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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8310590" data-attributes="member: 70468">We had our <s>third session</s> session zero today. I set down a copy of the part of the map I developed while working through setting creation, and everything changed.[SPOILER="Section of my region map"][ATTACH=full]138538[/ATTACH][/SPOILER]I had assumed I would go over the setting some, then we would start play. We did, but it ended up being much more in depth than I expected. We ended up spending a couple of hours on it. By the end, we’d charted a completely different course. I had already dropped some of the conceits from the previous iteration, but I tried to keep the idea of the PCs as explorers. It was meant to be a sandbox game, and they’d decide what to do next. Well, they did.The basic premise of the region is that it’s a frontier. The kingdom that existed there was destroyed in an accident. A neighboring nation eventually came to push back the Outsiders who had come forth again (through a portal accidentally opened in the Donarhus, the megastructure serving as the capital located in 0509 on the map). I’m not sure why, but my players took a big interested in that. They want to get inside and loot it.After working on setting prep, I struggled a bit with what to prep for my hex map’s key. The region map I generated ended up much larger than my previous one (~56k vs. ~17k square miles). My previous approach was to prep every hex. I thought I could use tags to make that easier to do here. I’d use the generators to create content the PCs could discover. The thing that changed was me. I finally understood how WWN goes about creating its sandbox.The sandbox is not about having everything prepped for everywhere. It’s working at a higher level than that. That’s why points of interest are comparatively sparse. You’re not supposed to pixel-bitch your way across the landscape. The game is presenting you with a setting made out of adventure hooks, and you’re supposed to go see which ones are interesting.Our next session is in about a month. Setting generation produced a ton of notes (about 12k words) that I want to organize into something both for myself and my players. I also want to finish up my hex map (I have the terrain done, but I need to finish up the settlements and ruins in a few other parts of the map) and create an in-setting variant for my players to reference.Once I’m done with my prep, the game should be very easy to run going forward. It’s been a long time since I’ve run something without having to do a ton of work between sessions, and I’m really looking forward to it.</blockquote>

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