Home Base

Gateway to Adventure
Down to a handful of hit points remaining, most of the memorized spells having been cast, low on food, torches and other expendable equipment, the party decides to quit the dungeon for now and head back to town for some well needed rest and resupply. Exiting the dark dungeon, eyes adjusting to the bright light as lungs draw in the clean air, the party breathes a collective sigh of relief and heads off towards home base.
Home base, or where the party of PCs spends time when not adventuring, may start off as nothing more than a roadside inn where they meet a mysterious stranger who sells them a map, or offers to hire them to retrieve a lost item, or rescue someone who disappeared down the tunnels. There may be a few items useful to adventurers for sale, if the party is lucky that is. Eventually a group of PCs will require healing and request more of the referee than is available at a roadside inn and the village or town is born. Here hard won coin can be spent on entertainment and hobbies and maybe even to buy influence with the local magistrates, clergymen, etc. Eventually some PCs may desire to build a stronghold as described in White Box, thus entering the realm of land-holder and local politics.
The fleshed out town or city home base can become the site of even more adventure as the urban setting provides a number of opportunities for PCs, some legal and some rather shady. The thief character class as introduced in Supplement I Greyhawk seems particularly well suited for urban adventure, but there is plenty of mischief available for the other classes in the city as well. NPCs rather than monsters become the major adversaries and opportunities to make alliances and business deals abound. In fact, many PCs may find life in the city to be just as rewarding, and sometimes more dangerous, than delving in dungeons for a living.
Social standing, membership in various organizations and factions all add an additional level of challenge and potential achievement for PCs. White Box only hints at such milieu details, but the enterprising referee can easily find information to inspire their own "house rules" for such. Many systems that follow closely on White Box recognize the natural progression of the campaign into the urban environment and include such rules. Play aids for White Box and other systems include cities and towns among the earliest published offerings. What starts out as a "safe" place to rest up, heal and resupply can quickly become its own source of danger, intrigue and opportunity.
When I was first learning White Box and attending a small liberal arts college in the late '70s I saw an anti-war poster on campus that said something like "Travel to exotic places, meet new people, and kill them." Sure White Box can be a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff, but it can also be so much more than that. Why limit the fun to dungeon crawling? So you are tired, hurt and out-of-supply, "Welcome home, where the adventure is just beginning!"