One of the biggest complaints I hear from players is that they want to play in campaigns and settings where they feel like they have freedom and autonomy, and not that they're going to be put on rails and driven toward the Game Master's predetermined destination. The opposite end of that setting is, of course, the sandbox game. This is where players are plopped down into the game world, and they are free to explore, take up quests, meet NPCs, and get tangled up in whatever webs they please.
The thing is, for a sandbox to work, a Game Master has to actually populate it with stuff for the players to interact with, and events to take part in... otherwise you end up with a ghost town.
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Load Up The Sandbox, And They'll Never Run Out Of Things To Do
As someone who has run both linear games where there's a direct through line where the game starts and ends, as well as someone who has put together a handful of sandboxes, I can tell you that the latter take ten times as much time, energy, and effort to set up. This isn't just because you have to populate the world with NPCs, plot hooks, news, rumors, loot, dungeons, and more... you have to do that for a linear progression game as well. The difference is that for a sandbox you have to have more of everything, because you have no way of knowing what your players are going to do, or what direction they're going to go in.
Think about it for a second. If you're going to run a linear plot, you have a series of events that take your players from Point A, to Point B, to Point C, dragging them along a pathway toward the eventual showdown with the campaign's big bad. But if you are running a game where you simply set the world in motion, then turn your players loose, you need to have significantly more stuff for them to do, people to talk to, and happenings to get involved with!
For example, in a linear game, you might have one bar with plot-relevant characters, a couple of town guardsman with actual information worth delivering, and a series of dungeons where encounters will take place... but for a sandbox, you need to have that kind of setup for a wider variety of decisions the players might make. Not only that, but there's going to be a ticking time clock on events, because what the players choose to get involved with, and what they choose not to get involved with, can affect the machinery of the world.
Consider the town of Timbersong. It's a small port town with half a dozen fishermen and some traders and travelers. There's a lumber operation there (or at least there used to be), and most people who come up that way do so for the hot springs, or to look for work in the growing boom town and its surrounding farms. And there are dozens of things that can be done in this location, including:
- Taking on work at the Hardwick Agency as a private guard
- Examine the Palatine Spring, and the rumors of something unusual there
- Go into the old growth forest in search of treasure, ruins, or monsters
- Talk to sailors coming in from the sea to hear about rumors of pirates attacking coastal towns
- Escort a caravan down to the next town
- Take passage on a ship to go further along the coast
Now, if this was a linear game, you might have a specific idea of what you want your players to do. Hopefully they get hired by the detective agency, which then sends them to deal with something that's been seen out in the woods. They uncover an ancient cult, tie that to the springs, and realize the healing waters are drawn from an ancient genius loci. They form a pact with that spirit, and the old rituals are kept up to appease it, ensuring the town can grow around it. At that point the PCs leave Timbersong either by road or by ship to move onto the next town, and the next set of rumors, happenings, and people.
But that's one set of events. And sure, the PCs might take that specific bait and follow those particular events, but what if they step off that path? What if they instead want to try to recruit one of the odd cats that roam the town, either as a pet, or to have a familiar? What if they want to immediately go pirate hunting, trying to figure out if there are bounties and rewards for those who slay buccaneers, and trying to find a captain to take them on this errand? What if they take on tasks from Marlena Racks who needs surveys taken along the coast so she can draw accurate maps? What if, what it, what if...
None of these are random, either. Timbersong is one of the towns in my supplement
10 Fantasy Villages, and it's jammed with stuff like the above suggestions to give Game Masters an edge on laying the ground work for a localized sandbox.
Having a linear game means you have a single chain of events, more or less. There are likely a few side quests here and there, but nothing outside of the important main line is going to get really fleshed out. It's that old situation where there's one clearly important NPC in the bar, and while you can talk to other folk, that individual is the one with the information that's going to move the story along.
But if you have a sandbox game, you need to have either multiple chains of events that all branch off on their own stories, or you need to have a bunch of disconnected events and individuals, and allow the interactions of your players to build the story based off the things they choose to do or not do.
The World Needs To Move Without Them
Consider Timbersong again. There's a cult in the forest trying to awaken the wrath of a genius loci to wipe out the town. There are pirates pillaging the coast. There are farmers being attacked by terrible beasts who lost their habitats. While it's possible for the party to solve all of these problems all at once, if they neglect something, or don't consider it worth their time, then it will come to a head without them.
For instance, if the party goes out to hunt pirates on the waters, they might find a bounty, and bring them down quickly, giving them the time to get back to Timbersong to deal with the cult. But if they're gone for too long due to storms, bad rolls, etc., then they might come back to a town that's been ruined by an angered spirit within the spring. Or, if they focus on the cult first, and then handle the pirates, by the time they come back to town they might find people deep in debt because the farms were overrun and all their food now has to be imported.
Or if the PCs chose to do an escort mission for a ship or a caravan, then they might hear about the uprising in Timbersong, or about how a disaster wiped it off the map, only for the survivors to be captured by pirates and sold into slavery.
 |
| It's a rough life on the bloody seas. |
Now, the point is not that you need to give your players impossible decisions... the point is that for your sandbox to have meaning that there has to be a lot of stuff in it, and for the decisions your players make to have weight and gravitas. And while you might be able to tie various things together due to the players' actions (say they do capture a special cat from the forest, and it turns out to be able to talk. So now it can clue them in on secret knowledge of the cult, and the spring spirit, which they didn't have before because they did a seemingly pointless side quest), it needs to feel organic.
In other words, if you only have one bar, and it doesn't matter which one your players walk in they're getting the same NPCs and the same floor plan, that gamble only works if they don't realize you played switcheroo with them. Because if they feel you're just creating a Potemkin village that makes them feel like their actions have consequences, but really there's only ever been one path to walk, that's going to deeply disappoint people who showed up to play in a sandbox.
So yes, sandbox games require a lot more in terms of worldbuilding, NPCs, plot hooks, events, etc. But once you have all those things in place you can basically set the world in motion, and then just watch what your players choose to do, and ask how that affects the physics of the world that was already turning.
Harder to start, but fairly easy to keep running once you flick the switch and all the gears start running!
With that said, I would recommend checking out
all of my 200+ TTRPG supplements that are largely meant to help you populate your game, and to be sure you save your brain power for the heavy lifting. You can take a look at
this pinboard of all my supplements and games, but if you're looking to build a sandbox I would definitely suggest grabbing copies of:
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