Any good sandbox module published?

[CapnZapp]

Hello

I'm looking for a map and material of the old school sandboxy feel. Any recommendations, particularly ones published for Pathfinder?

Specifically:

You have a map of wilderness, with the usual ruins, marshes, abandoned towers, caves and what not. In one corner of the map there's the town that'll become the adventurers home base.

This is supported by descriptions of what you'll find at each location: the goblin tribes, the fearsome troll, the skeletons lurking in the abandoned graveyard, ideally complete with encounter maps of warrens and abandoned towers etc.

As you explore the map, you'll find leads to more adventure (quests) deeper within the wilderness. There might be suggestions for random encounters. Hopefully (for the PCs!) the deadliness starts low close to town, so they get a chance to level up before venturing to the farthest reaches of the map.

As an example from the computer world; Skyrim would have made for a *bloody excellent* sandbox ttrpg module.

I'm mainly asking for newer products, including from 3PPs. (The "classics" of AD&D and 3E, from Gygax, Necromancer Games etc I already have )

 

[Zardnaar]

The 1st two Kingmaker adventures are quite good, it breaks down a bit after that. Stolen Lands for pt 1 the other one I can't recall off the top of my head.

They're also easy to convert to D&D.

 

[CapnZapp]

The 1st two Kingmaker adventures are quite good, it breaks down a bit after that. Stolen Lands for pt 1 the other one I can't recall off the top of my head.

They're also easy to convert to D&D.

Are you talking about adventures in a series? Doesn't that mean there's a red thread and a story?

 

[Zardnaar]

Are you talking about adventures in a series? Doesn't that mean there's a red thread and a story?

Yes but the story issnt pushed that hard so the plot is fairly easy to ignore. It doesn't really turn up until the 4th module or so. You can also ignore the domain building aspect.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm looking for a map and material of the old school sandboxy feel. Any recommendations, particularly ones published for Pathfinder?

I'm a fan of the Varisia region. That's probably the most sandboxy area of the game apart from the Riverlands (see Zardnaar's suggestion). Set Sandpoint as the initial homebase. The town of Sandpoint is well-documented and profiled. There are six adventure paths that deal with this region: Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne, Second Darkness, Jade Regent (though it leads to polar journey north to Golarion-Asia), Shattered Star, and Return of the Runelords. You can ignore the adventures entirely, but purely pull plothooks and issues from these paths.

 

[amethal]

I'm not sure if it is counts as "Necromancer" but Frog God Game's Hex Crawl Chronicles are available in Pathfinder format. They are by John Stater, who certainly knows his way around a hex map. (I assume they were originally written for a more "old-school" system and converted, however.)

Over on the "Against the Wicked City" blog a number of Pathfinder adventure paths have been converted into hexcrawls, including Kingmaker. Anyone who is wondering how you convert a "hexcrawl" into an actual hexcrawl should check it out!

http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/03/condensation-in-action-from-600-page-ap.html

 

[Celebrim]

In general, I think it's impossible to publish a sandbox module.

The reason is that I define a sandbox as "preparing far more material than you intend to use", and a module can't because of the limit of page counts and other economic reasons do that on its own.

So if you want a sandbox campaign, IMO you have to marry multiple modules together in the same setting and give the players options to pursue exploration in any one of several possible environments. You can do this in the context of modules or campaigns that have strong exploration components, but you can't do this in the context of a single adventure.

You mention admiration for Skyrim, and Skyrim is a case in point as Skyrim is actually a collection of fairly short and often barely related adventures occurring in close proximity to each other, together with a collection of short 'six room' type dungeons which again are not strongly related to each other.

 

[Celebrim]

Over on the "Against the Wicked City" blog a number of Pathfinder adventure paths have been converted into hexcrawls, including Kingmaker. Anyone who is wondering how you convert a "hexcrawl" into an actual hexcrawl should check it out!

It reads more like converting a hexcrawl into some vague ideas for a hexcrawl. I would need to convert this back into 600 pages before it would be of much use for anything.

 

[amethal]

It reads more like converting a hexcrawl into some vague ideas for a hexcrawl. I would need to convert this back into 600 pages before it would be of much use for anything.

My unspoken assumption was that anyone running it in Pathfinder would already have Kingmaker, so already has the encounter details and Pathfinder stat blocks. I wasn't intending to imply that an entire Pathfinder adventure path in playable form could be had for free at that link.

The author's reference to 600 pages is an exaggeration, since the adventure part of each episode of Kingmaker isn't 100 pages - there's the fiction, bestiary etc. That aside, fleshing out an 8 x 10 hex grid into many, many pages (even if not 600) would be going overboard.

 

[wakedown]

If you want a mega sandbox, check out "Wilderlands of High Fantasy". If you want something more accessible, check out the "Vault of Larin Karr". You'd want PCs that are able to self-motivate in a true sandbox where they can freely choose to move from Point A to Point B on the map at any given time of their own free will.

I'll try to be spoiler-free here (any stuff here will be able to be picked up by aspiring players in the player's guide).

I've both played in and run Kingmaker. While Kingmaker is a bit railroady, it's "sandbox-like". The general premise is there's an unexplored stretch of land and the PCs are commissioned to explore it. Ultimately the PCs pick a hex for their capital and start their own nation. Content in the books contains events that will pop up in their capital city or outskirt hexes so this content would need to be ignored or adapted if the PCs aren't actually running a nation of their own but simply looking to travel between towns.

You could obviously toss this aside as a motivation and the PCs can decide that they want to be bandits and to start their own lair and raid the road depicted in the north but then you'll be mostly improvising from the map rather than using any of the content that are assigned to exist in hexes or as events triggered by the growth of the kingdom. A lot of the hexes in Kingmaker are self-contained and basically lie in stasis awaiting the party's arrival (like a spider nest). A lot of groups, under the mandate of founding the kingdom will "centipede" explore the hexes to check them off. There's not a lot of towns to visit between level 1 and 10 where there'd be a ton of NPCs to interact with as the swatch of land begins the campaign as essentially uninhabited. So if you're looking for any town crawls or NPCs pre-provided, there'll be a shortage of those.

I think Kingmaker is pretty good if you can jump onto the premise of "PCs running a nation" and do a little work to make the hex exploration less tedious and redundant. Kingmaker from a challenge perspective suffers from an encounter-a-day issue in 90% of the hexes and if your PCs are playing it like a explore-every-corner CRPG I almost would suggest hand-waving a lot of the mundane hex encounters just to get to the meaty stuff faster (which makes it less of a sandbox and more of a run-a-nation simulator).