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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8381283" data-attributes="member: 6937590">Hey, so this thought is maybe tangential to your topic, but here goes:I recently came across a cool idea in an OSR snowflake setting called the Planet Eris Gazetteer, which is that the planet goes through a 555 year orbit, 111 of which is a "winter" season, during which most intelligent species must flee underground to survive. I guess that's really just a more regularized version of the "winter is coming" many-year-seasons premise in Game of Thrones.But just picture how perfectly that setup works with a West Marches sandbox game--At some repeated interval, most surface civilization has to be abandoned due to extreme weather conditions. The PCs and nearly everyone else live for decades in a state of secluded hibernation/shelter. The extreme weather has just ceased and the PCs are now in a position to explore and salvage all kinds of left behind goodies from the before time. They would have records of what existed prior to the extreme weather, but the lay of the land would have changed in the interim period and been filled in by all manner of hardy extreme weather adapted creatures.k, so more on topic:You could make the NPC factions' goals, resources, and bases of operations an unknown that publicly unlocks in the same way that player knowledge of the map does. So if, say, one group of players discovers that the goblin tribe and bugbear tribe hate each-other and could be played against one another, they can record that info for the next group to use if it becomes pertinent. Similarly, if different groups of players discover that the same bandit organization is doing something odd in multiple dungeon complexes, sharing that info across groups could help you build a campaign-wide mystery.</blockquote>

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