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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8655599" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Geography is an illusion; I’ve played in a sandbox game that was set in one city that felt enormous, and I’ve played in a galaxy spanning sandbox that felt small. I’d say it’s more about content and how it’s generated. If you want to do a wilderness exploration game, then you need to come up with some content for the characters to bounce off of, and you need to decide how this content is introduced. You need to determine the characters motivations for exploring the wilderness so that you can use that to help direct play. What I would likely do is come up with some elements that would serve as obstacles to the characters’ motives. Hostile factions, natural hazards, dangerous locations, and so on. Introduce some of these to get things going. Ideally, hint at these elements before they’re actually encountered. So if you have a hostile band of mercenaries in the area, maybe some homesteaders tell the characters about it. Or maybe the characters find a burned out homestead that’s been ransacked, and a black claw symbol has been painted onto the wall. That kind of thing. I would say to keep the scope of it relatively contained. Only introduce what you need. Slowly expand as the players have the characters go in new directions or as they interact/deal with the elements you’ve introduced. Use these elements as steps to new ones. So the mercenary band is discovered to be employed by a ruthless merchant back in capital city. The ruins near the volcano are actually an old temple to Imix, and there are supposedly other temples nearby. Don’t over commit; keep things loose enough before introduced to play so that you can adapt to the players and what they seem to enjoy. If they show a lot of interest in the mercenaries and the merchant, then you can build that out more… other merchant rivals, perhaps the area is rife for exploitation of resources and so many parties are becoming interested in it. If they don’t seem to care too much about a fire cult, then you can downplay that and not introduce more fire temples. The physical space of this area depends on your preferences and how you want to handle things like travel and resource management and the like. You can have this all be one valley or you can expand it to a frontier or even to the size of a continent. It depends on how much of a factor you want all that to be. The more involved the exploration elements and resource management, the smaller I’d try to keep things.</blockquote>

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