragedy. I want to touch on ideas of terror and desperation. But, also valor, compassion, and human beauty. Intense moments bring the opportunity for all these themes, and I intend to use them. I want to be highly evocative and take the intensity, wad it up, and then hurl it like a fastball right at my player’s hearts. I have to make sure the group is on board with that type of roleplay though before we start the game.

If you GM for a regular group, about this point is where I'd recommend you stop planning anything further and make your pitch to your friends. If they don't go for it, you don't want to spend too much time building your world just to be disappointed. If you've already done that, or know your friends will enjoy what you're planning, continue on. I, however, am going to be soliciting an entirely new group when I get to a certain point in development, but that's because of the nature of this setting. I want my players to self-select.

Darker themes typically mean we have characters who will play more like real people than Batman, which feels right for Stars Without Number. If you're unfamiliar with the system, it's quite possible for an unlucky max level player character to be killed by a lucky level 1 or 2 enemy. I like that because shotguns don't care about levels.

Thats another thing the players will have to know about too. Especially if they're used to higher power game systems- but that's yet another problem for future me, so I'm going to toss it out of my head for the moment and move on.

Back to the topic, just because a bleak tone is prominent, it doesn't mean there's no room for humor. I've never once run a table where people don't laugh, and I don't want to. But it does mean there's no room for a firbolg barbarian with 12 coconut cream pies as his main weapon- if you don't get the reference, I'll have a link to a fantastic comic in the notes for the show.

A big part of tone can be defined by our timeline of play; so I’m going to answer the questions “where do we start and where do we end?”

Starting is easy in this setting. Along with many other genres, I'm going to borrow heavily from disaster movies, survival stories, and war flicks so I'm going to look to them for my timeline too.

Those stories don't start right when the volcano erupts or when the aliens blow up the White House. They start well before that, so we have a chance to care about the characters and their lives before bad things happen to them. It’d be like starting Game of Thrones with Joffrey's death, You’d get no satisfaction from seeing him choke on poison, and since he's still a child, he'd probably be really sympathetic if you knew nothing about how evil he was.

What this means at the table is that I must allow time for an adventure or two before the end of the world starts, otherwise none of my players will care about it.


Cool bookend one is decided. We'll introduce our players and their characters to the world sometime between a few days and few months before the invasion.

Bookend two is a little trickier. I tried imagining what the end of the game might look like, but I came up bare. I just didn't know enough about anything in the game universe to say for sure. I just know the end state will be extinction, but that's enough for now.

Despite that, This point is a big milestone.

- I have a scale, it's the entire solar system.
- I have a tech level, it’s recognizable but quite a bit more advanced than the 21st century.
- I have a chaos engine, with the alien invasion.
- I have themes and play style.
- I have a starting point and general end state.

This is a greater level of detail than I get to with most homebrews. I quit long before I get here because I don't find something to really sink my teeth into creatively. It means this campaigns has legs and I’m really likely to actually finish creating it.

The next thing I should have started on were the aliens themselves, but I didn't. When I’m creating a campaign, I often find myself vividly imaging vignettes from different points in the story. They’re disconnected from anything at this point, but I like to use them to work backwards and then figure out how to incorporate them into the campaign.

I started getting the first flashes of one of those scenes. In my head, I envision a religious rite. I see a group of space pirates performing this ritual. But, they're not just a gang of pirates, they're members of a specific culture of pirates. A group of people who, maybe for several hundred years, have been living in space and developed their own culture, their own language, and they live at the margins of (quote-unquote) civilized space. They are some sort nebulous space barbarian. Fortunately, that's a trope that can be explained to players quite easily.

The space barbarians are descended from people who settled the outer colonies early on, and that's all I really know about them. Eventually I want to flesh out a more thorough ethnography so they can develop into more than just an archetype. But where I'm at is fine for the time being.

In my mind's eye, I see a few dozen members of the space barbarians standing in the cargo hold of the party's ship. The player characters are watching the ritual like wallflowers, being careful not to interrupt the holiest of moments for this culture. The leader of the barbarians is preparing his people for battle with the aliens using a willing human sacrifice. The person sacrificed will be someone very important to their barbarian's social order to illustrate how seriously they take the situation.

I'm not trying to create a terrifying moment of horror for my players, rather I'd like them to see the sacrifice in the context of a deeply solemn ceremony with genuinely religious participants. Capturing that distinction will be a huge challenge, but there's something deeply satisfying about subverting some horror tropes.

Finally, I want to point out the juxtaposition of Old World style religion with futuristic scifi space ships, because I suspect that will become another repeating element in my setting.

This one scene has already created a lot of nucleation sites to build more of the world. The barbarians, the party's ship, religion within the game universe, they're all things I can wok from. Thinking it out satisfied my distractable mind. I fully admit, I often act out these aloud scenes in my car since no one can hear me with my windows rolled up, and this one was no different.

Whether I'm acting it out or just quietly brainstorming, I can also pick appropriate music to listen to. This always eventually develops into a personal soundtrack for the campaign and a touchstone for my memorization process. The music helps me cement a scene in my head. Every time I hear a given song, I can imagine the related scene. When I imagine the scene, I can remember all the details in it, and all the concepts the details are attached to. Music is a powerful memory aid, as many people know. I'd wager you could probably remember a song some teacher taught you many years ago, if you thought about it.

And that's where I'm going to leave it today. In the next episode, I'll step away from the vivid scene I've already imagined to begin defining the aliens and discussing one more memory tool I use to keep myself on track.

Thank you so much for listening, and good luck this week.