High Trust

Okay, read this first.

Now look this over:

Are you with me so far?

This reminds me of a systemless adventure published in issue 10 - 'The Cowboy Issue' - of Adventure Gaming magazine back in '82, "The Big Horn Basin Range Wars RPG Adventure." The adventure was based on a fictionalized Johnson County War, perhaps best known to gamers of a certain age from its retelling in the famous movie flop Heaven's Gate. I would guess that it would be barely recognizible as an "adventure" at all to many gamers: it's a bit of background, some locations such as ranches and towns, and the non-player characters - some historical, most fictional - who inhabit it.

And that's it.

The simplest summary can be boiled down to, 'In this place and at this time, some folks are ranchers and lawmen, and some folks are cattle thieves. Have at it!' There's no presumption about on which side the player characters will be found - a plausible case for joining either side can be made, really. No scenes, no programmed encounters - heck, no encounter tables at all.

I didn't see this until about a dozen years ago - we relocated many of the non-player characters and locations from "Big Basin Range Wars" from Montana into our 2e Boot Hill campaign in New Mexico, as can be seen on our campaign map - but it struck me that it's a campaign setting, a small sandbox, rather than what most gamers of my acquaintance would ever call an "adventure."

It's setting-as-adventure, which if you go back to the ur-hobby is what most "modules" - what we had before the hobby advanced the notion of "adventures" - really were, and it's still my first approach to preparing to run a roleplaying game. My current Flashing Blades campaign - which is slowly, sadly failing, I'm afraid; more on that another time - is a ruritania in the south of France in 1625: for it I developed some locations, a bunch of non-player characters with their vocations, avocations, and relationships, and some history, and turned the adventurers loose in it. It ticks many of the "high trust trad adventure" boxes and it most closely resembles the modules of my youth.