D&D 5E Your Favorite Sandbox Support Materials

My first 5e campaign was an open world sandbox campaign. I did most of the broad strokes world building myself, because that was a large part of my enjoyment with the hobby at the time. The third-party material I would use were mostly adventures that I thought I could plug in a pinch and ways to quickly pick or generate settlements, NPCs, encounters, etc. Basically, to fill things in. What I list below are only what comes top of mind from memory, I use a lot more, but would need to go back and skim over my materials for that campaign in Google Drive and the Foundry world I created from the material I exported from RealmWorks.

I was an in-person game, so I could go into different approaches and products I had for battlemaps, minis, terrain, and other physical assets for a sandbox campaign, but I'll just focus on print/PDF material for now.

First, I found ENWorld to be a great resource and was a Patreon member for years. I didn't use everything, but there was enough that I did use to make the sub well worth it. ENWorld has since published a number of collections of locations, adventures, etc., so it is easier to just buy what you need if you don't want to subscribe.

Kobold press's book of lairs gives some nice drop in encounters/mini adventures that are easy to drop into any campaign. There are not many of them, but they span all tiers of play. You do need the Kobold press's Tome of Beasts as well (I think that's the one, their first 5e monster book), but it is an excellent monster book.

At the time I was using Cityographer, software that will generate a map of a village or town and populate every shop and home. You can create or edit the default text files used to randomize it to fit your campaign or specific areas and regions. I could generate a village or small town on the fly. For larger settlements the maps would get a bit wonky and for important locations I would pre-create and edit to get exactly how I wanted it. But for some random village or town the PCs were just passing through, it made it easy and fun. It was actually less work than collecting an curating large number of drop in village/town maps.

DnD Beyond's character generator is good for quickly creating NPCs.

Frog God Game's Quests of Doom series of books (I have 4 of them, don't know if they've published more since), gives a nice variety of small adventures for all tiers.

I used a lot of maps from 0one game. There website has a good collection of detailed maps for entire villages, Dwarven fortresses, etc. Their PDFs have features to layer on and off map elements and they print well.

Necromancer Games: Book of Taverns

Bill Webb's Book of Dirty Tricks
 

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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.


Temple of the Moon Priests (Doyle, Allan, FraNe); it's a one page dungeon.

Canticle to the Goddess (shotmaster0); 8 pages, was a submission to Knave 2E adventure game jam. While it didn't make top 3 for that jam, it's creative, focused, and tongue-in-cheek. Can easily tone down its more over-the-top elements. For 5E, only need to adjust stat blocks and add a few descriptive elements to present it more comfortably.
 
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While i was going through my Fantasy grounds materials, I remembered that I own Tactical Maps Reincarnated Adventure Atlas. That is an anthology that you do not see mentioned often. I will have to go through it and see what is worth using.

Also, I think I am going to use one of the starting towns from Storm King's Thunder as my initial base of operations.

This is going to be one Frankenstein's Monster of a sandbox...
 

I once ran a campaign with old modules. For conversion just adapt the statblocks. Goodman games also has solid 5e conversions. And they always add some additional material that is great for use in a sandbox.
I can recommend:
B2 Keep on the Borderlands (OAR 1 Goodman games)
T1 The Moathouse (OAR 6 Goodman games)
U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarch (5e ghosts of Saltmarch)
N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God

Furthermore there are some short adventures from OSE that would be easy to incorperate:
OSE Adventure Anthology 1
OSE Adventure Anthology 2
These OSE adventures have some interesting Sandbox locations:
Nightmare over Ragged Hollow.
The Horrendous Hounds of Hendenburgh
 



Robert Conley's How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox is a very good resource in my opinion (disclosure he did most of the hex maps for my settings)
Thanks for the shout out!
So folks know I broke out the example I used in How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox, the Isle of Pyade, into its own book. The DriveThruRPG files for the Isle of Pyade contain the full-resolution downloads of the hand-drawn maps that Pyade originated from for those who like those types of resources. And I licensed the text and maps under CC-BY.

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These "make a sandbox" books aren't really what I am talking about. i want to fill the sandbox with adventures, factions, dungeons, lairs, etc.
 

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