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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeph" data-source="post: 6507337" data-attributes="member: 6738">I'm kinda astounded nobody's dropped a link to the West Marches yet; it's a series of blog posts with some fantastic advice on running sandbox games. (Plus some rotating-playerbase stuff, which isn't as relevant.)<a href="http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/" target="_blank">http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/</a>Sandbox is my preferred style. My process is:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Draw an evocative map with lots of cool stuff on it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Give the players a reason to be together and go out and do things, before chargen. Eg, "Make characters who are settlers on a new continent. You're the few people in the community willing to go and explore a dangerous wilderness."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Present them with at least 3 choices, and always ask what they want to do next at the END of each session.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Prep the thing they say they want to do.</li> </ul>Plus two golden rules:FRACTAL COMPLEXITY: The more players interact with pretty much anything, the more detail, nuance, and complexity you give it. Be it the culture of the beast-men who inhabit the hills or the motivations and personality of the air elemental bound to Forbidden Library or the language of the ruined city of Pinosh Orum.INTERCONNECTED HISTORY: Start with a rough sense of the history of the area of play, and how it maybe gave rise to the current major powers there. Drop details as you play about how the NPCs, monsters, and places the PCs interact with relate to that history and each other.In both cases, make up the surface details on the fly. Between games, take the stuff you made up during last week's play and flesh it out with internal logic and richer detail.A map I used a few years ago for a super successful E6 3.5 sandbox game. The players started in New Town, in the lower left:<a href="http://imgur.com/xT3nBny" target="_blank"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/xT3nBny.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></a></blockquote>

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