There’s a particularly prevalent — but completely incorrect — belief wandering around that sandboxes don’t have scenario hooks.
To the contrary: A good sandbox has scenario hooks hanging all over the place. The successful sandbox will not only be festooned with scenario hooks, it will also feature some form of default action that can be used to deliver more hooks if the players find themselves bereft of interesting options.
For example, a typical hexcrawl sandbox features a rumor table (which serves up some arbitrary number of scenario hooks to the PCs) and a default action if none of those rumors sound appealing (wandering around the map until you find something interesting).
A megadungeon sandbox similarly features a rumor table and a default action (go explore some unknown part of the dungeon).
Prepping this plethora of scenario hooks can be daunting for a GM who believes that every scenario hook needs to be linked to a distinct, unique plot. The trick to a sandbox is that you don’t prep plots: You prep situations. And for the sandbox you’ll be able to hang countless hooks off of every situation. You’ll also discover how sandbox situations “stay alive” even after the PCs have interacted with them (instead of being completely chewed up and discarded).
For example, let’s say you’ve got a dungeon a fair distance outside of town that’s the remains of a Neo-Norskan temple complex. It’s currently being occupied by a Bandit King who has forged together an alliance of humans, goblins, and ogres. He’s also renting skeletons off a nearby necromancer.
In terms of scenario hooks, there’s all kinds of stuff you can hang on this situation: Bandit raids are terrorizing local villages. A powerful magical artifact was stolen from a local caravan. There are old legends about the Neo-Norskan temple and what it contains. Because of the skeletons, there are false rumors that the necromancer lives there. Or that the necromancer has allied with the Bandit King. (And you can salt these scenario hooks into the campaign in any number of ways: Rumor tables. Lore recovered from other locations. Allies of the PCs who are now in need. Et cetera.)
So one day the PCs grab one of these hooks and they go off and they kill the Bandit King and they take the magical artifact he was carrying.
Over and done with, right? Only not really, because the guy who originally owned the magical artifact still wants it, so now the PCs are getting attacked by bounty hunters attempting to recover the artifact. Meanwhile, they didn’t wipe out all the bandits and the remaining goblins are renewing their raids under the leadership of the One-Eyed Ogre.
So the PCs go back to the Neo-Norskan temple and this time they wipe out all the bandits, permanently ending their threat to the region. Except now the Necromancer sees a big, open dungeon complex filled with the discarded corpses the PCs have left in their wake, and so he moves in and animates the corpses as a skeletal army.
Which all sounds like a lot of work, but because you prepped the whole thing as a situation to begin with you haven’t needed to spend more than about 5 minutes “refreshing” this content between sessions: You’re reusing the same maps and stat blocks over and over again. You spent a little time putting together new stat blocks for the bounty hunters when they showed up. And there was probably some light re-keying necessary for the changes the Necromancer made when he took over the complex.
You didn’t have to buy a whole new set of tools every single time. You just occasionally added a new tool when necessary. (And occasionally removed a hammer that the PCs had broken.)
This can be easier to visualize with a location (which is why I use it as an example), but the same basic process holds true for, say, factions in an urban campaign. Create a gang that’s, for example, manufacturing and marketing a drug derived from blood that’s been harvested from vampires and you should be able to use that toolkit to generate dozens of sessions of play.
The other thing that happens in a sandbox campaign is synergy between the different elements of the sandbox: By holding onto the artifact that was stolen from them, the PCs make enemies of House Nobuzo. This unexpectedly earns them a patron in the form of House Erskine, unleashing a flurry of scenario hooks from the “feuding noble houses” toolkit you designed. As the PCs get drawn into that world, they’re approached by a minor house named Tannar: They’re currently allied to House Nobuzo, but their daughter has been murdered by the Necromancer who has now stolen her body in order to transform her into his Corpse Bride. If the PCs can rescue their daughter from a fate literally worse than death, they’ll break their alliance with House Nobuzo and pledge for House Erskine.
After that scenario has resolved itself, you might find that the players are now actively looking for minor houses that they can endear to their political causes by doing favors for them. (Which would organically create a new default action for delivering scenario hooks.)
In any case, once your sandbox toolkits start interacting with each other like this, you’ll quickly find that the sandbox is basically running itself.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Another possibility is to create a timeline of events that are probably going to happen unless the PCs preempt them. Invasion, famine, disaster, disease…
I think of a sandbox as a well-oiled machine; everything spinning away nicely.
Each faction is a cog; over there are the bandits doing what bandits do, here are the merchants doing what merchants do, down the road is the dragon doing what dragons do etc. Some factions are allies, some are at odds – there may be peace and quiet or nightly knifings in the dark but … that is just what happens; it doesn’t actually change the status-quo to any large extent.
The PCs are the iron bar carelessly dropped into the spinning mechanism and the cause the usual result; noise, breakage and chaos. Cogs in the immediate proximity may be slowed, bent or broken and nearby cogs sent spinning in new direction while those located farther away spin on in blissful ignorance of the wanton destruction the PCs are causing.
But these aren’t metallic cogs; they are organic and as such they react to what has happened. Those that are wounded may retreat or lash out, allies may offer aid or become enemies, enemies may move in for the kill and disinterested observers may see opportunities or threats which they will take action to embrace or counter.
For a GM, the beauty of this way of thinking is that for every action of the PCs, you only have to consider those factions that may be affected and decide what you would do in their position.
You knew the status quo ante; you know the reactions of the factions; absent further PC interference you can work out what the status quo post will be and how long it will take to settle. If the PCs continue to interfere then the reactions will change but if they stop and come back you know what the new normal will be.
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Game’s haunted, it’s running by itself
I’d also say a good sandbox has places to project good hooks from. The excellent example of that game wherein the PC’s go to their contacts being one. IF the Players Don’t want dungeon adventures, then have them develop contacts and use their contacts to find other adventures. Barkeeps and Merchants could be contacts instead of the nigh worthless rumor mills they are designed to be in early editions of DnD.
Hello, Justin, and thank you for this note. I read it several times. Thank you again, but I have some problem. I ran my own sandbox with “5-7 big situations” and I made three clues for “start node” of each of them. My PCs are very active, so they discovered a lot of hooks… Too much. And now my sandbox, builded with using almost all of your advises is disappointing. I was so confident in reliability of my campaign, but my players have just said me: “It is too difficult for us. You gave us 15 hooks, we can’t stand it”. Can you hepl me with it? Some advice, may be? I dont want to loose my prep, and I dont want to cut plotlines. Please.
Oh, I’ve just read my own comment. I didnt want to say, that your advices are disappointing (they are useful then anything), that was about my campaign. My english is not so good, I’m sorry=)
@Tony S.: As you’ve learned through practice, pacing the scenario hooks is important because, as your players said, they got overwhelmed. This can become even more true if the hooks all feel like they’re urgent and need to be pursued immediately.
Particularly if your players are new to non-linear adventuring, I find they making sure they have 2-4 hooks at one time is usually the sweet spot. And only some of them, or quite possibly none of them, should feel urgent.
Couple things you can do here:
1. Explicitly tell them that the goal is for them to CHOOSE what they’re interested in.
2. Handhold them through that process: “Okay, out of all this stuff you’ve discovered, what are you most interested in?”
Identify two or three things (or whatever list they’re enthusiastic about). (One way to do this is to have each player say the one thing they’re most interested in, then combine the list.)
Tell them to toss the rest. (Either completely or onto some separate “things to think about later” list.)
Have them prioritize the short list they chose and figure out what they want to do first.
Get back to playing.
3. You don’t have to let the other stuff go. Advance stuff where appropriate. Create new vectors. Reintroduce material through new hooks.
If you’re designing situations, it’ll all work out: The situations will develop or be approached from different angles, but your prep will still be a valuable part of the campaign.