The free form nature of role-playing games are difficult to manage. It is understandable why many choose to run their campaigns as a linear series of adventures. To allow for more freedom you need to get away from the idea that a campaign is a connected series of adventures.

To do this you need to develop a "Bag of Stuff." The elements inside your "Bag of Stuff" are pulled out and combined during a session to form the adventure the players are experiencing. A campaign cease to be about prepping adventures but rather about managing and expanding what in your "Bag of Stuff". The referee creativity becomes focused on judging the consequences of the player's action.

What goes into a "Bag of Stuff? The broad categories are Items, NPCs, and Locales. Items are the physical object found in the setting both mundane and supernatural. NPCs are the characters including generic template that can be customized on the fly with a name and personality (Barkeep, guard, etc).

Locales are descriptions of sites both specific and generic. This part is the most like writing an adventure except the effort should be focused on description not plot. A Palace could be a setting for an audience with the king one session or the scene of a raid on the royal treasury the next. General locales are generally the most flexible. A typical church of the god of honor, a peasant hut, a manorhouse. The more well-read the referee is the more able they will be able to customize the generic elements into the specific items the PCs encounter.

Coupled with this is a "World in Motion". Making a living breathing setting that exists outside of the player's actions. To prepare the "World in Motion" for play, the referee draws up a timeline of what going to happen in the setting for the expected length of the campaign. It may be a year, two years, or a decade. This timeline is written has if the characters did not exist. It will guide the referee as to what specific items, NPCs, and Locales need to be added to the "Bag of Stuff".

The "World in Motion" comes into play through the background color, news, and rumors the referee uses during play. Referee will focus a timeline on events that are of interest to himself and his players.

Managing the campaign is about deciding the consequence of player actions and their effect on future events. The referee will need to be prepared for drastic alterations if circumstances required it. Above all remember that the timeline is a plan not a script. Like a plan of battle it changes once put into action.

The creativity of the referee comes primarily in deciding the consequences of the player's actions. Not just picking out the likely consequences but the one that are both probable and interesting This is because we are playing a game not writing a alternate history thesis.

By adopting the "Bag of Stuff" and the "World in Motion" as tools in managing a campaign you will find that you can allow players to have considerable freedom within the setting and the amount of prep work remains the same as a campaign comprised as a series of linked adventures. If you chose to retain the setting for subsequent campaigns you will find your prep work to be considerably reduced as much of the material is recycled into the new campaign's "Bag of Stuff".

With help from Patrick Walsh I uploaded a PDF collecting all the published "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Articles"

http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Make%20a%20Fantasy%20Sandbox_111005.pdf

Quote from: estar;562633With help from Patrick Walsh I uploaded a PDF collecting all the published "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Articles"

http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Make%20a%20Fantasy%20Sandbox_111005.pdf

Thank you.

Wow. Thank you!

Thank you! This rocks

All this stuff is excellent, but what I would really like to see at some point is an annotated example of play from the DM's side of the screen for a sandbox campaign.  Something that shows what the DM was thinking, how he made the decisions he did, when he resorted to random generators and when/why he modified the results, etc., etc.

Current Version of Vreeg's Rules of Setting/Game Design.

Vreeg's first Rule of Setting Design
"Make sure the ruleset you are using matches the setting and game you want to play, because the setting and game WILL eventually match the system."  

   Corrollary to Vreeg's First Rule.
"The amount of rules given to a certain dimension of an RPG partially dictate what kind of game the rules will create.  If 80% of the rulebook is written about thieves and the underworld, the game that those rules are meant for is thieving and skullduggery.  If 80% of the mechanics are based on combat, the game will revolve around combat.

   Multiply this by 10 if the reward system is based in the same subject area as the proponderance of rules."
 

   2nd Corrollary.
"Character growth is the greatest reinforcer.  The syntheses of pride in achievement with improvement in the character provides over 50% of the reinforcement in playing the game.  Rules that involve these factors are the most powerful in the game."


   3rd Corrollary
"The rules are the physics engine of the setting, Crunch models Fluff.  As rules are the interface between the setting and the player's actions, Houseruling is a constant process of creating a rule for a setting-specific event to formalize it.  This is a process to be welcomed and enjoyed, as it only comes from the expansion of the players into the setting.  Talk to them about it and formalize it with them if you have any doubts."


Vreeg's Second Rule of Setting Design
"Consistency is the Handmaiden of Immersion and Versimilitude. Keep good notes, and spend a little time after every creation to 'connect the dots'. If you create a foodtuff or drink, make sure you notate if the bars or inns the players frequent. Is it made locally, or is it imported? If so, where from? If locally made, is it exported?  

The first time a player discovers something can be interesting, if it is still there or referenced later, it becomes part of the depth of the setting, increasing the solidity"


Vreeg's Third Rule of Setting Design
"The World In Motion is critical for Immersion, so create 'event chains' that happen at all levels of design. The players need to feel like things will happen with or without them.  They need to feel like they can affect the outcome, but that these events have weight of their own.  Event-chains need velocity, not just speed.

Cause and effect from an event-chain cements the feeling of setting-weight and the march of time to the players. It's not enough to have an election in a town, the effect of that election must be there when the players return to that town."

Vreeg's Fourth Rule of Setting Design
"Create motivated events and NPCs, this will invariably create motivated PCs. Things are not just happening, they happen because they matter to people (NPCs). There is no overacting here, make sure that the settings and event-chains are motivated and that the PCs feel this."


Vreeg's Fifth Rule of Setting Design
"The 'Illusion of Preparedness' is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion.   Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM, even when the GM needs to change things in their favor; it removes them from the immersed position.  The ability to keep the information flow even and consistent to the players, and to keep the divide between prepared information and newly created information invisible is a critical GM ability.
(Cole, of the RPGsite, gets credit for the term)."

 
Vreeg's Sixth Rule of Setting Design.
"That in a good Sandbox, it will create itself as it needs to be.
I have noticed, in a Sandbox, that there is a skill (and something of an art) to building a lot of information in the direction you think the players are moving towards, but still filling in histories and side-bits as well as (most importantly) enough information sketched on the outskirts of this path and nearby that the GM can logically extrapolate and the players never know when they have mved from the center of the detailed part of notes off to the more 'sketched-in' areas. This is a critical part of good GMing, and is part of the fifth Rule, about the 'illusion of preparedness'.
Especially because the good sandbox GM is very Aurelian in nature ("The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.") and between session in the same way, will adapt to the new 'direction' of the PCs and detailing more fully in that area and sketching in the sides and big-picture stuff around that new Player direction.

Quote from: estar;562633With help from Patrick Walsh I uploaded a PDF collecting all the published "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox Articles"

http://www.batintheattic.com/downloads/Make%20a%20Fantasy%20Sandbox_111005.pdf

That is an outstanding resource!

Very detailed! Personally, I would never, ever go into air circulation patterns, sea currents or migration history, though.

This thread is pure gold. Favorited.

Now, while Estar did a superb job in the first post, I think he missed an important point, at least in the way I do sandboxes. A point that Vreeg depicted beautifully:

Quote"Create motivated events and NPCs, this will invariably create motivated PCs. Things are not just happening, they happen because they matter to people (NPCs). There is no overacting here, make sure that the settings and event-chains are motivated and that the PCs feel this."

Entities´ agendas and relationships are the biggest hooks and plot-generators in my games. To the point that my single most useful tool is piece of paper with a (badly drawed) map of those.

Quote from: silva;562679Now, while Estar did a superb job in the first post, I think he missed an important point, at least in the way I do sandboxes. A point that Vreeg depicted beautifully:

Which is partially why I haven't released a book. Because there is a whole management side I want to distill into something folks can follow. A side of sandbox play that Lord Vreeg explains very nice in his post (among other things).

That getting this explained right I think essential in helping folks run a sandbox campaign given the reports of failure I read about over the years.

Wow, seriously nice information.

Quote from: Melan;562677Very detailed! Personally, I would never, ever go into air circulation patterns, sea currents or migration history, though.

I did this ages ago when I designed top down. Now I'm much more inclined to design a setting starting with the local and making my way with the campaign itself towards the big picture, so I'd make up an area with a variety of ethnicities, local color and history, and would retroactively explain stuff like climates and currents and human/demi-human migrations as the play scale "zooms out", so to speak. If needed at all, that is.

Quote from: estar;562681Which is partially why I haven't released a book. Because there is a whole management side I want to distill into something folks can follow. A side of sandbox play that Lord Vreeg explains very nice in his post (among other things).

That getting this explained right I think essential in helping folks run a sandbox campaign given the reports of failure I read about over the years.

I see where youre coming from Estar, and totally agree. Indeed, you have a nice way of putting it down on simple words. Please, keep it coming.

Benoist: Yes, I am mostly on the same page. I view sandboxes as settings which are based on information immediately relevant to the adventures I am planning to be running there.

One of the main draws from me - aside from hex-crawling as a simple but rewarding game structure - is that I can radically cut down prep time and avoid getting into setting detail I will not use. I could not find the time and inspiration to develop a really detailed top-down setting; I'd just get burned out along the way.

There is usually something like a master document which has very sketchy high-level information (like the most important gods, interest groups or locales), but the majority of documents represent ground-level stuff. Setting details, if any, emerge from the actual play through interaction, extrapolation, odd ideas and sometimes random and semi-random generation.