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Message: <blockquote data-quote="arjomanes" data-source="post: 6386572" data-attributes="member: 94951">I think it's good to think of a sandbox game as a map with terminals and a number of different railroads the players can get on. And they can choose to ride that rail as far as they want. If they get off at the next station, then great, but if they jump off in the middle, then you have to think on your feet.  For my campaign, the PCs start the game on a tropical island. On this island exists a native village; lizardmen marshes; a destroyed, abandoned, and haunted colonist village; an old lighthouse with caves beneath that lead into an ancient temple (the excavation of these tunnels made the excavation team mad who went and killed the colonists); a haunted mansion of the former governor of the colony; a jungle with goblin monkeys, dinosaurs, etc; caves of crabmen with myconid slaves. There are very solid hooks for them to follow, and anytime they bite then they climb on the train to an adventure. My DM notebook has over a dozen full adventure modules in it. Some them are reskinned classics like the Saltmarsh adventures, or The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, while others are newer short DCC modules, and even a 4e adventure I liked, as well as my own homebrew adventure ideas and maps. My players have explored one half of a level of a dungeon, then left, explored part of a sunken ship, and then attacked the cultists under the lighthouse. They may never explore the lizard swamps or the jungle shrine or the ruined village or the haunted manor. They may fight against or join the pirates that are scheduled to arrive in a week, or they may not go to the area of the island those pirates are at. If they interact with the pirates, they may end up for a ride partway on the Pathfinder pirate Skull & Shackles adventure path, and if they veer off that, they may head down to the Isle of Dread, sail into Freeport, go undersea with the Sunken Empires underwater city, or maybe they'll run into the Razor Coast adventure setting, or sail all the way up to an Oriental Adventures setting.I think trying to have a multi-directional dynamic campaign setting can be more work than running a one-direction game (which is why I stock my world with pre-made modules and just sketch out the basics of new home-brew adventures until they bite). You may have a lot of material they never see. But I personally think that players should be able to make real and meaningful change in the world. That even means they can disregard adventure hooks completely or they can join up with one of the factions in the world (which may or may not be considered villains). To help round out the spaces between adventure sites I use some random tables that represent encounters appropriate to the area. No, not all encounters are level appropriate, but that doesn't mean they automatically die. The level 1 PCs heard something big thrashing in the jungle and they hid, so the T-Rex didn't see them (they were downwind) and it wandered off. If it had seen them, then they could have run or climbed a tree, or tried something else. Regardless, they appreciate the options they have.</blockquote>

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