Structuring a Quest Based Sandbox

[Reynard]

Forward: I am putting this in General because it applies broadly, but is definitely something commonly found in D&D and similar games. I am actually building mine for use with Pathfinder 2E.

Anyway, I want to build a smallish sandbox based around a central location (a village) filled with quests both in the village and in its environs. I am not interested in hex crawling, nor am I interested in a major storyline or plot. It is basically going to look a lot like a typical CRPG town and adventure zone.

I think the best way to build it is by way of NPCs and their issues. Old Lady Filligree needs someone to recover her jewelry box from the now abandoned family home outside town. The baker's daughter ran off with a faun and he wants her brought home. Etc.

What other sorts of quest starters work in such a circumstance? Have you built a "questbox" before? How did you do it? How did it go?

 

[Big Bucky]

Video game rpgs would be a good resource. Just don’t make your players come back with 10 bear pelts.

 

[Reynard]

Video game rpgs would be a good resource. Just don’t make your players come back with 10 bear pelts.

But Mrs. Dorren needs to bake a pie for Mr. Stabler and only 10 rare gooey-fruits will do!

Lol. No, I definitely want to steer clear of MMORPG style fetch quests.

 

[Fenris-77]

Leaning on NPCs is a smart place to start. You could weave something a little more interesting than that out of ihe idea if you wanted. Just to spitball, lets say there are families in the villages, families who have been there for a long time. There are legends that get told, and there's the retired mayor, and his father before him, who have made a hobby of writing these legends down. Old Dunbarr, the priest of Torm who tends the shrine on the fells, has some strange tales to tell as well, and he's been in the village since before the last King. You could dole bits and pieces of clues to a larger mystery, a little each adventure. Some from NPCs, some from legends written down, and some from things found on expeditions. The odd disappearance, some odd behavior from some known NPCs. Everyone said there was something wrong with the village....

A slow burner creepfest really. This sort of thing only really works in a small village setting with really regular NPCs that the party can really get to know. If the players don't bite you haven't lost anything, but if they do you have a pretty killer game on your hands.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I think it would be interesting to have one or at most 2 hidden factions in the town. Whatever they are. Maybe the baker is also a member of some sort of wider cult; or the woodcutter is also a member of the thieves guild (why is his house so nice?). And if those factions are potentially at cross purposes...?

 

[aco175]

You could structure it a bit on the Essentials box. There are a few quests to start and a few more that come in every few levels. It would be good to see if things happen once the PCs choose one adventure over another.

Say the PCs skip the necromancer and skeletons at early levels. You can still use the map and basic layout but level the bad guys who now threaten the town several levels later. This may save some work designing multiple adventures for each level depending on where the PCs want to go.

 

[Gilladian]

Maybe pick out 2-3 good low-level adventures and use them to write the backstory of your village. Tie each adventure in so it makes sense that several NPCs would know pieces of the stories, and can relate them in logical ways; ie if there is a ruined, haunted castle up on the hill, who knows the story of the evil warlord who lived there 3 generations ago, and was slain by adventurers, who left before his ghost began to haunt the place? Does the elderly priest in the temple know why the OLD graveyard is off-limits? Is there a really old battle-field on the edge of the forest not far from the village, and the guard-captain often goes out there to hunt for arrowheads and such? Does he know if it is true that the elves of the forest lost their Queen in this battle and have never dealt with their human "allies" again?

Find your adventures FIRST, then create your village/town, and be sure to add the things that the adventures need to make them work, rather than the other way round...

 

[TwoSix]

The OSR game Beyond the Wall has a book called Further Afield, which is focused on running a campaign growing out of a single village and expanding to the environs around it. The campaign rules are pretty system-agnostic, and has some example campaign packs around quests revolving around a single campaign specific looming threat.

 

[Odysseus]

where i've done this I don't really structure it. I keep 3 or 4 vague quests ready at any one time , and constantly throw chum in the water for the players to follow. And just make up everything up as I go.

 

[Shiroiken]

I did something like this as a West Marches style game for D&D. Rather than a village, I eventually had to move it to a nearby city for it to continue to make sense ("why is all this happening in such a small area?!?"). There's two approaches, depending on how you work best: quest based or location based.

If you want to design your quests first, focus on the NPCs of your village/town/city. They're the ones who need the PCs to do stuff, for the most part, so after coming up with about a dozen or two rough ideas, you can then design the region around the base (as well as the base itself) on the needs of the quests you have. The advantage to this is that if you have a specific location required for a quest (such as a mountain, desert, sea) you can just make sure it happens to be there. The downside is that your regional map may make very little sense geographically, which may or may not matter to you and your players.

The other method, which I prefer, is to design the region and home base first. In general you want to try and have as many different terrain types you reasonably can, but some are just not going to be possible depending on how large your regional map is. Once you have the everything designed, you can look at it and think about what might be happening there. This then leads to the inspiration for the quests. The advantage is that the world should make a logical sense, and in theory your quests can be somewhat integrated without having an overarching plot. The downside is that once you design the region, you'll lock yourself out of certain adventure types without a LOT of work moving the players outside of the region (which can be very problematic if the players like the new region instead).

As for the general layout of the campaign, I'd have the players hear about several things happening about town (quests), letting them choose what they want to investigate. Ideally, session 0/1 introduces them to the town and the various quests, which they will decide which to follow up on at the end of the session. This gives you the time between to fully flesh out the adventure for the next session, rather than having to design a bunch all at once. I would also periodically have quest not chosen to resolve without the PCs, either being done by other adventurers (possibly a rival party) or reaching their natural conclusion (failed adventure). This allows you to introduce new quests, while removing old quests the party obviously has no interest in. This also gives the feeling of a living, breathing campaign world that exists beyond the PCs.