Sandboxing! | Running the Game

everybody Matt Koval here this is the sandboxing video this is a video a lot of people have asked me for a lot of people have asked me how I do it and what techniques I use and you know there's a lot of videos I'd like to make I want to make a video on fourth edition because after the interview with my friend Jim which was really popular a lot of people said wow you both really seem to like fourth edition we want to hear about that and I want to continue the politic series and a lot of people have asked me how i award experience and i want to start covering different adventures and i promised you we'd go over a couple different campaign settings but not all of those videos are equally useful for a new DM and so i want to make sure that while we're doing the kind of stuff that i like to do and whatever subject kind of strikes my fancy including you know movie stuff i also want to make sure that new DMS are getting good content and i think this is that kind of video all right what is a sandbox when people talk about sandboxing in D&D what do they mean and i think what they mean is what in video games we would call an open world game i used to work at a company called pandemic studios I worked on mercenaries one of mercenaries - I was a designer and I was a writer and mercenaries was like GTA was GTA and a warzone was the phrase we used it was both an open-world game and a sandbox game and using those definitions which we'll talk about in a second I don't really think D&D I think it being a sandbox game kind of goes without saying sandboxing and video games means the designers tell you what to do but they don't tell you how to do it right there's no right answer and in fact as a writer I used to have to go to some of the other designers and say no no you can't tell the player not to use this airstrike until they get to the mission that you gave them the airstrike for it's those are their airstrikes they can use them for whatever they want and they should be allowed to get themselves into a situation where they've taken this quest to blow up this building but they used the airstrikes you gave them to do it now they have to come up with another way to solve that problem and that was a big part of the fun of mercenaries players would do things that we the designers never thought of and that was delightful to us we loved watching like the first time I think anyone in a video game ever took a chunk of c4 and put it on a Jeep and then got in the Jeep and drove it ejected from the Jeep and used the Jeep as a rolling bomb detonating the c4 once the Jeep was where they wanted was in mercenaries and we the designers had never thought of that that wasn't something that we had know something the QA guys discovered it's one of the things it's one of my favorite things in Dungeons and Dragons is awarding magic I don't specifically like ran magic items I roll on random magic item tables and the players end up with these sub-optimal items stuff that wasn't tailored and chosen specifically for them as their character it's random stuff that they don't exactly know what to do with and they sit around going well who can use this who wants to use this we don't know and then later when the chips are down and they're desperate they come up with this is the sandbox part they come up with interesting and novel ways to use these items to save their bacon that I never thought of and certainly the designers never thought of like for instance the first time those who follow my campaign Diaries may remember that it became a problem the players were using the portable hole that they got to bypass a ton of content but the first time they ever used it that way was when I had and I was pretty proud of this I had taken the party and I basically chopped them into a portcullis had fallen and divided the party into two chunks and Noel's attack from both sides so when before it used to be the frontline fighters would fight the Noles and the guys in the back of the magic-user the thief was able the Ranger was able to stay at range now there were knowles on both sides and they couldn't move where they wanted to move because the portcullis cut them off and that's when anna had the idea of using the portable hole in its cloth form putting it through the portcullis sticking it up on the wall the players on the other side of the port calls jump in the portable hole and then anna reaches through the pour calls and grabs a portable hole off the wall and now they're all on the same side of the portcullis in a video game that would be a sandbox thing that would be the kind of thing where the designers had never planned on that they had never thought of the players doing that and i was delighted when anna did that i thought that was fantastic so later on the portable hole got a reputation for being kind of a broken magic item at least in my game because of the way I was letting the players use it but the first time they used it it was amazing and I thought wow that is super cool I love that stuff I love it when the players start using these items in novel ways ways that I guarantee you the designers of the game had never intended in a video game that would be a sandbox situation the dungeon master was set up the challenge designed the encounter and had no idea how the players would solve it I do that all the time people who watch my campaign Diaries are often wondering how did Matt know that the players would come up with a way to get out of this and I'm like I have no idea how they're going to get out of it I'm constantly setting up challenges that on paper look ridiculous the last time we played which was actually several weeks ago those of you who have missed the campaign Diaries take heart in the fact that we haven't played since you know for about six weeks now but the last time we played I threw a mind witness and a bunch of drow at the players and they were stuck in darkness and they were getting zapped by mind witness tentacles and I had no idea how they were gonna survive that and it looked for a little while as though they were doomed but then my friend Lars pulled a rabbit out of his hat and used sunlight it dispelled all the darkness and then graves cast fear on the mind witness and suddenly the tide of battle turned so I do that all the time I run the kind of game that challenges the players and I don't really worry about how are they going to get themselves out of this that's their job I think most people who play D&D though when they talk about sandboxing they mean what we who are video game designers consider an open-world game an open-world game in a video game at least like mercenaries like GTA it's up to you to decide what you want to do it's up to you to decide what quests to go on what missions to take there isn't a main storyline there isn't a wrong answer to the question what should I do next and in fact the more you explore the world the more interesting content you find contrast that with games like Last of Us for instance which have one storyline and there's no branching and you're just basically going to follow along with a story and there are other games that blend that and there are quest lines you can follow there is a mate like Skyrim has a main quest line but you can spend literally hundreds of hours lost in the nooks and crannies of that world but even in Skyrim there is a main quest lines just up to you whether or not to ignore it or follow it with a game like mercenaries there is literally no main quest line here it's up to you to decide who do I want to work for and the choices you make you can follow all the way through to the end of the game so I think all of us who run D&D we are running a kind of sandbox game because we create these encounters and we don't really have any idea how the players are going to solve these problems like for instance the Delian tomb that i put up one of my first videos was this little dungeon and people constantly come to my subreddit and they tell me their experiences running that tomb and players come up with lots of novel and interesting ways to deal with the things in that tomb that I never accounted for and that is just the nature of D&D the nature of D&D is sandbox play so when we talk about sandboxing in D&D we're talking about what would in videogames be an open-world game where you are free the players are free to go wherever they want and do whatever they want within reason obviously I mean GTA is an open-world but you can't play GTA san andreas and leave San Andreas and go to Vice City for instance a lot of people have heard me described the sandbox game that I run and they want that feeling of the players being free to pick their own quests and follow their own storylines and like how do I do that and I'm afraid unfortunately I don't have an answer that is easy the only way I know how to do that is to do a lot of prep work I can kind of get away with it because I've been running D&D for like 30 years and I have run probably a dozen or two dozen low-level adventures and I liked some of them and I didn't like some of them and so what I've done when I put together my sandbox campaign was I picked those low-level adventures that I thought were cool and engaging and fun to run so I take all these adventures that I have run in the past and I just dropped them all into my campaign setting we're going to talk about them right now one of my favorite starting adventures is against the cult of the reptile God here let me move over a little bit there we go against the cult of the reptile God which is I think maybe I mean it's an old adventure and so it is burdened with a lot of the assumptions that they had back in the early 1980s about how D&D is run and that requires a little bit more work on your end now but I love running this adventure I think it's fantastic against the call to the reptile God is not a sandbox adventure it is a quest there is a town the town is called or Lane and that's one of the things that's cool about this adventure is it comes with a town I think all good starting D&D adventures you need a town and you want to know what's the name of the blacksmith what's the name of the inn is there a temple in town what God is it dedicated to what's the name of the local priest is there a local wizard is there somebody who can identify our magic items I think that's one of the things we want when we're starting off our DND campaign is we want a cool dungeon or a cool adventure and we want a cool town to start and that is detailed enough to make it easy for us as Dungeon Master's to run the way I use against the cultu the reptile God is it doesn't really matter where the players start maybe they'll start on their way to or Lane maybe they'll starting two completely different nearby town but they hear rumors of a curse on this town and they'll meet people from or Lane who have left they've packed up all their worldly belongings and they've they've evacuated the town they've abandoned it because of the curse because people they know have stopped acting normal and if people they grew up with stopped recognizing them the people who have left Orlais and feel like their town is cursed and eventually it'll be all pod people all right they don't know what's going on they don't know why these people that they've known all their lives suddenly don't recognize them and act strangely now in one game that I ran the game at Turtle Rock Studios one of the players friend Tom his sister was from ore lane so the adventure started with Tom getting a whole bunch of letters from his sister describing the events developing in our lane but that was just one plot hook for Tom none of the other players had any hook into or Lane and in fact they didn't start that campaign in our lane they started in another town called the village of hamlet this is another famous low-level adventure it's considered by a lot of people one of the best low-level adventures again it's super old-school I want to talk about old school I mean like when you read it every shop has it every shop and you know Farm has the people who live there detailed to a level I'm not sure new DM needs and includes stuff like where all their cash is I think we talked about this on another video where all their cash is just in case the thief player wants to practice his pickpockets skill I think somebody reading it now would think why do I need to know where this farmer keeps his 27 copper pieces apart from that though the village of Hama is a great low level starting adventure because again like against the cults the reptile god there's a great town here it is very well detailed there is a wizard who can identify magic items there's a local druid and there's a nearby dungeon the moat house which is a great low level dungeon although there's not a clear reason why in village of Hamlet you would ever go to that moat house dungeon back in the day Gary Gygax just assumed that if you were adventuring in this town and someone mentioned the nearby dungeon the players would just want to go there there's a dungeon nearby let's go but these days I think players need a little bit more motivation to do stuff like that one of the things I like doing is if there's a half-orc character in the party there are a couple of allies of the local evil cult that have kind of taken over the local general store and so when the players show up I enjoy having the two bad guys that run the general store mistake the half-orc player or maybe the rogue or thief player as a member of the cult and suddenly this player is drawn into this conspiracy that they don't know anything about so village of helmet is one of the other adventures I use to seed my sandbox game I drop all these adventures all over the place I put them in nearby towns and villages I put the dungeons nearby and I let the players decide where they want to go one of the interesting things about the village of hamlet is that it leads to it doesn't include but it leads to the Temple of Elemental Evil the Temple of Elemental Evil is a kind of famous adventure but it's also terrible it is an awful awful adventure is unreadable it is probably unrunnable I mean you can run it my friends have run it but one of the things I noticed is everyone I know who ran it basically winged it they read The Adventure they were confused and they made stuff up based on what they thought the adventure was saying there are resources online that if you search for you know running the Temple of Elemental Evil you'll find I think dragons foot which is an old school you know Advanced Dungeons & Dragons website I think dragons foot has a whole bunch of files you can download that help you parse and understand what's going on in Temple of Elemental Evil and you need those things otherwise you'll have no idea what's going on so unfortunately I can't really recommend the Temple of Elemental evil witch village of Hamlet is the beginning of butt village Mohammed is fine in and of itself like I said it's a town and a nearby dungeon just like against a call to the reptile God another low level adventure that I dropped into my sandbox setting is the keep on the borderlands really all I use this is another classic starting adventure really all I use from this is something called the caves of chaos the caves of chaos are a great cut low level sort of open-world like adventure thing it's a valley basically with a whole bunch of cave openings in it and it's up to the players to decide which cave openings to explore and they all are many of them interconnect in the side of these hills I think there's a necromancer in here somewhere but apart from him the caves of chaos are just a bunch of random monsters thrown together and they skirmish with each other and fight with each other it's one of the canonical examples of why are all these different monsters hanging out together without much rhyme or reason but actually if you read The Adventure they do talk about how different factions of monsters have alliances with each other and these monsters don't like these monsters and they skirmish all the time I think a clever adventuring party could learn to negotiate with some of the monsters and you and make an alliance with some of them and then use that alliance to exploit some other group of monsters in the caves but again it's just a bunch of random caves in the side of a hill the first time I player has ever encountered the notion of the bad guys grabbing an unconscious player character and dragging them off and then ransoming them back and saying listen we will return this unconscious hero to you if you give us a thousand gold pieces and that magic sword you've got the first time that ever happened was in the caves of chaos I don't always use the caves of chaos in my sandbox game because unlike the other adventures unlike village of Hamlet unlike against a cultic reptile god there's no plot here it's just usually what happens is the players are on their way from one place to another following some quest and they attacked by goblins and if they follow the goblins back to their lair their lair is in the caves of chaos along those same lines one of the adventures I drop into my sandbox world is from this book dungeon delve it's a fourth edition book it was fantastic I have no idea why there isn't a fifth edition version of it dungeon dough is just a whole bunch of little tiny adventures often only two or three encounters and there's one for every level so there's a first level one in the second level one there fantastic that's a great way if the players are on the way from point A to point B and you want to throw an adventurer at them or you need a random encounter or if the players want to play D&D tonight you did everything ready dungeon delve is fantastic but it is a fourth edition product and I think fourth edition products are maybe the hardest to convert to fifth edition there was something a little bit like this for third edition called The Book of challenges so between the book of challenges and dungeon delve both of which you can get on DMS guild I think there's lots of great highly modular content that you can drop into your adventures I don't know why there is an aversion of dungeon delve for fifth edition except that Wizards of the coast doesn't seem to believe in the notion of the modular adventure anymore the idea of smaller chunks of content that's just for a first level or first a third level these days they put out you know one book a year and it gets you from first level all the way to 10th level and it's not modular at all you can't just take one chunk of storm Kings thunder and drop it into out of the abyss so often my players in the sandbox game when they get to whatever town they're going to whether it's or Lane or Hamlet or some other town or Fair hill which we'll talk about in a second they see this broken tower over the tops of the trees and maybe they wonder what it is and they get to town they find out well it used to be a watchtower and it used to protect the town against bandits but now we get attacked by bandits all the time because the tower isn't ruined and it's been taken over by goblins and it was a very successful first encounter first adventure in my sandbox game but the problem was because it was near to the local town and because it seemed like a self-contained chunk of content which it was it's just a tower with a bunch of goblins my players always went to this so I stopped using it after a little while because I didn't want that's the opposite of an open-world right if there is an obvious first thing to do then I feel like I have failed to set up the open-world sandbox well I mean obviously that means I'm kind of a lazy DM right because if I wanted to I could have put the broken tower somewhere else made a little bit farther away made it maybe a little bit more dangerous and therefore it wouldn't have seemed like such an obvious first thing to do or maybe let the players discover sometime in the middle of some other adventure but it is a great self-contained little objective the players have to go solve the problem of the goblins in this tower and there are some cool goblins in here there are many different kinds of goblins in here makes it a lot of fun to run follows guide to monsters now has lots of different kinds of some monsters like lots of different kinds of goblins for instance and that would make something like this easier to run or easier to convert I guess I mean as a chunk of content it is bite-sized and it gives the players the sense of having accomplished something they've they've taken the tower back from the goblins and now the town will be able to put a watch garrison there and thereby protect the town against bandits but again I never tell the players that they have to do this or they should do this I always make sure that the broken tower the caves of chaos the village of Hamlet the village of or lane from against a call to the reptile god there are hooks to all of these things in front of the players so it's up to them to decide what to do in addition to or Lane and its nearby dungeon and Hamlet and it's nearby dungeon I also use the village of Fair hill from the crucible of Freya this is a great low level adventure it also comes with a free downloadable prequel called the Wizards amulet that you could use they can either start in Fair Hill or they can start in a nearby town one of the nearby towns and hear about these stolen crucible from the temple of Freya or maybe one and maybe it's not Freya maybe one of your players is a priest to one God or saint and instead of it being Freya in this town it's that player's God so even though they're not in ferial when they hear this story about how a temple to their god had a magic item stolen from it they're gonna want to go there and get it back that's an important point if the players start in or Lane they're going to want to solve the problem of the reptile God if they start in Hamlet they're going to want to solve the problem of the moat house if they start in fairy Hill they're going to want to solve the problem of the missing crucible so it's important that you make sure the players start somewhere where the nearest closest adventure isn't the most obvious like if you start an omelet for instance maybe the players have no hooks that lead them to the moat house they've just heard about it they wonder about it but they do have hooks you have given them hooks into the adventures in the other town so it's up to them to decide where do we go sometimes I start the players at Tor keep which is the nearby local seat of the barony and there's no adventure they're all there are are rumors and hooks to all these other towns nearby all of which are in trouble that's sort of how the West marches game works and maybe the next video we'll do will talk about a West marches style of game because it is you're in dear to my heart but I've never done it I think some people online are familiar with the West marches as the name of someone's campaign but before it was that it was the name of a style of play the guy named Ben Robbins came up with ed Robbins who also came up with microscope and Kingdom which I bought and unfortunately I've never gotten to use even though I really want to I can do this kind of sandbox game because I've run each of these adventures each of these adventures was the beginning to some other campaign I ran years ago so when I decided I wanted to do a sandbox game where I had no idea where the players were going to go they had lots of options I just grabbed all the little level adventures that I had run that I thought were super cool finally the last adventure that the players typically go on in my sandbox campaign once they are around level 5 they tackle this also happens to be one of the first adventure hooks they get and that is the keep on the shadow FAL this was the first adventure published for 4th edition it wasn't very good like when you read it the town that's described in it is terrible it doesn't have anything like the detail that the other towns that I've described had it was mostly like a World of Warcraft quest hub so that part of it was really poor but the dungeon in it isn't bad I've used it many times this is also where calor Oldham Isle comes from off to put his name down here because there's no people ask me questions about Cal roll the vile all the time and it takes me a second to figure out what they're talking about because they don't spell it right but how could you spell it right if all you've heard is me say it I mean that's not a person's normal name that is one of the first things that happens in my sandbox game is the players meet calor all the vile and he is building this fortress out of bodies he's building the black tower and the more corpses he gets the bigger the tower gets and that by the way is not from the adventure keep on the shadow fail that's from the black company books by Glenn Cooke which I stole I better move over now so you can see both of these it's not from keep on the shadow file it's from the black company books I do that all the time I steal stuff from books all the time so I made keep on the shadow file a lot more interesting than what was in this original adventure by meeting Cal all the viol when the players are way too low-level to do anything about him it creates a great villain the players have met the villain they want maybe they try to take him on I have no problem with that maybe they tried to go after him when they're not high enough lowly yet I have no problem with that the player should be allowed to get in over their heads all of these adventures are all first or third level adventures it's only keep on the shadow file that is really out of the players level range and I love the idea of the players going after Cal roll the vial when they're not high enough level one of the problems I've noticed my players have and this is because they're not plugged into the traditions of D&D is they want to wait until the last possible moment to go after some bad guy like Colorado vial even though if they went after him real honestly if my players decided listen this guy is evil we need to stop him they probably could do it because they have to go through an entire dungeon to get to this dude and they probably have a random encounter or two on the way there so that they might not be fifth level when they get here but they might be third or fourth I've noticed the players these days are not conscious of the fact or they haven't really put two and two together and they don't realize we can decide to go after this guy now and that's fine because we will get experience points and magic items as we go through the dungeon that he is the boss of I also use my own homebrew stuff I have the tower of the Oracle which is a thing I made up I stole it from my friend Jim I designed my own elven Tower and the players hear rumors about the orcs attacking it it's an opportunity for them to go fight a bunch of orcs and also make some allies vocal elves you see how it works right unfortunately there's no trick to it there's no easy way to do it I have run a whole bunch of low-level adventures I've picked the ones that I thought were fun to run and I thought were cool for new players and then I seed them all around the area and I give the players different plugs no one player has hooks for all of these things in fact the players often have competing hooks and I want that feeling of the players arguing about what to do next the players will often bargain they'll say okay your sisters in trouble so we'll go take care of that first but then afterwards we have to go find my brother that literally happened in one of my games one of the phrases I use in my game is the clock is always ticking it's a catchphrase I eventually adapted it as the catchphrase to a local Thieves Guild which I thought was fun it's a phrase I deployed to tell the players whichever these adventures you go on whichever these problems you try to solve the other bad guys at these other locations are advancing their plot and as a result if you finish if you save the town of war Lane lera the beautiful over in the village of Hamlet may achieve his goals I don't run the village of hamlet vanilla by the way this is some sort of advanced dungeon mastering but what I do is I use the moat house dungeon from return to the Temple of Elemental evil which is a completely different product but you can get it online you can get on the DMS Gil and I think the moat house dungeon in return to the temple of Elemental Evil is more fun and more interesting than the one in the vanilla village of Hamlet but that might be a reason for you to use the one in the original village' Hamlet because it is kind of straightforward low-level dungeon return to the temple of Elemental Evil is a follow-up adventure it came out I think 15 or 20 years after the original Temple of Elemental Evil it literally takes place 20 years after the events of the first adventure so I just meld those two adventures the town the village of Hamlet from the village of homeland and the moat house dungeon from returns of the Temple of Elemental Evil and my players have no idea I've done that I want to give the players that feeling that their choices have consequences so whichever adventure they pick up the other adventures are ticking along and those bad guys may achieve their goals this ties into another style of play I happen to like games were eventually armies clash and the players are worried about being able to muster enough units to defend the stuff they built or taken so that often ends up being the end of my sandbox game I have my own rules for units and warfare which I will eventually put up on the DMS Gil they're not ready for primetime much like my stronghold rules which I am working on for instance if the players never go to the caves of chaos the necromancer their summons an army of undead I mean army a few units of undead enough to take over the town that the players have been using as their base if the players don't go to or Lane and deal with the cult or the reptile God eventually a whole bunch of you on T that's a great reptilian bad guy a whole bunch of you on T several units of you on t show up at the local town to try to take it over if the players never deal with Cal revile maybe he summons Lord South the death knight and Lord South is leading the army of undead from the caves of chaos see it's up to you to decide what happens if the players don't deal with this stuff maybe each of these adventures is in stasis until the players go to try to solve these problems but that creates another issue where these are all low-level adventurers and eventually the players will have enough experience points that you if you want to do it that way you're going to have to take these other low-level adventures and buff them a little bit to make them challenging for the players but I like selling the players on the reality of the world the feeling that it's a living world the feeling that whatever they do all the other choices they have are all progressing and regardless of what system you use defending the town against an army of undead is epic defending the town against an army of you on t defending the town against at one point the player is summoned this huge I think I used a drag Olaf which is not a Godzilla sized creature bite made at Godzilla size for this purpose that was an epic end to that campaign and in each instance the players knew this happened because we didn't take care of this problem and it can be kind of frustrating for the players because they feel like how could we have done everything and to me to my way of thinking that kind of frustration is okay the players shouldn't necessarily feel in a sandbox game maybe the players shouldn't feel like they can achieve every goal that maybe they should feel like following one thread means letting another one lie fallow again that's up to you that's down to your taste so what's next after the sandbox campaign do you keep playing this way normally what I do is I pick an adventure there are lots to choose from that start at around fifth or six level and we'll take the play a mega-adventure that will take the players from fifth or six level up to tenth or twelve usually what I use is red hand of doom which is an awesome adventure so all the while as the players are going through the events in my low-level sandbox they're also hearing about these hobby goblins from red hand of doom or maybe I'll run an adventure in the Underdark maybe I'll segue to Knight below typically after the players have gone through these five levels of sandbox game and defeated or not Calla roll the vial I give them some downtime and this is an opportunity for them to spend all their money and pursue their own interests and usually that's the point where I do a lot of listening and I try to pay attention what the players are interested in doing and then craft some content that allows them to follow that like for instance in my friend Brad's game after we had gone through the first five or six levels of sandbox content we were now free to do what we wanted and I built I started building a stronghold and when my friend Dave who played a wizard heard that I was building a stronghold he decided that he wanted to do something like that and he talked to Brad about it Brad opened up the map and Dave literally looked at the map and pointed to a random hex and said hey who lives here and Brad says oh it's just a bunch of like barbarian tribes and dave says I am gonna go down there and take that place over and build my wizard tower and Brad was like okay fine he came up with an adventure involving a whole bunch of barbarian tribes and Dave had to fight with some and negotiate with others and when he was done he had some barbarian allies and he built a tower and he became the baron of that area that was purely self-directed that was 100% up to Dave so that's how I run a sandbox game I have a bunch of adventures I'm against the cult of the reptile god I have the village of hamlet I have the broken Tower from dungeon delve I have the caves of chaos I have the crucible of Freya I have the keep on the shadow fell and I seed some of these rarely all of them I choose and pick which ones to use depending on my players and then I know typically that after that is going to be something like red hand of do or night blow or my own custom content depending what the players decide they want to do I can get away with this because I've run a whole bunch of low-level adventures you don't have to have done that to get your own sandbox game going you only need a couple of choices maybe only two and maybe they're not published adventures that have hours and hours of content to give you from first to third level maybe it's just a couple of encounters the principle is just that the players have different hooks and not all players need a hook not first of all one of the things I've noticed is not all players necessarily want an adventure because they often don't know what to do with it right so I give certain players because I can usually tell which players are self-directed I give them adventurer hooks and then they are the ones that are driving the adventure so I only need two or three different threads for them to follow remember that in a given evening 3 to 5 encounters is enough for the players to feel like they've gotten a lot done and they've accomplished something so you only need to seed maybe 6 or 7 different encounters broken into two different threads for the players to feel like they have choice and they can go where they want and they can do what they want the players will inevitably ask but what about the adventure we didn't go on just remember to tell them the clock is always ticking that's it for the sandbox episode folks you'll probably have a lot of questions please ask them in the blah-blah down below or come by my subreddit slash are slash mad Colville next episode we might get back to politics I do want to do a four e fourth edition video because a lot of people watched my interview with my friend Jim and we talked about fourth edition how much we both loved it and that surprised a whole bunch of people so to me that warrants a video I still want to talk about adventures I still won't talk about campaign settings as usual there are no ads in front of my videos I do not have a patreon but if you want to help support the channel come by my amazon page there's a link in the dooblydoo down below I have an independent fantasy author I write fantasy novels as a hobby lots of people have bought them and many of them like them you might to look at the reviews see what you think each book is for bucks of which I see three bucks so if you buy both books you're throwing me six bucks I do not recommend getting the book in print I went to print because people bugged me and said I don't like reading on my Kindle but unfortunately the print version is really hard to update and keep up to date so it's now I think one or two revisions stale it's also way more expensive and instead of seeing three dollars from each book I see one dollar from each print book so it's kind of a bad deal but if you like things in print go ahead and pick it up knock yourself out who am I to tell you what to do that was the Sam boxing episode folks I hope it was in some way useful or inspiring until next time peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 697,988

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Id: DWAhcY9QroQ

Length: 28min 39sec (1719 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016

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[u/Xercies_jday]

Resources if you want to make a sandbox yourself:

West Marches Resources: http://roll1d100.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/west-marches-resources.html

Some great stuff here about running a game as well:

http://hillcantons.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/on-sandboxes-growing-into-special.html

http://hillcantons.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/building-dynamic-sandboxes-part-1.html

Great Sine Nomine stuff which gives you a lot of random tables that you can use to inspire you and make world creation easier:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/89888/Red-Tide-Campaign-Sourcebook-and-Sandbox-Toolkit

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/185959/Godbound-A-Game-of-Divine-Heroes-Free-Edition

[u/3d6skills]

I think one of the best setting books geared toward sandbox play is Yoon-Suin: The Purple Lands.

The book is divide into 5 unique area across the land. And within each section, are tables for DM to generate a unique towns, building, NPCs, and NPCs the PCs know. Then the final step is converting all of that into a list of hooks to start the campaign off with.

The setting is a sorta of fantasy Tibet, but can easily be converted into any type of setting.

[u/SilentMobius]

Man, I love some of the things that Matthew Colville has to say, I just wish I didn't have to wade through mountains of useless-to-me [A]D&D stuff.

I guess that just one of those things when someone whose opinions you find interesting likes something you really don't.

[u/scrollbreak]

I agree with a lot of it but not the 'make the adventure obscure so they don't just graviate to it' part. Just present two towns they could travel to, with some idea of the dungeons/adventures there in advance.

Also Mercenaries was indeed a great game (and Mercenaries 2 wasn't allowed enough time in the oven)