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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8377552" data-attributes="member: 6670763">In a sandbox campaign, discovering new things along the way is a major aspect of the core concept. Especially when it is focused on exploring an unknown wilderness, which I think is essential for West Marches campaigns. Finding hints for new places to check out, and always having multiple choices of where you can go next is what the game is all about.That' a good element to mention. In a campaign where PCs are meant to return back to a main base often and relatively quickly, having pointers to where they could go to find something interesting might be a better approach than sweeping trough lot of hexes and hoping to find something.Those rumors can be both generated by the GM, but also be things that other players noticed on their adventures but didn't get to check out before they returned home. Either because they were currently focused on something else, or because it didn't seem like something they were not interested in themselves. I think it could really help if there is some kind of institution within the game world through which adventurers exchange such information. That could be some specific place where information is collected, but also a kind of custom that exits among adventurers.For my campaign, I am setting up a system where players can increase the reputation scores of their characters by writing some kind of report of what they've seen and done on their last adventure, which get collected and are part of the game world as tavern chatter that they have spread. Players can agree to not share what they did on an adventure and keep their discovery secret and simply not get any reputation for it. But they could also agree to not mention certain details which will be left out of any reports they write, so they can go back to check things out further later.A fun idea is to think about what civilizations existed in the sandbox area in the past. For my campaign I have six, though that's probably overkill. Three should totally be enough. The idea is to consider during the creation of the environment who had inhabited the area before and at what times, and what typical traits are common to the ruins they left behind. In my setting, the last civilization disappeared from the area a thousand years ago, but in the centuries since then, various barbarian tribes have come through the area. Barbarian sites are either in caves or the uppermost sections of older ruins. They have relatively little treasure in them and almost none of it is coins. If they left any traps behind, they are made of wood and ropes and often already nonfunctional when PCs get to them. And there might be plenty of warning markers to not continue into cursed areas at the very edges of where constructions by the barbarians end.The idea is that when player have been to several barbarian or naga ruins before, they are able to recognize one when they discover it, and have some knowledge about what challenges they could expect ahead, and what contingencies they don't need to worry about. Floor traps might be a serious danger in naga ruins, but nobody has ever seen one in a giant ruin, for example.</blockquote>

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