How to Make a Sandbox TTRPG Setting

greetings gamers my name is anto and today i'm going to show you how i approach making an open world sandbox campaign and how you can do it too so when you're ready to start your game you can have hundreds of locations and points of interest ready for your players to interact with this video is sponsored by mammoth chronicles we'll talk more about them later so over the last couple months i've been building a new open world the jewel cities of talabar for my next rpg campaign i've been streaming that process over on twitch and i get a lot of questions asking about my general process for approaching open world sandbox buildings so today i want to walk you through some of the surefire tips i have and some of the processes i use to populate an entire map so you end up with hundreds of pins on it just like this and locations that the players can find and interact with and get adventures from if you are a game master who's looking to run an open world sandbox style campaign make sure to hit the like button to help this reach even more people like you and hit the subscribe button because i've got a whole bunch of content that you'll find really useful on the channel so the problem i see most people having with open worlds is where to start there's that anticipation that fear of the blank page i must not fear fear is the mind killer and they want to get to that point where they feel like oh my players can go everywhere but right now they can't go anywhere because i can't even think of a single place to put down on the map so let's take a look at my process for building an open world and how i've been approaching it for my campaign set in the dual cities of taliban now the first step is to start with your biggest settlements your cities i always start with settlements before i decide on regions because you can use some context clues from your map to figure out where your settlements are going to be big cities are usually going to be on rivers or on coasts so that gives you a really great starting point and then you can look at your map and look for places that look like they're either going to be strategically important maybe there's a narrow path with a river and that's the only way to get between two fairly large regions chances are there's gonna be a city there or if you have a significant river and it has a fairly narrow mouth or there is a major waterway that traces right the way up a continent the mouth of that waterway is probably gonna have the city so placing cities is fairly easy business you just look at your map and place them wherever one makes sense for them to naturally develop my next step is to place towns now towns are fairly easy to do as well i tend to work out in 25 to 50 mile increments away from the cities and look for natural places to put them so river crossings near woodland areas near any other resources which we'll come to place your towns don't name them again don't even name the cities this this stage is not about name and this stage is just about figuring out where settlements are placed and then once you've placed your towns then you can start thinking about villages now i don't tend to put villages on the map unless they're an incredibly important village unless there is some reason why a cartographer would have wanted to put them on same reason why i don't name my towns i only name cities on the map itself because i like to imagine this as a map that's being made in universe you could hand it to the characters and it would give them all the information they would need so if there is no reason that mapmaker would think to include a village or a town they don't need to be added yet once i've added my towns next i focus on resources now this isn't something that you have to do but it's an incredibly useful process for giving you some more context about your world and helping you develop conflicts later on down the line so things that i place on my map things like iron deposit copper gold silver precious metals where the woods are so where is there gonna be large sources of lumber and timber where are we gonna find any specialty magic items so like diamonds for diamond dust rubies things like that where is there going to be a large location of coal or a specialist building materials where are there going to be heavy concentrations of specific livestock and things like that essentially you just want to pull up a list of medieval era resources and choose a couple of them and put some locations for them on your map you might not end up using all of these but they are useful contextual tools to tell you about the surrounding region if you place down a bunch of copper in a mountainside and then later on you decide right actually there's going to be a town or a village here chances are that village or town is going to have some interaction with that copper trade and that can help you flavor the appearance of that village how they respond to certain things their their wealth status or any number of other information points when your players arrive at that location that are determined by their proximity to or their access to this resource so it's around this point that i usually start to think about borders and regions and the larger areas of my world if i'm working on a multi-nation map or if i'm working on a smaller level map this is where i start thinking about faction control and local lords and landowners and that lower level politic instead the reason i do this now is because once you have the locations of cities and you've placed down all of your natural features your rivers your mountains your forests and all that stuff and then you place your resources you can look at that and you can get a reasonable idea of right okay where would boundary start to form so along things like mountain ranges are a great natural boundary rivers can be a good natural boundary between two locations or if you're going to draw a border connecting some of those points can be a really good way to do it and then same with resources looking at the resources looking at their proximity to different cities as well as how many are clustered in different areas will give you an idea of kind of relative wealth of different areas as well if you've got one region that is fairly inaccessible other than maybe one narrow pass like i have in the dual cities there's a region called the vale it can only be accessed by land through one narrow pass through a region of cliff and mountain and there's a lot of different natural resources there so the veil is a wealthy nation because they have access to all of these things that they can use to make them money but they're not threatened by their neighbors because there's such a narrow path that they have to defend once i've broadly defined some borders the next thing i like to do is i like to go through and grab a copy of the monster manual or the bestiary or whatever your system uses for giving you monsters or enemies grab that and start flicking through it and anytime you come across a monster you think that's pretty cool make a note of where that monster lives on the map and you can be fairly arbitrary here it doesn't have to be a a hard and fast rule system that you apply for this just keep it broadly in the terrain than it might live in and start placing monsters on the map and this in particular i've found to be incredibly useful for building out the map really quickly and getting that open world feel because one of the defining things when you play things like open world video games players will go and find locations for hard monsters for boss fights for creature lairs and things like that and you want to go in and place them all across the world and it will help the world feel real because you can incorporate them into stories if the players are moving through a region you can introduce the monster that you've placed on your map as a random encounter except it's not random because that monster always lived there or you can use it to inform you for like big game hunting let's say the players are getting to a higher level and they want to craft some kind of item and they need a monstrous component for that well you can say okay this high level months that exist in this part of the world there are there are tales and rumors so you've got to go over there and do a little bit of investigation and go out and hunt this monster and find it in its lair and fight it and then retrieve the parts that you need doing this i find helps add new context to other areas as well and that's one of the benefits of this approach the more you add the more you can start linking all of these elements together so as you add a monster near a settlement you can look at that monster and think right how would that monster impact this settlement what would it change about the settlement maybe there is this village that is near some copper but there's also a monster there so how does it impact their production of copper maybe there's a plot line there where they haven't been able to refine any more copper or get any more copper out of the hills because the monster has migrated into the path of their mining operation and they need to hire some would-be adventurers to go out and clear that monster so they can resume production all those kind of things when you look at the points that you've added to your map and start connecting them kind of like the the charlie day meme with all of the strings on the board that's when you start to develop what feels like a really vibrant and living world that exists without the players and that's actually a really good use for today's sponsor so this video is sponsored by the mammoth chronicles by mammoth factory this is a kickstarter that is running at the moment that is funding a year's worth of 5th edition compatible adventures as well as well over 100 stl miniatures each of these adventures has been designed to just drop into your campaign and they run from levels 4 to 11. so the eight adventures that are included in the bass pledge you can run them as a full adventure or you can break them into their component parts which is what i plan on doing and you can place them across your world as adventures that exist at this fixed point on your world that your players can come to and find so one of the adventures for example is curse of the skin walkers it's a really lycanthrope werewolf focused adventure it gives me real dog soldiers vibes and the way i would use that is i would choose an area of my world to have a focus on werewolves and i would just put that adventure there so when my players get to that region as we're running the open world running the sandbox i can pull up that adventure and i have eliminated most of my prep for that week or those couple weeks because there's an adventure there ready to go and that's a really great way to use these adventures in an open world in a sandbox game is to place them around the world as you would do a monster except you've got a full adventure there to run for your players and really cut down on the work that you have to do but that's not all there's also well over 100 stl miniatures available during this campaign and mammoth factory sent some over to me including this incredible dragon that i have printed and done a really quick paint job on and i've got to say these are some of the most detailed sdl miniatures that i've seen maybe ever looking at the dragon i'll throw some b-roll up here so you can see some of the finer details like the way the wings stretch at the back and you can see the stretch of the flesh there and all of the individual scales have picked up beautifully like i had to resupport this because i only have a really small 3d printer but they do offer pre-supported files so if you've got a printer that isn't the size of a phone like mine is you can print these off all ready to go and they print out absolutely beautifully so i'll leave a link down to the mammoth chronicles kicks that are down in the description below i highly encourage you to check it out and using those pre-written modules as a way to add specific points onto your map for sandbox campaign works amazingly well so the next thing that i do to help build out my sandbox campaign similar to monsters is i like to approach the map with the point of view of treasure and specifically magic items so i will look at the map and i will think right where can i start placing magic items that would be interesting for the party to find now the trick with this is obviously you don't necessarily know what characters your players are going to be bringing to this campaign ahead of time you also don't know what kind of match items they're going to be interested in so when you're placing these magic items i always try and place them within the context of a story that is satisfying even if the players decide no we don't want to keep this magic item at the end of it so an example might be in one region of the dual cities of taliban there is an aeon stone and the flavor i have given that is that it is actually a jewel from the crown of the ruling monarch of the region that got lost and there is now a false stone in that crown and that could be part of an adventure to recover that return it to the monarchy have them reset it in the crown and instead of the players getting the magic item they get the reward or if they want magic item they can find the magic item and i can either incorporate the elements of it being part of that crown into the story and maybe some people come after the characters or i can just completely scrap that and it's just here's a cool magic item that you've found i find that thinking about these item placements in the same way that we do with the monsters in terms of how does it impact the local area is there any legends attributed to these items are they being guarded by something or is somebody after them again helps you build this web of interconnected stories across your world and then we get to my last two approaches for populating the map first step is places of interest now these are anywhere that you would want to note on a map that isn't a settlement so things like a ruined wizards tower these are physical locations they exist at a specific point in space but they're not a settlement they're not a village a town or a city that's how i categorize these places of interest these points of interest and i use a specific pin color in legend keeper which is what i use to track all of my pins and i will place these all across the world for things like ruined watchtowers military outposts other adventurous camps that's one of my favorite to use have your characters have your player characters interact with other adventuring parties and find their camps they might find them with the adventurous still there they might find them abandoned or ruined maybe there's a monster nearby that's killed some adventurers and that's where you can incorporate those monsters that you've put down on the map previously or you can use it to mark battlefields or shrines to different deities anything anything that's a specific location that's when i go through and add this and again this is another chance to add a layer of interconnected story beats to your world and then finally the last thing i like to add to my maps is what i call vignettes now these are small isolated moments of story that could be a random encounter except they're not random because we're putting them on the map that's the whole point but they're they're a random encounter kind of level of importance and they might be a combat encounter so you might encounter a group of bandits that are trying to rob people or you might encounter a questing night on the road and you just have a conversation and maybe they give you some information as to a location in a far-flung region that you might want to go and explore later on but the idea is that these are small potentially movable little moments that your players can interact to add some interest when they are traveling and that is the specific focus for these vignettes is to improve and make more interest in the travel time between locations so i will usually put these on roads between locations or in regions where i think the players might be traveling now some of these might prompt larger story arcs i've got one in my current jewel cities map there is a group of pirates in a standoff trying to figure out who's gonna dig up the buried treasure and recover it that could lead to you going and finding that treasure and the secrets within and then going on a whole quest related to that or it's just an interesting thing as your players are riding down this coastal road they hear shouting and crest the ridge and they see this trio of pirates all aiming pistols at each other and it's just an interesting thing to happen on the road my big problem with random encounters is a lot of the time they feel random they feel like the game master has just rolled on a table and oh look suddenly you are fighting this random monster or suddenly 1d4 wolves attack you and that's not interesting it doesn't achieve one of the two goals that i think an encounter should have it doesn't add anything about the world and it doesn't tell the characters anything about themselves or the people they're traveling with whereas if you put specific little vignettes dotted all around the world they can be used to tell the players about the world you can introduce members of new factions or give them rumors of distant locations and any number of things to help the world feel more alive or you can use them to help tell the players something about their characters introduce a moral dilemma that forces them to make a choice which is a learning moment about your character does my character go down path a or path b and then when all that is said and done you can start to go back and look at where all of your pins and locations are and start to really interconnect them so when you've placed all of this first round of elements i like to keep it to roughly one point of interest one pin per hex i use 25 mile hexes so i like one point of interest be it a town a vignette a monster a night and whatever it is at least one of those per 25 miles and then once i have placed one for every hex in a region i'll go back and i'll look and i'll say right okay what different points of interest are next to each other how can i start tying them together and building this interconnected world even further and that for me is the real benefit of this approach it is much more front heavy with the planning but it means that no matter where your players go you've always got a short and evocative idea pre-generated on the map specific to your region specific to that world and the things around it and it i found that it really helps cut down my prep time because i can go right okay the players are going to the the weld of masks which i know is this forest where all of the trees have been carved with grinning faces and different facial visages um i've got some information about that place i know that there are some enemies and some threats in that area cool i know broadly what the next session is going to be i need maybe 15 minutes to grab our batmap and some encounters that blocks but all of the the nuggets of story information the things that really slow me down that keep me from conquering that blank page have already been done i really hope that you found this video helpful if you want to see a significantly more in-depth version of this process i'll leave a link to the vods of my live streams down in the description below there's something like 14 hours worth of me doing this in real time down there so you can get a much clearer idea of exactly how i do this moment to moment and that'll be linked in the description if you're new to the channel welcome hit the subscribe button and ring the bell down below i make new content for players and game masters every single week but until next time happy gaming

Channel: Icarus Games

Views: 35,300

Keywords: Dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeonsanddragons, rpg, onenote campaign dnd, “Icarus Games”, tabletop, dmtips, OneNote DM, DM Bible, dnd 5e, D&D 5e, onenote dm bible, dungeon master tips, be a better game master, best dnd, how to play dnd, game master tips, dungeon master, DM Tips, DM advice, how to D&D, homebrew dnd, homebrew, dnd sandbox vs railroad, dnd sandbox modules, sandbox dnd game

Id: idTi6abSZ38

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022