Planning Ahead; a D&D Campaign for the Future

I've been running Call of Cthulhu exclusively for months now, and love it.  I really feel good about the campaign I'm running and the additional single-shot games I'm running both at the store and at conventions.  But I also know that sooner or later I'm going to want a palate-cleanser from the unspeakable cosmic horror I'm hip-deep in.  And to tell the truth, because right now I'm not writing scenarios but running published ones, I'm not exercising my creativity *that* much on the gaming front right now.  So I've begun thinking about a D&D campaign for once "A Time to Harvest" wraps, probably mid-autumn.

Here's what I know I want:

• More "traditional" D&D than my last campaign; fewer rayguns, more Western European fantasy tropes and Arthuriana.  I'm likely to replace some of the D&D humanoids with critters like Sciapods, Blemmyes and the like from medieval manuscripts.  How is it Blemmyes never made it into any of the Monster Manuals?
• Sandbox adventuring.  "A Time to Harvest" is very plot-centric, and I'd like a break from leading the players from clue to clue and let them decide where they want to go and what they're going to break when they get there.  
• Rules-lighter mechanics.  Swords & Wizardry, B/X retroclones, and 5e are all possibilities here.  3.x/Pathfinder are not.  
• A sense that the world does not exist for the PCs, that there are constantly things going on in the setting that they aren't interacting with.  

Here's what I'm pretty sure I want:

• Early Modern tech levels; gunpowder and early firearms exist, though will not always be easy to get, with a matchlock musket being as "high tech" in this campaign as the X-Ray Pulse Rifle was in Devil's Canyon.  This has me somewhat leaning towards using the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules.  Longbows, crossbows, and armored warriors will be much more common.  
• Strongly humanocentric setting.
• A solid mix of exploration/dungeoneering adventures and castle intrigue/stuff going on in town adventures.  A number of castles within the sandbox controlled by various wizards and warriors who feel very different from one another, so visiting Castle B isn't a cookie-cutter of having visited Castle A.  Likewise, different towns have different problems.  
• No reusing monsters; if there are orcs besieging Castle Blackstone, those are the only orcs in the sandbox.  There may be Chaotic-aligned, 1HD humanoids elsewhere in the sandbox, but they'll be, as mentioned above, Sciapods or something like that.  Mixed in with the Ogres, Harpies and Dragons will be the occasional weirder critter drawn from the Random Esoteric Creature Generator.
• A tracker akin to Chris Kutalik's Chaos Index tracking the ebb and flow and Magic and Mundanity in the sandbox.  

And here are some of the resources I intend to be using:

• 1E Oriental Adventures yearly/monthly/daily events charts to determine the regional events that the PCs can choose to ignore or involve themselves in.  
• Medieval Demographics Made Easy, by S. John Ross.
• Hexographer.
• OD&D Castle Occupancy Chart, combined with Jeff Rients' Random Castle Shenanigans chart.
• Justin Alexander's take on building a Hexcrawl.

What's Next?

I'm vastly behind on my painting.  I have a couple miniature projects in various stages of completion, and I've completed my entry for the "L'amour" bonus round of the Painting Challenge.  I'm particularly pleased with my entry for the "Defensive Terrain" round - I interpreted the name literally, and had the terrain be on the defensive, as an Earth Elemental struggled to fight off a team of undead miners directed by a witch.  Here are some pics:

The reason I haven't been painting too much is that I've been writing a whole lot - I've had two story proposals accepted for inclusion in upcoming anthologies.  One of my stories is complete and has been submitted, the second is in the works.  I'm also working on a third piece, my first try at fantasy fiction, to submit to a new magazine.

In other gaming news...

My two Call of Cthulhu games at Running GAGG this year have me feeling pretty good about that, and I'm looking ahead to other cons to run Cthulhu at, plus the possibility of arranging a monthly store game at a gaming store in Buffalo.

I've been invited to take part in a Savage Worlds game in the Deadlands weird west/horror setting, which should be fun, though I'm a little wary - I sometimes think I'm under a curse, that any RPG I join as anything but the Game Master is fated to die after the session I join.  Every game I've joined since I graduated college in 2009 has died after the session I participated in.  It's eerie.

I'm also considering the possibility of another home game - probably some form of Swords & Wizardry again, as I really like that system, though I'd use Ascending Armor Class this time - it really is just a more sensible system than the attack matrices.  I would do either "regular" D&D, without any science fiction elements of the sort I had last time - though I'd operate under the same sort of campaign framework, with the player characters free to wander and find their own adventures rather than adhering to a pre-planned story - or use the Swords & Wizardry rules in conjunction with the Warriors of the Red Planet book to run a full-on Barsoom-style game.

A lot is going to depend on my time and attention - right now writing fiction is holding on to my attention very tightly, to the point where I don't want to divert attention from that to preparing game material.