If a veteran player, reading our promise that a year of sessions in Cappadocia can be played without a single round of combat, is about to ask the perfectly reasonable question — then what do we actually do? — here is the answer, as plainly as we can put it.
The calendar is the dungeon. The rooms are the months.
The campaign in Cappadocia is not a sequence of quests but a sequence of seasons, and a session set in March is a different room from a session set in October because the country itself is doing different work.
In March the swallows are coming back and the lambing is on. In May the beacons may or may not light. In August the cave-chapel opens its door for one day. In October the salt caravans fill the white roads and the village settles its accounts. In November the country goes down into the rock for the winter.
The party moves through the year the way a party in another book would move through a megastructure, and what they do in each room is the same thing they would do in any good dungeon — look around, talk to the people they meet, take a position on the local quarrel, and leave the place changed by their passing, or changed by it themselves.
We did not invent this. Anyone who has run a long sandbox campaign in any system has half-noticed that the calendar is doing more of the GM's work than the dungeon is. We just decided to commit to it. The book is built so that running a session in October works differently from running one in March, not because we have a different table of encounters for each month — though we do — but because the country itself is in a different mood, and the things the party can plausibly be doing have changed.
It is, we think, the most honest dungeon you can build, because it does not pretend the world is waiting for the players. The world is doing its work. The players walk through it. If they help, they help. If they hinder, they hinder. If they leave, the next swallow comes back next March regardless.
— Adapted from Children of New Rome: Cappadocia, Chapter 1.