One of the entries in Zak S's Thought Eater rpg essay tournament has got stuck in my head and made me think. It's about how RPG setting information gives you a snapshot of a particular moment in time and quickly becomes obsolete as time passes in a campaign (the second one here: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2015/09/infinity-thought-eater.html).

I think this can be a real issue with a lot of sandboxes. Often it seems like the whole world beyond the horizon is caught in amber and things only happen when the PCs stumble across them. Generally it matters very much WHERE the PCs go but not at all WHEN they go there.

And I think having when matter is important. It gives player decisions more importance and makes the setting feel alive. Some thoughts on how to do this:

Set up a future timeline for you setting: basically write out a timeline of what will happen in the world if the PCs do nothing. Pundy's written some posts about this an it's a good idea. Often setting are written up with a lot of tensions and conflicts bubbling away under the surface but without any explosions in fireworks factories going on right this minute. Screw that, in most A Song of Ice and Fire RPG material I've seen the general assumption is that things will start off at a quiet time in Westerosi history so that the PCs can get their feet under time and start with small scale problems. Screw that, start things off right at the start of one of the big wars. That way current events really matter and the decisions players make in response them mean the difference between a queen inviting them to try to tame a dragon and one torching the inn they're staying at.

Unleash mothra: the flip-side of writing up a future history is gong out of your way to let the PCs change it. After each session really think out the consequences of PC action and let those consequences flow outwards in ever-expanding ripples. Few things make a setting seem more alive than players realizing that everything going on now is a result of what they did a few sessions back. Of course this means having to go through the annoyance of updating your setting every session, so it's probably best to keep the bits of your sandbox that the PCs haven't seen yet fairly small (either geographically or in terms of details, love small sandboxes have run two short campaigns that took place entirely within a single richly-detailed six-mile hex) so keeping it moving in time isn't too much of a hassle.

Random events: hit the sandbox at large with random events, not just the bits the PCs are in right now. Noisms wrote up a good blog post about how to do this, which none of the google searches I've just tried manage to turn up. The basic idea was that you had a random events table and then randomly roll which hex in the setting gets hit by that event and do that constantly, which sounds like a good idea to me.

Cycles: a simple way to have a setting be in motion without having to change everything is to have it run in circles. A simple way to do this is keep track of phases of the moon so that you know when the werewolves come out. Similarly, have the seasons matter instead of having it always be indistinctly spring-ish and to drive this home turn the weather up to 11. Have snow banks thirty feet high, swarms of blood locusts that blacken the sky, and the burning time where wildfires race across the countryside and give some monsters bizarre seasonal life cycles, perhaps the larvae who are friendly in the spring will have their face-eating teeth by the fall. Similarly people move in cycles and to make things more interesting go beyond sticking a few holidays in the calendar. Have enormous caravans that (try to) move according to set schedules or tax collection month when the tax farmers are out in force.

The Stars are Right: for all the importance that astrology has in the material that gamers draw on for inspiration, it's surprising how little it is used in RPGs. Really want to write up an astrological system that has real effects on the game and allows players to get information based on it. Have it be simple enough so the players can figure out for themselves when the stars are right and take advantage of that.

World in motion gaming.

Been around forever. Talked about it lots on here too. Lots of us oldies like that.

Quote from: One Horse Town;856562World in motion gaming.

Been around forever. Talked about it lots on here too. Lots of us oldies like that.

Yup, am not saying anything new just throwing in some ideas. One specific thing that I haven't seen much is astrology as a way of making the world seem in motion, you'd have thought someone would've done more with tracking when the stars are right.

Also think it really helps to turn things up to 11. Easier to make the PCs care about winter when everything gets all To Build a Fire and packs of starving wolves start running into town instead of just slowing motion down a bit cause there's a few inches of snow.

Any good specific past threads about it?

Quote from: One Horse Town;856562World in motion gaming.

Been around forever. Talked about it lots on here too. Lots of us oldies like that.

So very very true.

Good news is that some of the new generation of RPGers are re-discovering it.

For me random event tables work well.

Quote from: Daztur;856564Any good specific past threads about it?

Estar had a series of threads which were pretty cool. Search estar & sandbox and you should get a few hits.

Quote from: One Horse Town;856567Estar had a series of threads which were pretty cool. Search estar & sandbox and you should get a few hits.

Many thanks.  I take a lot of random six-month hiatuses from reading RPG stuff online and those seem to have fallen through the cracked. Hitting them now.

Quote from: Omega;856565So very very true.

Good news is that some of the new generation of RPGers are re-discovering it.

I'm not that new *waves cane* The first RPG thing I ever bought was a Rules Cyclopedia.

But even though it's been around from a while it's surprising how little you see it supported in published products. The OSR hexcrawls I've seen/bought don't have any specific content to support it. Pundy's Dark Albion has a future timeline which is good but I wish there was more of that out there.

Quote from: Daztur;856558Screw that, start things off right at the start of one of the big wars. That way current events really matter and the decisions players make in response them mean the difference between a queen inviting them to try to tame a dragon and one torching the inn they're staying at.

It can be difficult to combine sandboxy freedom of action with a massive war or similar - the newbie PCs are likely to be compelled to join up and fight and you either get "Tour of Duty" if they go along with it or  "Legion of the Damned" if they don't. Big wars tend to suit linear Adventure Paths like Wrath of the Righteous. Conversely the build-up towards a big war can give a pulpy 1930s feel that works well for sandboxing.

LordVreeg, too, knows what's what. He refers to it as "world in motion." Here is a search for his posts with "motion" on it. Enjoy

Quote from: Daztur;856570But even though it's been around from a while it's surprising how little you see it supported in published products. The OSR hexcrawls I've seen/bought don't have any specific content to support it. Pundy's Dark Albion has a future timeline which is good but I wish there was more of that out there.

Part of it may be the OSR's collective stance against scripted adventures and in favor of events developing through PCs' actions plus honest DM judgement (possibly assisted by random tables). Any timetable for future events could potentially be construed as a "metaplot" or a "railroad", so out goes the baby with the bath water.

Still, many sandboxes do mention short- and long-term goals for the setting NPCs, and generally give a GM enough to reasonably extrapolate.

I do this all the time in my Minarian campaign. Of course, it helps that it's based on a board wargame (random event table built in!), so wars and politics come very naturally to it.

I like the astrology idea, though, Daztur.  Some means of doing it so it isn't completely random but sort-of-is and acts like a countdown clock.  Slumbering Ursine Dunes talks about a Weird meter, the astrology angle could work like that maybe.  Several scales that interact in interesting ways.

I seem to remember astrology coming up in several WFRP adventures. They had those crazy moons...

I've got a calendar and constellations and whatnot for my homebrew... but I need to set it all up better to be more manageable.
Even a little bit of background noise goes a long way towards making the world seem alive. I used to play Earthdawn with a GM who was really good at it.

Quote from: Daztur;856564Yup, am not saying anything new just throwing in some ideas. One specific thing that I haven't seen much is astrology as a way of making the world seem in motion, you'd have thought someone would've done more with tracking when the stars are right.

Well I use real calendars in Honor+Intrigue so the moon is full when the moon is, you know, full not when it may convenient (or inconvenient) for some presumed narrative or adventure hook. If I was more concerned with the stars (as opposed to the moon) I might look at the historical astronomy.

I recall a friend of mine who played in a a D&D game run by Greg Gorden (007, DC Heroes, WEG Star Wars) that used a lot of astronomy/astrology and numerology. I don't know how that worked though.

In the Questioning Chirine thread Chriine mentions that Phil Barker had something like 1500 NPCs for Tekumal and that on a real world monthly basis he went through some process to figure out what the NPCs were up to and what might have changed for those NPCs for that game month. It sounds like a good bit of bookkeeping (though some could be automated), but that does make a world in motion, not one where anywhere the PCs aren't is trapped in amber.

I prefer sandboxes that have events happening regardless of what the players are doing. I don't like events being put on hold until the players are ready to choose that quest or some similar nonsense. I'll use software to handle events happening if I need to.