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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 8219464" data-attributes="member: 97077">The way I set up my current sandbox (a hexcrawl campaign) is pretty simple. It's prep-heavy on the front end, but is very easy to run at the table and produces fun results. I'm all for spending a little time out of game to make it easy to run at the session.I have a forested swamp as the sandbox. There is one town which is a relatively safe place to long rest and do downtime activities. On the map, I placed 20 points of interest in various hexes. When traveling the swamp, if you enter a hex without a point of interest, there is a random encounter. That might be with a few giant leeches or a green dragon or anything in between - it's up to dice. If you enter a hex with a point of interest in it, you experience the point of interest, whatever that may be. These are somewhat detailed, interesting situations that are doing their own thing until the PCs turn up. Then we see what happens. There is also a big threat that wanders the swamp - a horde of undead. When undead are indicated for a random encounter, it also means the horde moves one hex in a random direction. (As it happens, it's getting close to town now!)There are also several factions. On a weekly basis, I roll randomly and one of the factions does something notable, the specifics of which is also generated randomly. Then I have to figure out what that means in the context of everything else going on and show how the situation changes if it's noticeable. This has meant so far that some weirdness is going on with the adventuring guild and this has ticked off the local church, but has presented an opportunity to the PCs by allowing them to not worry about encountering a normally dangerous faction in the swamp. So this is already creating interesting side effects only 49 days into the game (in-game time). Session 4 is this Friday.Weather is also rolled randomly on a weekly basis, plus something the cursed land itself does (e.g. floods areas of forest so they aren't suitable for long rests, makes diseases more difficult to shake off, etc.). Anyway, that's all there is to it. It practically runs itself. The players do what they want given what they know or predict based on their experience so far. And I have no idea how it will turn out which is part of the fun for me. Last week, the party managed to make a big score and level up. They are pumped to head out into the wilds next session to see what else is there.This is what a sandbox is to me.</blockquote>

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