D&D 5E Your Favorite Sandbox Support Materials

I am spinning this off a couple other threads just to make life easy and I expect other folks might be interested in the answers.

I am going to be buildinga sandbox for by next (2024) 5E campaign and I am looking for resources to populate it. Giving me your favorite short adventures (preferably site based), your favorite faction supplements, your favorite unique monsters and lairs, your favorite magic items compendiums, and so on.

I am not looking for a singular big sandbox like Dungeons of Drakenheim, but rather smaller publications so I can fill the sandbox with a wide variety of cool 5E compatible content. Exra points if there is a Fantasy Grounds version of it, too.

I have Prepared! 1 and 12 Towers from Kobold already.
Great idea, I look forward to the responses
 

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Hexmaps that I can repurpose are useful, and short adventures and locations that I can place into the sandbox for the players to stumble over (or avoid). I tend to get them by cannibalising other things - pretty much anything really.
 


For short adventures und like the arcane library and sly flourish 'fantastic' books. Most of those slot in quite easy.
I also plan to use stuff from tales of the yawning portal.
 

Over on Humble Bundle, the Adventures, Crafting, Monsters, and VTT Assets Bundle has a huge collection of third-party D&D products for your games. The base level starts with nine map collections, the second level adds on nine VTT token collections and another three map collections, while the top tier has 58 total products including maps, monster books, DMing guides, alternate rules, encounters, adventures, and a whole lot more.
  • Price: $5/$15/$25 (97% off at top tier)
  • Charity: Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (user-defined, default 5%)
  • End Date: February 1, 2025
In a bit of synchronicity, this bundle is on sale full of a ton of sandbox type resources. Does anyone have familiarity with and opinions about any of the stuff herein?
 



Scrolling through DTRPG I am going to get the EN5ider Over the Next Hill compilations for settlements.
Excellent choice! I've been getting all the EN5ider articles for a while now. They are an amazing source of elements for a sandbox. The Intriguing Organizations series can also be very useful.
 
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Seconding Worlds Without Number that @Imaro suggested - it’s fantastic for sandbox

The Perilous Wilds (Jason Lutes, Lampblack) is another excellent resource for procedural generation. So is his playtest Freebooters on the Frontier.

Any Judges Guild material you can find is also excellent.

Tome of Adventure Design (Matt Finch) deserves honorable mention, though harder to use spur of the moment.

Those are universal resources.

For 5e vignettes, the EN5ider Over the Next Hill: City of Hidden Ways (GM Lent) is a good one.

WL-16 Lammasu’s Secret (Kobold Press) is a decent one I’ve used, though there are a lot of offerings in their “Warlock” series that I haven’t touched yet.

I’ve run a few Quests of Doom (vol 1 & 2, Necromancer Games) that were pretty good. I like the diversity of vignettes in those compilations.

There are a few monster books whose lore is so good it has inspired vignette sessions for me and I think would be good fodder for sandbox. The one that comes to mind for 5e is a fan-made Witcher/Witcher-esque monster pdf called The Book of Beautiful Horrors (designed by Nathan Haslé aka u/regerem ).
 

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