Running a Successful Sandbox Campaign

Have you ever tried to run a sandbox campaign and started by presenting the players with a description of the world, and then asking, “What do you do?” I have, and the results were predictable: the session stalled while my players stood around scratching their heads, wondering: “What can we do? What should we do?”

I have also run a very successful sandbox game. The way I did it was using a method I call “sandbox with prompts.” It starts with the idea that the game world isn’t static: no matter what the PCs do in the campaign, the world continues to turn and things continue to change. People in the world are pursuing their goals, and achieving a goal (and often failing to achieve one as well) causes change of some sort. These people all have stories that they’re involved in - and the important ones are those whose stories are likely to intersect with the stories of the PCs.

To start a sandbox campaign, you need a game system, a setting, and a premise. For my City of Lies campaign, the system was Legend of the Five Rings 4th edition and the setting was the world of Rokugan, specifically the city of Ryoku Owari Toshi aka the City of Lies. The premise was that the PCs would form a group around an Emerald Magistrate (an office with broad law enforcement powers) as their leader, with the party built as the cast of an ensemble TV show. They would pursue extraordinary crimes in the city - treason, black magic, and similar crimes against the emperor - but the corrupt local magistrates would police general crime in the city.

Every game needs these 3 elements, but for a sandbox campaign, the premise can be the most important. One way the premise of my City of Lies campaign contributed to the campaign’s success was that it was very focused. The PCs had a specific role they were playing in the world that informed them of the kinds of things they could and should do. This might sound counterintuitive to running an open-world campaign, but the reason it works is that it limits the amount of work the GM has to do. If something falls outside the campaign’s focus, you don’t need to have stats or descriptions for it ahead of time. When these kinds of things come into play, it’s easy enough just to make it up as you go along, especially because you won’t be doing as much of that kind of work. Most of the game will work off of your prep.

Now we have a narrow focus for our campaign. This could be fighting a specific type of crime in a specific city. It could be that the PCs are adventurers who travel around exploring and looting ancient ruins. It could be that they’re a ragtag group of spacefarers trying to make a living by transporting people and goods around the scattered colonies on the fringe of inhabited space, supplementing their income with occasional crime for hire. You get the idea. You need to provide your players two things for this to work: a role and a scope. Their role is what they do; their scope is how, when, and where they do it. Role and scope are limiting factors, even if the scope is something big like galactic politics. A bigger scope means the PCs are dealing mainly with things that affect that scope: if they’re superheroes traveling across the galaxy trying to stop a mad titan, they’re not worried about thwarting some robbers at a Kwik-E-Mart.

With our focus in hand, we have a good idea of what kinds of stories will intersect with the PCs’ lives. Next, we want to create some of those stories and the NPCs and other elements that are involved with them. In my City of Lies campaign, I created one big story for each major arc, and several smaller stories that either intersected the big one, or would cross paths with the PCs for other reasons. The big story was a major campaign piece and I knew that many sessions would be dedicated to it. I wanted to make sure it continued to evolve as the campaign went on, while offering the players numerous hooks and opportunities to pursue it. For the first arc of the campaign, the major story was about a witch hunter from the Crab Clan’s Kuni family, who had forsaken his family’s mission and sold his soul to use black magic for his own purposes. Now, if I just give the players that information, they can just arrest the witch hunter and carry on, but that’s not how they encountered this story.

For the witch hunter’s story, I wanted there to be a big case involving ongoing crime with black magic involved. I used a string of murders committed by a summoned oni, a demon associated with the kind of black magic the players - and the witch hunter - had the authority and duty to pursue. I came up with a story that involved the witch hunter killing a bunch of people to cover up his involvement in black magic, because they had stolen black magic supplies from a secret cache he kept. To keep things interesting, the introduction to the story was oblique even to this element of the plot. When the magistrates arrived in the city to take up their post, they noted that a significant portion of one of the city’s quarters had been destroyed in a recent fire. The corrupt local magistrates had already briefly examined the scene and declared it an accident, but that wasn’t the whole truth. The thieves had attempted to raise zombies in order to take revenge on someone who was protected from them by the social order. The ritual went badly, and to cover their tracks, the thieves burned down the warehouse where they did the deed. Then the murders started: the witch hunter was sending a summoned demon, and in one case a samurai ally and a group of ogres, to kill the thieves one by one.

The players didn’t start with all of this information. On entering the city, they learned of the fire. When they questioned the local magistrates, they learned it had been deemed an accident. They learned about the first murder shortly after it occurred, and the description that suggested a summoned demon was involved meant it was their job to investigate. Because I had plotted the trajectory of the story in advance, each time the players picked a thread to follow I knew where it would lead. This gave me the freedom to give the players total agency: I would give them limited information through their interaction with the game world, and they decided in each case what to do with it. In the same way, I threaded smaller stories into the campaign, either tying them in some way to the main story or creating a crime or conflict that the PCs could, and probably should, get involved in. Sometimes I used a big juicy hook like a high-profile murder; sometimes the hook was more subtle. In each case, my priority was to use the game world as the means by which the players received information, and for them to encounter an ongoing story rather than the beginning or end of one.

To sum up, the way the sandbox with prompts method works is twofold. First, put the “box” back in “sandbox” – use your campaign premise to provide the PCs with a role and a scope, so that the players know what they can do, and what they should do. This makes less work for the GM, as almost all of the prep you do for the campaign should fit in this box. Second, populate your campaign world with ongoing stories that will unfold with or without the PCs’ involvement. Use in-world hooks that engage the PCs’ role and scope to bring them into a story as it unfolds. Do your prep so you know where each of these story threads leads, you know who has what information, and you know what will happen if the PCs intervene – or if they don’t.

Until next time, I hope you have a blast giving your players maximum agency!