So I recently acquired a bunch of the old Black Industries supplements for WFRP 2nd Ed. other than most of the material being easily converted to 3rd Ed., I was very impressed with the book, Renegade Crowns. It's an unusual location guide, in that instead of detailing each and every corner of the Border Princes, the book offers numerous tables and lists for generating your own Principalities. There are tables for creating a variety of terrain, various towns and villages, monster lairs, random encounters, and even stats and personalities for the local warlords and princes...there are even tables for creating dynamic interpersonal relationships between the local border princes (i.e. prince A doesn't trust prince B, bc prince B betrayed him 12 years ago over a land settlement...etc).

In all, it's a pretty impressive book and has inspired me to try to build a sandbox style campaign to use with 3rd Ed. Since there's such an abundance of background material for Warhammer (all the previous editions, the war game, etc), it should be relatively easy to build my own region specific tables. What I'm really wondering is if any of you have tried sandbox style games? It doesn't have to have been a Warhammer Fantasy game per-se...it could have been AD&D's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, or Ptolus: City by the Spire. I'm really just looking for examples of how these actually work at the table.

I basically run all my campaigns in a sandbox style. I have to do this anyway, since my group seldomly does, what they are "supposed" to do. So, when an adventure ends, I basically freestyle the next few in-game-days to see, where all is going and thus prepare the next adventure accordingly.

I also try to have npcs occur in later adventures again, to give the whole world a feeling of coherence.

If I have a particular adventure prepared, I try to steer the group in that direction. This sometimes leeds to difficult situations, when they don't understand, what the main plotline is and lose themselves in sideplots. But I don't really care that much, unless I put much preparation into a big premade adventure, in which case I meddle some more (always trying hard to not let the group know, that I am steering).

So the problem mainly is - in my opinion -, that you have to be comfortable to deal with unexpected situations and sometimes have to flush hours of preparation down the toilet. But with the time you learn to use unused adventure-parts in a different context.

A long time dream of mine is to have a nice set of short adventures (the one-page-adventures mentioned for example in Reckless Dice Podcast are great), locations and npcs to really wing it. But that needs some hours of preparation, especially since you would have to know the basic contents of all the adventures a bit.

My current group runs a tavern in Middenheim (also great point to switch players between sessions), is known by the authorities in Middenheim and the surroundings and has some underlying goals, derived from unsolved mysteries through different adventures. Currently they plan on helping one of the dwarf-players on his quest to please the dwarven god that helped him in a dangerous situation, which gave me the opportunity to feed his dreams with visions of his homeland to steer the group in that direction and have a good starting point for some dwarf-adventures. Since it's a very long way, I will seed the journey with some smaller encounters/ adventures, which will also result in them not knowing if this part of a "new adventure" or just "story-trash". I like them confused and they like the feeling of really being in the world, just dealing with what happens around them.

Well, long story short: hooray to sandboxing!

I like to think that most of the campaigns I run are at least partly sandbox (in that the course of the campaign is entirely determined by the PCs actions rather than any predetermined plot.

In a recent campaign I asked the players to explain why they were together and they decided that they all worked for the same crime lord in Ubersreik. I did not expect this campaign to end up as a sandbox (as most of the players were Pathfinder players who had mostly players published stuff) so I drafted out the basis of a campaign where the characters started as low level mob guys and worked their way up to be rivals to their original employer. Then in about the second session they ended up stealing a river boat and sailed away from Ubersreik (with both their boss and the merchant owner of the ship after them). The rest of the campaign ended up pretty much like a sandbox where the players decided where they were sailing to each week, what they were doing when they got there and whether they were going to get involved in any events I introduced.

How does it work around the table? That depends on what your players are like. The basic element of a sandbox is that the GM will start a session with a question "What do you want to do?". This is different from a usual scripted game where the GM will usually describe an event and then ask "What do you want to do?". The players may have loads of ideas. If they do you just follow these and fun will follow. If they don't then as GM will need to introduce events that the players respond to. You will introduce events anyway. The world doesn't revolve around the PCs so 'real world' event must occur to make the setting seem real. The difference with a sandbox and a normal adventure is the fact that you should not try and get the PCs to respond to the event if they don't want to.

For example in my "Made Men of Ubersreik steal a boat" campaign there was a lot of stuff happening in the background. At most places where the players stopped they would find some evidence of a big event happening (a group of well funded agitators were trying to incite revolution in reikland, plus several small villages had been attacked and destroyed by an unknown army) as well as lots of small local events (mutants in the woods, a lost dwarf hold, bandit activity, a group of unknown people kidnapping suspected witches, rat catchers missing in the sewers of Nuln etc). The PC were paranoid about being chased by their old employer (a paranoia fueled by finding out they had prices on their heads) so they rarely stayed in one place long enough to get to the bottom of a story. However the story happening in each places continued without the PCs there so when they returned to a town they have visited previously they would see evidence of a developing story. So in Nuln they heard of a missing rat catchers, heard of a cult in the sewers worshipping a great beast. They found and fought the beast in the sewer but did not investigate the cult properly. So they failed to find the out the fact that the cult had infiltrated the kitchens of the city guard and watch and were stock piling poison. They found evidence of an army of mutants hiding beneath the city but did not investigate it. When they were in the south there heard report of trouble in Nuln and when they came back to it a few weeks later they found out that it was basically on fire. The army had lost control of a lot of the city. The PCs guessed the cause of the problem when they found out what had been happening and used their knowledge to help regain control of the city.

So how do you get started? Most group wont want to jump straight into the sandboxy elements. The party have to have a reason to stay together and they also need some knowledge of the setting. As a result it is often best to start with a scripted adventure and then slowly let the players take over. Sandbox games work best when the players know the detail of the setting well. And by this I don't mean they know their warhammer lore. I mean they know what the names of NPCs in the local area, they know where to go to get stuff, who the movers and shakers in the region are etc. My river bound sandbox did not work as well as it should because the PCs would never stay anywhere long enough to develop contacts with NPCs.

So for a Border Princes campaign you could start something like this:

The players are hired by a noble in the empire. This noble has a bastard offspring who has taken it on themselves to 'earn their birthright' by trying to start a kingdom in the Border Princes. The PCs are hired to keep them alive. They have to travel to the Border Princes, infiltrate the court of the bastard prince and start to work to protect them. By doing this they learn about the local rivals and the local threats and opportunities. The PCs become trusted advisors and power people within the bastards realm. Then the bastard is killed by an assassin. Now we enter the sandbox. The players know the local area. They have the power to take control of the kingdom. If they return to the empire they may well find themselves hunted by the noble that hired them in the first place for failing in their job.

Tips:

Don't be afraid to make stuff up on the fly. You will be required to do it if you give your players real freedom.

Don't be afraid to say "That thing I told you last week was wrong" - if you make stuff up sometime you will trip yourself up. The players will understand.

Don't try and prepare for every possible option the players may take - it will send you to an early grave

Keep track of what 'bad guys' are doing and what the status of background plots are.

Make a list of 10 names in each of the following categories - male first name, female first name, surnames, towns, villages, pub, generic business, dwarf, elf (if you in an area where they could be encounters). When you assign a name to a person write who they are on the list. Add more names to replaces ones you have assigned. Your players will think you have named every NPC in the world.

Make use of rumors to keep PCs informed of ongoing stuff

If possible try and get an idea at the end of each session what the players want to do in the next session - this makes planning easier.

Try and use someway of recording events that everyone has access to (Obsidian Portal or a wiki or similar) as it will help build the detail of area you are playing in.

Try and keep using the same locations and guest star NPCs. This will help the players become comfortable will the world (one of the great things with WFRP for sandbox campaigns is that the power curve is so much flatter. If you sandbox in something like Pathfinder the NPCs you introduced one week have to keep leveling up at the same rate as the PCs or they become an irrelevance. In WFRP you can keep using the same NPCs with maybe just the addition of an action card or an increase in ACE budget as the PCs increase in power.)

Make use of maps of the region you are in as it can focus.

Throw plot hooks out regularly.

Feel free to change the pace into a structured type adventure if you feel your players need a bit of a kick (it is good the real world to interrupt the PCs plans fairly often). This is very easy if they rule their own kingdom (or indeed just run a pub) because they will have to respond to threats to the kingdom. So bandits, invaders, people spreading lies, refugees descending on the place etc all have to be dealt with.

Finally remember that it should be more fun to GM than to play!

GoblynKing said:

I'm currently running a hybrid of sorts. The general campaign is sandbox with a major plot. I have tied all the released adventures into this plot. The campaign is centered around the players having a place in the world and creating something, from a trading house to a criminal empire or whatever the think of. There will be events they can react to (or not) and these events are based on the official adventures. While I do like sandbox campaigns I think there needs to be some sort of story line, but I give my players all the power to change the world for good or bad. They don't need to have success with an adventure. They can fail and it will be a great story leading to new adventure.

Running a sandbox isn't easier though as I find it requires a lot more preparation that a linear campaign.

Gallows said:

This is very similar to my approach. I created my own province within the Empire, and most of the campaign action takes place there; weaving in the published material into that province or they take quick jaunts out. There is a meta-arch for the players to explore/uncover, but things happen about the province that allow the players to explore what interests them (shadowy underworld, politics, cults, nobility, etc.)

What Captain Fluffy, Gallows, and Hedge Wizard said.

We're podcasting my current sandbox Buried but not Forgotten (link in my sig) if you care to see how I have managed. I started it with a pretty linear opening to introduce the setting, but once the characters get back into town they will have free reign to pursue or ignore the various plot threads dangling out there.

I think the most important thing about sandbox style is learning to let go and give the characters the steering wheel.

When you run scripted adventures, there is a tendency to ensure that certain events play out a specific way. It's part of having A to B to C to D plots; you need B to occur so you can get to C. You also don't want the players to go from A straight to D, because then the adventure is over too fast.

With sandbox, you have to ignore this tendency and let the chips fall where they may. If the players assassinate the villain in Act 1, then go with it. If they decide halfway through a plot that they give up and do something else, bully for them. You don't have to worry about breaking the plot, because in sandbox plot is what happens at the table rather than the novel that the gm writes and runs the players through.

For me the easiest way of dealing with this is instead of writing full adventures, I just put forward unresolved issues and allow the players to resolve them however they want. Don't write an endgame. Maybe create a few different opportunities for resolution, but don't assume one will happen over another. If the players do something else, then roll with it.

Otherwise, your sandbox ends up as just a series of linear adventures with a big map.