The Sandbox Shaman
With Narrative play, there’s very little that will surprise you and even less to interpret. “Throwing Bones” means to roll dice, coming from what dice were made from. With West Marches and Sandbox games, you’ll frequently need to make sense of what these results are — a Sandbox Shaman. Bones or entrails were frequently what a shaman would use to interpret signs and make determinations. Unfortunately, entrails would quickly remove your player pool so you’re stuck with throwing plastic emulating bones. There’s one game that comes to mind when it comes to having a dice roll needed to be interpreted by the Director.
Blame Colville
3rd Edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game Dice
I was fascinated when Matt Colville talked about the 3rd Edition to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game. It used unique dice; not the family of dXs we’ve all fallen in love with but dice with symbols on each side. In it, players would build dice pools based on bonuses and penalties for what they wished to attempt. Then, when the dice were rolled, the Director would need to pull on their Shaman cowl. There’s no numbers on these dice; instead, they’ve got to interpret the results based off of all of the symbols.
I wondered if that could be done with regular dice and now my hubris has come back to bite me.
Sample Interpretations
Zekame's Wandering Manor
I have a Faction I’ve named ‘Gorgon Lake’ because it is an artifical lake created after the party allowed Max MacDonald’s The Wandering Manor of Zekame (2021) to fall to seed from the One Page Dungeon Contest folks. Zekame’s moving castle manor has unfortunately unloaded its various menageries; with the other one, I had the intelligent fish folk create their own habitat. When I roll for Random Encounters, I don’t use a Bell Curve method like 2d6 for reasons outlined here. This means that there’s an equal chance of any result with weight being distributed by multiple entries. I got the Gorgon Lake and had a player randomly roll while I figured out which Random Encounter within the Faction the party came across and I got two Eels in shale hills.
Well, that’s definitely a choice. I rolled with it and did a simple trick: I tossed the information at the players matter of factly. This, in the business of sharking people, is known as a cold read. They supplied the answer, asking when the last major storm was. One good survival roll later, the party determined that a day before they began their journey there had been a huge storm. They filled in the details; oh, these Eels got caught up and dumped here. The players made a nice little shelter for them and filled it with water, I gave them Easy XP for solving the Eels issues and they went on their way.
A more complex example is when two of the players rolled up Random Encounter triggers. One was the Summer Court, the other was a Faction. I took a look at the map in the Hexcrawl where the party was and realized it was within Margrave Cwyll’s territory. Cwyll is another One Page Dungeon Contest entry that I used from Yusef Shari’ati’s 2021 The Unholy Hall of the Huntsman King. I changed the original person who gifted Cwyll his powers to a Winter Court Fey when I ran the initial adventure. When I rolled for encounters, the Summer Court had two of my own creations: a Honeybuzz (I have had art comissioned for the little guys here for a paused project) and an Abandoned Dancer against an entire hunting party of Cwyll. Suddenly, I saw that this was an easy dispute: Cwyll wanted his Summer brethern off of his lands. He is coded as a straightforward villain but my players decided to hire him, as buying him off was probably more likely than a confrontation. My players were clever and pulled a “we’re your boss, it’s OK, we’ll escort them out of your territory”.
If you want to include the Honeybuzz in your game, I did convert a Cloud Curio adventure into ‘restarting the Happiness’ for the Honeybuzz in my Note Failure Line to get back to making their Ambrosia.
Director, Not Master
I prefer the term Director from MCDM’s upcoming Draw Steel RPG over the traditional “DM” or “GM”. The Dungeon or Game Master implied that they’ve mastered their element and it will be within the context of a game or dungeon. In a Narrative game, I do not disagree as much. With how much roleplaying games are cooperative storytelling, you are more of a Stewart than a Master of elements. If we really wanted to flex my film knowledge, the term in French for Director is “réalisateur”; or the realizer. You’re the drive for why the game happens but you are not alone when it comes to telliing stories everyone at the table cares about. If anything, with how insane some options can be, you’re more of a Sandbox Shaman.
