Preparing Sandbox Adventures for Maximum Fun and Minimum Stress

You voted and so you shall receive. Here are some of my thoughts and principles for running sandbox style adventures with less stress. Links to all the resources below.

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The Game Master’s Book of Random Tables

Random Tables: Dungeons and Lairs

Random Tables Cities and Towns

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The Village of Greenhaven

Over The Next Hill

Over The Next Hill 2

Under Illefarn

Videos Mentions

The Game Masters Book of Random Encounter

The Game Masters Book of Astonishing Tables

[JackToSquareOne]

Great video. I struggle with giving my players fleshed out places and will probably look into the suggested reading material to see if I can drop them into my campaign.
I haven't seen your videos before, but I'm glad I stumbled onto you. Keep up the great work.

[f.a.santiago]

One thing that has REALLY shaped a lot of my games that I think can really influence sandbox games is Baron De Ropp's three R's of Geo Politics.
Having an idea of the Resources, Routes and Relationships of a region really works wonders in deciding what kind of events the player characters can experience.

[matthewsherman]

#1 Love the Dragonlance Elmore print on your wall.
#2 My prep is ridiculously overdone trying to come up with sandbox options, but of course my players come up with some crazy ideas. And that is where the fun starts!!! My go-to random table source is The Tome of Adventure Design by Matt Finch.

[jocool]

The unpredictability is what makes sandboxes fun for me as a GM. A simple rumor, random event or encounter can fuel the best adventures.

[gozer]

I start my campaigns by making a whole bunch of npc, story hooks, and rumor index cards using various random tables.

[LeonardHarris]

I've found the main thing with a sandbox is to make the players at the end of each session to tell tell you where they're going to go the next session. And if they don't go where they said they were going to go without a very good reason, "oops you stumbled across Tiamat, TPK sorry."

[onealflynn]

I have a setting I’m going to use with the kids. It has points on already prepared. The expanded areas are not. I’m always looking for inspiration to give flavor to these area of the map are still no fleshed out yet.

[Atgard]

In my experience, it seems sandboxes (a) require 3x the work to make 3 adventures for them to pick 1 (perhaps you can ask them ahead of time but that doesn't feel very "sandboxy"), and (b) are harder at higher levels -- "Would you like to confront the army of undead pouring forth from the evil tower and overtaking the continent... or walk around and check out this random cave?" How would you run a higher-level sandbox beyond "you need to hit these 4 dungeons in whatever order you want"?