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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 5140256" data-attributes="member: 5636">A trick to managing sandboxes is make sure that players have backgrounds that ties them to the setting. This doesn't have to be elaborate 1/2 page to a page worth of material is sufficent.The best way I found to create this is to sit down one on one with the players. You ask the player "What do you want your character to do in general terms." You throw a bunch of possibilities, the players pick. Then you offset some specifics, the players talks about them and narrows his choices. You keep going back and forth until you have something that the player like.The advantages of this approach for a sandbox campaign are:1) The players are not standing around at the beginning going "mmm where do we go." 2) It makes life easier for the referee as the chance of the player dealing with something in their background is much higher than just going off randomly. Once the campaign gets rolling As for your specific example if one or more player has ties into the ruined Zhentil Keep, something they need to find, being a member of an organization headquartered there, etc. Then those 100 locations are likely not going to go to waste.Plus even if they don't get to it right away chances are they are going to want to deal with the Zhentil Keep as the players with that in their background clamor to go back. From my own campaign the party consists of two elves, and a human magic-user of the Order of Thoth. The magic-user knows that by 5th level he needs to have a scholarly work prepared in order to advance in the Guild. To this end he has obtained a journal that lists various circles of a long defunct magical order. They hit one at the beginning of the campaign and then one of the elves wanted to return to the elven homeland (about 5 days away). Something I wasn't quite prepared for. So they went there and I made up most of it on the fly. Finally when the elf concluded what he wanted to do. The magic-user said he wants to get back to exploring the old circles. So now in the next couple of sessions they are going back and try to find the other circles and the work I did on them will come into play.You can read about the background process from one of my player's point of view here.<a href="http://rustybattleaxe.blogspot.com/2010/03/on-player-character-backgrounds.html" target="_blank">The Rusty Battle Axe: On Player Character Backgrounds</a></blockquote>

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