Unless you're on Volturnus!In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.
Maybe someday will see planets other than Tatooine for the umteenth billion time.In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.
That's what I also concluded. The size of a sandbox is defined by the number of marked sites and the amount of random encounter checks between the sites.
Distances and geography are window dressing.
I guess one way one could approach filling out the sites roster would be to consider the amount of XP that characters could reasonably get from exploring a site, and the average party level to which each site is calibrated.
If there were only one dungeon aimed at 1st level parties and that dungeon doesn't have enough XP in total to get 1st level characters to 2nd level, that would be a good definition of "too small". In fact, I think there should be at least double as many XP in level 1 dungeons as the PCs would need to get to 2nd level, simply because they players won't accomplish anything they could and some characters might be lost throughout the course of the campaign. And we also want the players to have real options what they want to check out.
Since it's completely impractical to fully create all the dungeons that the players might or might not get to see in advance for the campaign, there is always room to adjust as you go. You can simply make dungeons larger with more opportunities to get XP, or you can adjust a yet unvisited dungeon to be for a level lower than originally planned. But this does have its limits. You can't really go straight from small goblin holes to the Black Fortress of Doom where dragons circle the spires and demons prowl the street. You need some sense of progression with the players going into slowly but increasingly more dangerous looking places and work their way up to the big nasty ones.
You can always add more sites to unvisted areas of the wilderness when it becomes neccessary, but then you'll not be having any forshadowing for those places, which in some context might appear a bit random and disconnected if the other sites are integrated really well.
Have you heard of Jakku?Maybe someday will see planets other than Tatooine for the umteenth billion time.
Jakku? I barely Knowu.Have you heard of Jakku?
(original planet, do not steal)
That's what I also concluded. The size of a sandbox is defined by the number of marked sites and the amount of random encounter checks between the sites.
Distances and geography are window dressing.
In sci-fi and Star Wars, you don't generally deal with planets. You're really only dealing with towns. The other 99.999% of the planet remain unexplored and undefined.
Star Without Numbers has guidelines for creating and using factions. These guidelines were direct inspirations, and explicitly cited as such, for John Harper when creating Blades in the Dark.The question that I have is, how do you set up a sandbox like this?
I guess the big points to consider even more so than in other open world campaigns are developing factions and creating conflicts between them. Creating some influential NPCs in advance might also help to some degree, but I think it would be difficult to determine who really might make appearances during actual play as the campaign is developing. Faction leaders and their preferred people to send out to other planets to deal with trouble hurting their interests would be the most useful. The later are quite likely to come to the PCs, and the former have some chance to have the PCs come to them. Some generic faction members could also come useful at some point, but I wouldn't assign them to any specific location or position. They would make for good quantum ogers that the players could encounter anywhere and whose home is only determined when the players actually meet them.
Maybe someday will see planets other than Tatooine for the umteenth billion time.
I occasionally use the MtG Color Pie as a way to set up factions, as it gives a broad-stroke sense of values (e.g., Morality/Order, Freedom/Chaos, Nature/Balance, etc.) with two opposed factions and two aligned factions for each color/faction at the basic five color level. It's obviously not applicable for every faction one may conceive, but it sometimes provides a helpful starting framework if one is out of ideas or just want some generic factions.I think actually you could take that statement even further and say that the factions are the "environment" of the setting in place of geography. Through the selection of factions you pick, and the choice which ones you don't pick, you are defining the theme and tone of the campaign. Even though the players would have the potential option to go everywhere and talk with everyone to do anything, the main factions make up the pool from which both trouble and help will come to them. As GM, you have complete freedom in take a character from anywhere if you're in need for an NPC for a specific situation. If you keep drawing a majority of such NPCs from the factions then you're automatically steering the players back into the network of faction conflicts. The players have complete freedom to go anywhere they want in physical space, but almost everyone they know who can provide assistance and advice that could meaningfully help them exists in that network and they don't have anywhere else to turn to. And in turn, any favor or service they are asked for in return will further draw them into that net.
Potentially, this net could even exist over a large part of the galaxy, but it might also be just a single star system. Since distances are illusionary in settings with arbitrarily fast hyperspace speed, it is the size of actors in the network that determines scale, not distance. Especially when using a system where time tracking is highly abstracted or nonexistent.
Six major factions that define the setting for the current campaign (though not necessarily the whole of the fictional world) seems like a good maximum number. That gives you a good breadth of different factions and also different types of factions and a total of 15 relationships between them (if my math doesn't fail me).
That is why I think a sandbox game needs continuous resource depletion even when there's no obstacles. If the players are undecided and treading water trying to find new opportunities, tell them another month has passed and their purses are now considerably lighter.
Characters having no in-game motivation to leave safety and face danger is a big problem I used to struggle with for many years. Inaction must have a price.
I've had this experience, too. A handful of times, thinking about it.I've had players in my West Marches game simply park it in the starting town and never leave. It's a safe place with zero adventure. And the player just wanted to be a shopkeeper. So I retired that character and asked the player to make an adventurer, they declined, so that was that. Kept the character around as an NPC and they occasionally pop up, but they're not out adventuring.
What could the Mining Clan find that would entice them to stay besides more ore? Some prestige for controlling the system? Notable societal or religious figure was born or trained here?Do you have any ideas what kinds of questions to ask to expand on those rought outlines and develop them further?
I hope I get these names right...My current idea is for a frontier star sector in which all the planets with easily accessible high value resources have already been mined and the industrial fleets of the great mining clans migrated on to new systems. On several of the planets that the mining clans have considered depleted, there are still substential amounts of resources to be found, but extraction is hard and not worth their time when they can just move their whole fleet to mine somewhere else. These depleted planets still have hundreds of thousands of people living on them whose contracts didn't get renewed or who used to sell services to miners after their shifts, who now make a meager living scraping away at the leftovers.
There's only a single mining fleet still in the sector, strip mining their last planet before moving on as well. [Dresat Mining Clan]
There are two planets in the sector with quite pleasant environments, which two merchant houses have set up shop on. The provide goods from the core worlds or their own local factory to the colonists and miners of the sector in exchange for the resources they mine, and of course are demanding outragous prices since they have a monopoly on these trades. Their planets are effectively giant company towns. [Ordos Merchant Cartel and Lupai Merchant Cartel]
The independent mines in the sector are fed up with the lousy exchange rates of the cartels and many of them are trying to unite to have their own fleet of freighters taking their resources to markets in the core worlds. [Tornesh Miners Cooperative]
For added confusion, a military task force from a neighboring interstellar state has recently arrived in the independent sector, claiming that they are "fighting piracy and protecting interstellar commerce". Which is odd for a sector whose only major industry has already left. [Directory Fleet]
It's a start, but still somewhat lightweight.
The two cartels are obviously trying to get a full monopoly on what trade remains in the sector, since there's not enough profit to be made to be slip between them as before. And both of them want to keep the Miners Cooperative from gaining economic autonomy. Endless opportunity. Help the miners from defending against sabotage and blackmail from the cartels, and help the cartels harming each other. Or help the cartels sabotaging the miners. But that's really only a two-sided conflict with clear good guys and bad guys, even if some miner leaders may be ruthless backstabbing bastards.
Unfortunatly, I still have no idea what the Mining Clan could want other than depleting their last planet. They are the largest entity in the sector, but with no motivations they aren't a relevant faction yet. Also no clue what the Directory Fleet really is trying to accomplish while it's loitering in the area inspecting freighters and settlements for suspected pirate activity.
Do you have any ideas what kinds of questions to ask to expand on those rought outlines and develop them further?