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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 8581915" data-attributes="member: 5636">Sandbox as a type of RPG campaign wasn't in use in the hobby or industry prior to the early 2000s. It was used as a synonym for settings or campaigns. For example, in Dragon magazine, the author would say "I welcome all players to my sandbox." And from the context of the article, it was clear you could easily substitute in " I welcome all players to my campaign." and the article would have read the same.I say this with all seriousness, go ahead and try to find quotes from back in the day that uses sandbox. The best source I found to date is the Dragon Magazine Archive. But with the increase in scholarly research, there may be more resources now than ten years ago which was the last time I took a deep dive to document this stuff. If you do this then you will see what I saw, people used sandbox but as a synonym not a type of campaign.I wrote about this on my blog.<a href="https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2010/03/musings-on-sandbox-campaigns.html" target="_blank">Musing on Sandbox Campaigns</a>Which references this Enworld Thread<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/sandboxes-forked-from-paizo-reinvents-hexcrawling.273514/" target="_blank">Sandbox Forked</a>The Enworld forums are a good place to see the evolution and the use of the term as its history extends before sandbox as a type of campaign was in use.Finally, keep in mind I am talking about the name of the term itself, people were running sandbox campaigns since the beginning of the hobby. There just wasn't a formal name for it. In contrast railroading along with other terms like Monty Haul were in widespread use early on.It was just with the Wilderlands boxed set project there was a critical mass of folks, including myself, that there were a lot of common elements to how we ran Wilderland campaigns.  Then after we started discussing it we borrowed the use of sandbox from computer games (like Civilization) as a shorthand. Then finally we got other folks talking about how they did similar things with their campaigns and that this style was part of the hobby for a long time.</blockquote>

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