Easy sandbox evolution

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A sandbox that only changes when the player characters turn up is two things:

Immersion breaking and boring.

Let’s fix that with a simple approach to keeping things moving in your world.

But first a quick reminder…

Our latest release, The 2nd Keytower of Grift, is a PWYW Mork Borg module with Cairn conversion kit is available now. Words by Murkdice, awesome art by Odinson.

A great way to structure a scenario is to have a timeline of events that occur if the PCs do nothing or fail to intervene. Take this example from Mothership’s A Pound of Flesh:

In my experience, these timelines work well for ‘contained’ scenarios. For open and big regions, they tend to fall apart or get into an unpleasant level of complexity. It’s hard to write a good timeline for a whole province right?

So how do you achieve a wider scale simulation of a living world, where big stuff is happening regardless of the PCs?

You use a table of course!

An event table is a table or set of tables that generates events that occur in a sandbox.

Joel Hines has a pretty detailed system in his post, utilising tables like this with additional tables too:

For me though, I want something a bit leaner.

Make a d6 table of interesting events that could happen in the world in that time frame. I encourage you to get detailed here (mine are short because I value your time).

1: A fire burns down the Great Library of Kelvaria. It becomes clear that the fire wasn’t an accident.

2: Edria, the son of Queen Thelqar is kidnapped. A ransom has been delivered by the Daughters of Alder, who demand a tithe for the Queen’s mockery.

3: The Plydedric Chapter calls for recruits. The reclusive order of magi initiates one of its rare calls for new members.

4: A sandstorm in Brekderth. It will last 2d6 days, any travel in the region is with near zero visibility.

5: Rumours of a leviathan sighting. Ports whisper that an inky shape larger than an island is moving below the seas.

6: The Court of Silver meets. They plan to enchant Thelqar to abandon her son.

Decide a timescale. Weeks, months, seasons.

For each time interval, roll an event. If and how news of it reaches your players is up to you. When you have used an entry, replace it with a new one.

If players take action that means an event is no longer possible, replace that entry with a new one.

If one event occuring prevents another from happening, e.g. two factions are trying to locate the same artifact and one succeeds, cross out both and write new ones in.

I imagine you’re getting it at this point. This table is dynamic. It gets changed by the GM as stuff happens in the world.

It’s flexible so that when the PCs go in a completely different direction or they take action that changes something, it’s no different to refreshing an encounter table.

You should 100% go share this with every ttrpg nerd you know, for your benefit and theirs. Not mine. Nope.

For sandbox prep, I write all my nonsense down in Muji notebooks (absolutely, 100% THE BEST notebooks) with a Lamy pen. Highly recommended.