The freedom players have in a sandbox campaign creates some challenges for a game master.

Players ignore adventure locations you’ve spent hours building.

Players can make choices that you don’t expect and don’t have anything prepared to handle. 

Players who aren’t used to sandbox play can be passive.

I learned that one way to address these issues is by making connections between the adventure locations and other parts of the sandbox campaign.

How I learned to love connected coherent campaigns

Once upon a time, I built a sandbox campaign by picking a bunch of adventures that I bought or got for free and placed them on a quickly sketched map.  I was trying to find out how little prep and world building I could get away with. Functionally, the map was there as a way to tell the players what adventures they could go on. I might as well have listed the adventures and asked the players to pick one. 

We had a good time but the campaign lasted less than a year, about 20 sessions give or take.

The reason it didn’t last, I believe, is because of the lack of connection or continuity between the adventures. Each adventure location was a self contained node with nothing tying it to any of the other adventures. There was no long running mystery to unravel or recurring nemesis to thwart.

When I started the Hogwater campaign, I placed three or four adventure locations near town. One of those adventures was Knowledge Illuminates by Tim Shorts of Gothridge Manor.  

There were several elements of that adventure that I brought into my campaign. There was a magic painting that I decided was very important to one of the major NPCs I had created. There was a substance called viz,  a form of portable concentrated magic energy that accumulated in a pool in the dungeon. I decided that there would be viz pools in other places. Those pools became important adventure locations later.

There was an order of paladins in the adventure. I created backstory and a fortress for their headquarters a two week journey from the dungeon. The order became an important source of information and aid the players drew on throughout the campaign. 

These connections were a catalyst for many adventures that I created or published ones that I modified. I didn’t anticipate that a 1st level adventure lasting a single session could lead to elements that were important across a three year campaign but that’s how it turned out. The players grabbed onto the details from Tim’s adventure that I connected to other parts of the sandbox. If I only ran the adventure and didn’t connect it to those factions and NPCs then it would have been a static dungeon location and quickly forgotten once it was cleared. 

How I connect an adventure location to other parts of the sandbox

The most important connections are the direct connections to major NPCs, factions, and monsters. 

When I create major NPCs or factions, I give them goals. I create enemies and obstacles they are working to overcome to achieve their goals.  I also give them resources they are using to overcome those obstacles preventing them from achieving their goals.

The easiest connection is a location that is a resource or contains a resource in use by a faction or NPC. Catacombs the local thieves guild uses to smuggle stolen goods out of the city. A mausoleum where a necromancer is sending his minions to gather bones for a bone golem. An ancient megalithic structure that concentrates magic energy that a wizard is using to fuel a portal to the outer planes.

When players explore adventure locations with these connections, it leads to more interactions between the player characters and the low level minions of a major NPC or members of a powerful faction. 

More interactions makes it more likely the players start messing in the affairs of a secret society, or a powerful wizard whose minions have caused them trouble when they were low level.  When players pursue those conflicts, running a long term campaign becomes much easier. When that happens, my main prep between games is role-playing out how the NPCs, factions, or sentient monsters respond to the adventurers messing up their plans. 

Some connections are indirect

A wise woman living in the woods isn’t a member of the assassins guild but there is this nice young man from the city who pays her well for all the belladonna she can collect. 

These sort of connections are places NPCs go, services they use, products they buy and the minor NPCs associated with those things. When players find clues which lead them to one of the indirect connections, this makes the setting feel more lived in.

Having a list of undeveloped potential connections gives me locations and minor NPCs I can use in the future. I can use them as a way to deliver a hook, or clues in social encounters. They can also be helpful when I have to improvise during play.

Connect adventure locations to the lore and history of the setting

Backstory of the campaign setting provides context for players to make sense of the predicament they are in.

I typically limit the amount of detail in the campaign lore or backstory to have a clear sense of why things are the way they are. I’ll try to develop only the material I need to provide players with enough information to make choices about what they are doing, and help me role-play NPCs and other entities in the setting. That lore grows as the campaign progresses but only in the areas where the players seem most interested.

I have a general idea of the “story” of a place and how the situation achieved it’s current state. Any part of that I think the players need to know, I deliver in little chunks that players can discover piece by piece over time. I call this micro-exposition.

Unique treasure items, graffiti, old maps, a torn out page of a manuscript, inscriptions on statues, a magic sword with some unique identifying feature, are examples of micro-exposition linking setting lore to an adventure location.

I have an idea for a warrior cult. The backstory is a mercenary captain who becomes immortal through his great deeds. His followers were some of the most renowned mercenaries of the ancient world. Whenever they went on campaign in a new place, they built a shrine to their hero. What happened to him and why the cult disappeared are details I don’t worry about right now. 

The players discover an abandoned shrine when they are exploring a wilderness area. I use micro-exposition to tell them a few bits of the story by describing an artifact they find there.

Several months later they find a helmet with some of the same symbols. Four sessions after that, they find a treasure map in the form of a clay tablet that has a seal with the symbol of the warrior cult. The players might think, “oh cool, it’s that weird cult again” and move on. They could start asking sages about it, trying to find out if there is some artifact of the immortal they could go questing for or maybe revive the worship of the hero themselves. 

When they do that, I know this is something they are curious about. I can now confidently create adventure locations, quests, magic items and more backstory knowing that the players are interested in unraveling the mysteries of the mystery cult. I place more of those clues to the new adventure locations I’ve created featuring the cult and players are likely to follow them. 

If players ignore that information, that’s OK.  I’ve spent very little time on it. I might continue to drop more bits of it here and there because it’s part of the campaign world. I won’t make it into something bigger unless players bite.

What about published adventures?

Creating connections is easier to do with adventure locations I have personally created for a specific setting. I can also modify an adventure location that someone else wrote so it feels like an organic part of a campaign world like I did with Knowledge Illuminates.

When I use a published adventure location, I will often substitute factions, NPCs or monsters for ones that I developed when I was building my sandbox. If I find something interesting in a published adventure that fits my campaign then I can bring that into my world either whole cloth or by changing names or characteristics that suits me.

Everything is connected

Thinking about how the things in a sandbox setting are connected to each other brings that property of reality into my games and helps to create the feeling of coherence, depth, and realishness I’m looking for.

Those connections create curiosity in players which provokes them to actively seek adventure and helps me to figure out what parts of my campaign I need to develop more to keep them engaged and actively moving toward their own goals and interests.