One of the biggest challenges for a sandbox campaign is getting players to engage with adventure locations. I don’t want to spend hours creating a dungeon or wizard’s tower that doesn’t get played.
Even if the players never go to that adventure location, the effort isn’t wasted. I learn something from the practice and maybe I can use it in another campaign or convention game. However, I’d prefer for the players to find out what lurks in the darkness.
I’ve learned how to set up my sandbox campaigns so this becomes less of a challenge the longer the campaign runs.
After they hit somewhere around fifth level, it is extremely rare for players to ignore an adventure when I’ve set up and run the campaign using a few basic concepts.
How do I do that?
First, a reminder about adventure design fundamentals, or an introduction if you are new to creating your own adventures.
Objectives and Obstacles
Each encounter has an objective.
- Safely traverse the passage.
- Kill the goblins.
- Find out what the sage knows about the swamp.
Every adventure has an objective.
- Kill the dragon.
- Get the gold statue and return it to the client.
- Rescue the princess.
An adventure is a string of connected encounters.
Encounters are connected to each other and to the overarching objective of the adventure.
Hindering players from achieving their objectives are obstacles.
Obstacles create challenge, interest, and conflict.
Sometimes the obstacle is obvious. If your goal is to kill the goblins then the goblins are the main obstacle to that goal. The more challenging or interesting the game master can make the obstacle the more engaged players tend to be.
The passage the players are trying to navigate has a pit trap.
- More challenging: The pit is filled with acid.
- More interesting: The pit has a secret passage leading to a temple where the goblins sacrifice any humanoids they catch in the trap to their Chaos gods.
Same thing with an adventure. Kill the dragon. Objective and obstacle are the same.
- More challenging: The dragon is an ancient red dragon.
- More interesting: The dragon is bound to the location by a geas from a powerful wizard. Kill the wizard and the dragon will go back to its original lair far off in the wilderness.
Everything else in an adventure keys off the primary objectives and obstacles.
Hooks, connections to other encounters or adventures, themes, motifs etc have something to do with either the objective or obstacle or both.
Most adventures have game master created objectives.
The game master creates an objective. The players decide if it is worth the risk of chasing it.
In a sandbox, players can say, “No thanks. I like that other one better,” and go somewhere else.
The better the bait on the hook, the more likely players are to bite. Obvious, right?
Once I get my sandbox campaigns rolling, the players start inventing their own objectives.
I don’t have to hook players on an objective that players create themselves.
I only have to create the obstacles. That’s a lot less work and I have 100% certainty that the players are going on that adventure so all the work I do will be played.
How do I do that?
I create emotionally evocative NPCs, legendary monsters, and factions
“We really need to kill that wizard.”
I didn’t create that objective the players did.
I didn’t send a quest giver with a mission, “Kill the wizard.”
I provoked the players into wanting to kill the wizard. I make the wizard a pain in the neck. I make NPCs desire a problem for the campaign world, a hindrance to the players goals, or a threat to helpful NPCs that the players rely on for information, healing, safe harbor, and resupply.
My “bad” NPCs…
- Insult the player characters.
- Play petty and annoying tricks on them.
- Steal from them.
- Rob them.
- Make problems for the place the PCs use for a home base.
- Have minions doing things the player characters don’t like
- Have minions getting in the way of player characters objectives
Creating ambitious, active, NPCs who are assholes, and then connecting them to various locations, factions, and major events in the sandbox creates a perpetual motion machine of adventures.
Once I get the cause and effect started in a sandbox campaign, the players keep it going.
I don’t have to think of their next adventure. They do.
They create the objectives. I merely create the obstacles.
Location adventures and exploration
I still create objectives and location adventures but I tie them back to the NPCs, factions, and events the players are already interested in. I can do that directly or indirectly.
Direct connection
I make an adventure site or an area for exploration that’s tied directly to the player’s nemesis and then drop a hook. A rumor or clues that the NPC or their minions are active in a particular region is usually enough.
Information from a friendly NPC also works. “You didn’t hear it from me but word on the street is there is a deal going down on the wharf tonight.”
Indirect connection
Let’s say I buy a cool location based adventure or come up with an interesting idea for a dungeon but can’t work out a way to tie it directly to the enemy NPC or faction; I can place something there that the players would find useful in their struggle against the nemesis.
A rumor about a magic item that would be useful (or necessary), a fortune in gold so they can hire that army they need to overthrow the emperor are examples.
Sometimes players will come up with objectives for a quest. “We need something to deal with all the undead around the lich’s lair. There are more than the cleric can turn and too scattered to catch them all in a fireball. Let’s check with the high priestess to see if she knows of any helpful artifacts we could use.”
I can turn that into a quest to get a holy artifact that requires several sessions to accomplish.
I can hook players on a location adventure by having active, ambitious but friendly NPCs offer the player characters a deal. “Do this job for me and I’ll give you the thing you need.”
I create possibility not certainty
When I build a sandbox campaign, I don’t know where the campaign is going to go.
I don’t know if the players will be interested in this NPC, that dungeon, or the smuggling ring selling fake Dwarfmade shovels. I can only set up the situations and see what happens.
I create NPCs, factions, and situations that create problems for players. Once the players get annoyed enough, they’ll start making their own objectives to do something about it.
That makes it just as engaging for me as it is for the players and it makes coming up with adventures a lot easier.
Grumpy Wizard 
Having read both your post on Game State and this one, I like this approach to running a campaign, because it allows characters more freedom of movement, and I also think it would allow for an unfolding story that feels more true to the PC’s motivations and therefore less like a preprogrammed series of encounters.
I don’t DM frequently, but when I have run games in the past, I have tended to rely on series of preprogrammed encounters, but I think the method that you are describing her is actually more robust, so guess what- I actually learned something! Thanks!
Happy Thanksgiving!
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You are welcome! I’m glad this is helpful to you.
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Great stuff, rings totally true.
I’d love to read more about getting a campaign into “self-sustaining mode”. It’s very simple to understand how to make a starting town and nearby dungeon, but a bit less obvious how one night go from such a location to the next step, whatever that may look like.
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There are probably several ways to do that. The one I learned by trial and error and applying lessons learned from other people is to build the campaign to make this a possibility. You can coax a bottom up sandbox campaign into this sort of situation, I did it before but it is harder to do.
In my monthly email newsletter archive there is a rough draft of my sandbox creation process that goes into detail about how I do that. The writing is rough but it will give you a good idea of the process I’m using.
If I had a sandbox campaign in progress and wanted to transition to something like this, the big thing is creating the most powerful NPCs, factions, and institutions. I don’t do that in detail. I start with a list and most of them will be a concept without a proper name like “God of War.” I pick two or at most three of the factions/legendary monsters/NPCs off the list that interest me the most. I give them a little more detail, most importantly what they want, why can’t they have it, and what are they doing about it. Then I place their minions or low level members of a faction somewhere in the region where the player characters are at, and start connecting them to various locations, events happening in the background, and get them involved in making problems for the player characters. I would start with little annoying problems at first and then bigger more existentially challenging ones later as the characters level up and grow more powerful.
If you would like the PDF of the more detailed work in progress there is a link to join my email newsletter in the sidebar. You should get an automated email with a link to the archive where you’ll find the PDF.
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Here’s a post I wrote a while back about how I create major NPCs. That’s the core element of my campaign and adventure design method. It’s one of the first things I do when I’m building a campaign or adventure. As old NPCs are killed or defeated I add new ones. I try to create powerful NPCs that the players can’t kill or drive off until they hit high levels. That gives the a long term goal.
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Just to add a note from the player’s perspective to this conversation. Obviously, the choices that DM makes are hugely important, but sometimes players can come up with long term ideas. In my current Ravenloft campaign, I have recently decided that my PC’s goal is to start fortifying our current home base (we got our hands on a fixer-upper keep) and start to accumulate artifacts to push back against the inevitable creeping corruption. It’s an idea that I will have to kind of sell to the DM and the other players as well I’m not 100% sure it will work out for our group. In my other campaign I’m playing a bard. I don’t have any lofty ambitions yet, but have been talking to the DM about inventing an electric guitar using magic. Every once in a while I will hit an idea that totally works for the DM and we can run with it.
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That’s definitely the sort of thing I try to encourage. If a player wants something, all I have to do is figure out what stands in their way.
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Thanks for this post. A lot of the info here is the kind of obvious where it’s most obvious in retrospect, and a lot of the info here is also “Oh I do that,” (overlapping parts), but having it laid out in this fashion, connecting “I do this” with “This is why I do this” and “These are the effects of me doing this,” is very helpful. I look forward to the other posts linked here, because I get the impression that you’ve highlighted part of a working whole, and excising that part might work, but less well than using the whole framework.
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Thank you for the feedback. My general overall approach to the blog is often to point out what is hiding in plain sight. People often fail to notice things that are obvious because they seem so obvious that they aren’t worth spending extra time on.
You are correct that this is one part of a working whole. I’ve developed my own methods, ideas, and processes over the years that work for me and are a little different than other gamers. A lot of that has just been intuitive and experimenting. I didn’t think very hard about what I was doing or why I was doing it, when I was doing it. Now I’m trying to get all these ideas into a format where I can communicate them to other people. I’ve had to think about the intuitive parts of my process and figure out exactly what was going on. This is one of those pieces. I have a couple of longer essays in the archives of my monthly newsletter (sign up in the sidebar) that go into more depth about what I want the experience of sandbox campaign to be like and how I go about building one that may provide more context. The design process essay is a rough draft that I haven’t come back to in a while. It’s the basis for a series of YouTube videos I’ve been scripting out but haven’t shot yet.
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