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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 8582423" data-attributes="member: 5636">I disagree that back in the 1980s sandbox was used to describe a distinct type of campaign or a synonym for free play. By the mid-80s I was in college and involved in organized gaming clubs and conventions. A lot of the terms used in this and earlier terms, I remember being used back in the day both in print and just talking with fellow gamers. However "a sandbox campaign" was not one of them.  And while Dragon Magazine is one of the better sources, especially their letter pages. There are the early Usenet, Alaurms and Excursions, and other sources.Again to be crystal clear, people used sandbox but as a synonym for setting not as a way to run a campaign. And people were running what we would now call sandbox campaign long before the marketing of the Wilderlands boxed set.  There wasn't a name for it or an awareness that it was something distinct.And you see this here in Enworld by just using the search function. The first substantive threads on Sandbox Campaigns as its own thing start to crop up in 2008 and not before.  Most of the prior usage were things likeHere this from a 2002 thread on Worlds and Campaigns. Note Desdichao using sandbox in a completely different way. Despite the thread being about topics that people would include in a present-day discussion about sandbox campaigns.Wrapping it upHey I get your skepticism. Aside from being involved the reason I remember how the term came about is that I started blogging a short time after it started gaining widespread use. My "<a href="https://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-make-fantasy-sandbox.html" target="_blank">How to make a Fantasy Sandbox</a>" series is by far my most popular series of posts.  Then starting around 2015 people started to forget how it came about. Like you, most thought that talking about sandbox campaigns was always a thing in the hobby. And I started getting skepticism about my account about how the term  "sandbox campaign" came about.It also doesn't help that the key discussions took place on an email list during the time I used Winmail and I lost the archive. And for the record, I didn't coin the term. Some else did and I was one of the early adopters. We liked it because sandbox computer games were a thing in the early 2000s and the idea fit perfectly what we all were doing with the Wilderlands. This further supports the notion that the sandbox campaign to describe a type of RPG campaign was a relatively recent innovation.  Because the use of sandbox as a term for a type of computer game <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game" target="_blank">is well documented</a> and its use as a term for a type of RPG campaign came afterward.</blockquote>

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