How to Make a Sandbox TTRPG Setting
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 พ.ย. 2024
- Making a sandbox world can be a daunting task, but breaking it down and following some simple steps can make it easy to have hundreds of locations for your players to explore.
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Welcome to the info paragraph, this is a place to feed the great algorithm, and if you've made it here you have probably scrolled too far! Icarus Games is dedicated to helping dungeons and dragons players and dungeon masters improve their experience in roleplaying games. For RPG players, there are videos on learning dungeons and dragons rules, as well as on character building, roleplaying, and optimization. For Game Masters, there are videos on organizing your dungeon master screen, improving your worldbuilding for your RPGs, and for creating homebrew dungeons and dragons content.
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Not 100% sure what caused the weird framerate issue in this one, but I think it's sorted and won't affect future videos. Hope you all enjoy the video regardless!
Looking very "cinematic"! 😂
Looks kinda cool stop motion anyway :)
Feels like one old point and click game
We just assume you’re now a claymation channel, so it’s all good.
The point of random encounters (wandering monsters) was originally to create a risk/reward situation for the PCs. It was also a resource management issue. In older D&D, combat was not assumed and generally avoided since your XP came from recovering treasure and wealth, not killing monsters (about an 80/20 split of XP between wealth vs. fighting). Engaging with a wandering monster was usually more of an expense than a payoff. Most "wandering" encounters carried no treasure. What you wanted was to find monsters' lairs, because that's where their loot usually was. Characters would attempt to evade or parley if the the encounter looked too risky, unnecessary, or unprofitable. Things like overland travel carried an inherent risk, so you planned and you took steps to avoid getting lost. Extra days wandering the wilderness because you couldn't be bothered to hire a guide or find a map meant using up rations and risking an encounter you are NOT ready for.
I am running a sandbox for the first time and I discovered your channel. Working through it now. You have such underrated content. I feel like the algorithm got it right this time.
This is easily one of the BEST sandbox TTRPG setting tutorial that I have ever come across. You've got a knack for it. Thank you so much for making this video!!
Thanks, I really appreciate that ☺️
This video came at SUCH a good time for me, as I've been working on a map for a sandbox campaign for like a month now. It made me see some of my more dubious choices in a new light, so thank you!
Love your videos! I am doing a Sandbox D&D game for my first time as a DM... its been daunting and this was some great information!
I'm glad it helped :D Sandbox games can be very daunting because it's so much!
ive currently been building my world and seeing this was perfect
Great video. Lots of helpful tips to get me dive into the map creator program deeper. Thanks again!
The frame rate was a bit weird, but loved the video!
This was exactly what I've been waiting for. Incredibly useful, thanks for the insight :D
Glad it was helpful!
Great ideas! A friend of mine loved to run Role Master, and so we'd play a session every now and then. But we never did any adventures. He'd just role on the random encounters chart, and we'd deal with (FIGHT) whatever showed up. It was fun, but never long term. One time, we faced a T Rex, and another time, he TPK'd the party with badgers. (The T Rex was killed by a critical bow shot to the eye.) RM is a deadly system. Almost every time we played, at least one character bit it. Random encounters are all very well, but imo it's better if they're grounded in something relevant.
I’m finally making my first campaign after 3 years of not knowing how I really just didn’t understand the game I thought the game was meant to be played in a sandbox way I thought that was normal
This is the best worldbuilding TH-cam channel 🙌 Your approach is perfect for my style
Glad you think so! Hope the videos help!
Natural resources being tied in is a fantastic tip, it's something so easily overlooked but does have a key place in lore/fluff
Great advice. Very practical.
Glad it was helpful!
Great suggestions. 👍
~ Adam
Great video!
Great ideas in this video
Where do you get your images from? I'm just getting into digital DMing and would love to know where to start building the world with a little picture flavor 😊
Thank you so much. I’m wondering if you would mind sharing your method for color/shape coding your LK pins?
Sure thing! I don't think it warrants a full video, so here you go:
- Black with globe icon: Regions
- Purple: Cities
- Rounded Gold: Towns/Villages
- Rounded Pink: Fixed locations that aren't settlements (so forts, camps, wizards' towers etc)
- Red Shield: Monsters
- Green Chests: Treasure. Weapons have a sword icon, other magic items use stars, all other treasure uses a chest icon.
- Brown Diamond: Natural landmarks (forests, mountains)
- Waves (no pin, just icon): Any water location.
- Rounded White with ?: Random encounters, points of interest, or vignettes.
@@IcarusGames Thanks so much! That is super helpful for a starting point! (:
I thought I would be able to start pretty easy to an Old American Western. Fast forward a few days of making just the map of Texas and the Indian Territory and I have had to research maps from 12 different countries and cross reference each location with its founding to ensure it was actually there lol
25 miles hexes... When I'm hiking, that would be at least two days and probably much more in mountain areas.
I think every DM or player interested in fantasy setting should hit the trail in real life from time to time. Of course, if you live in the Midwest or in Brazil with giant field of corns or soy stretching for hundred of miles in all directions, that won't help a lot. But elsewhere, particularly in old places (Europe, China, Japan, Maghreb, Peru, Mexico and so on...) with old towns and old villages, it gives a sense of scale.
25 miles = 40km. I just looked a wild patch of the Alps that I know well that's roughly that size. It counts on or two dozen of villages or little towns, one castle on the French side, one abbaye on the Italian side, dozens of pics, rivers, lakes, a canyon-like valley, a high-altitude medieval tunnel, a copper mine, and many chapels, isolated farms and sheepfold and so on.
Couple important things going on here.
Firstly, 24 miles/day is the "normal" travel pace given in a lot of games like D&D, and any time there are mechanics that key into those elements, that's what they are going off. I rounded up to 25 to make multiples easier to deal with.
Secondly, and way more importantly, we're not going for an exact simulation of real life here, but something that *feels* right. When you look at a lot of modern 25 mile stretches you'll find tons of stuff crammed in there, but things would have been much more sparse 600+ years ago.
We're also assuming a world without motorized transport where the main way people travel is on foot, and covering 20-25 miles over favorable terrain when you've spent your whole life doing that kind of walking is going to be very different to an office worker in the modern day attempting a 25 mile hike.
I know that 3mph is a super comfortable walking pace for me, but if I had to do it for 8 sustained hours I would be a mess, because I am not used to it, but we're assuming a world where that level of walking is normal for people.
Putting this on 1.25x speed looks freaking wild. Lol. 0.75x speed looks like a dial up connection
hey. does anyone has tips what tools you can use to draw a map online?
By having your encounters pre-written, how do you go about balancing those encounters (the fighting ones) ahead of time? Or do you simply do the style of this encounter is a lvl 6 encounter and this one is a lvl 2 encounter and if the lvl 2 players want to beat the lvl 6 encounter, they will need to circle back to it type of play?
It's not that the encounters are pre written persay, so much as the high-level themes and ideas of the encounter are thought of in advance.
So lets say the map has the marker for a level 12 demon and the party are level 3, well then instead they might encounter a cult devoted to the demon, and the demon themselves is more of a behind the curtain type figure or not directly involved.
The whole purpose is to offload the work of week-to-week inspiration and make it so if the PCs go in an unexpected direction you're not starting from a blank page.
Nice Video, weird Framerate
Right?! I thought my internet was slow 😅
Nah, just the tech gods cursing me at some point during the process and I didn't notice!
How do you manage the levels of challenge for the PCs as they progress? Do you decide on and set the levels when you create the world, so the party can have encounters that are too weak to provide a challenge, or too strong to be defeated (run away! run away!) or does the world "level up" alongside the party so that they always have more-or-less appropriate encounters to their current levels?
In the early stages its somewhat random and arbitrary, I place things down that sound cool regardless of their level. Once play begins, I might move around elements or make level tweaks, but I do leave a lot of elements where they are because I communicate to the players that there are things that exist in the world more powerful than them, and random exploration always runs the risk of encountering such a powerful foe.
@@IcarusGames That makes sense. I tend to create "threat zones" aligned to "advancement tiers" in bands that generally get more difficult as you move further from civilisation (but not all the time, there can be "safe" areas within dangerous zones, and vice versa (but that's unusual without it being widely known). Doesn't mean that the party can't encounter high-level creatures in the "safe" areas but they won't generally be hostile unless provoked. The players can get a feel for the threat level for a zone from tales, rumours or legends so that they don't walk into things without being aware of the potential danger - a bit of scouting never hurt either. I don't tend to jigger the threat levels around too much either, apart from the sort of "nemesis" opponents that the party might attract over the course of the campaign - these level up with the party, and attract their own followers, so they're always a challenge when the party bump into them.
@@FrostSpike investigation, research and scouting seem the way forward to me. Matching threat to PC ability doesn't align with the idea of a sandbox.
Let the danger be what it is, but make it make sense (often further from domesticated land is more dangerous, but maybe it’s a village terrorized by a dragon? Who knows.)
The big important thing is to telegraph the danger effectively and don’t generally force a combat encounter unless that flows naturally from play. (reaction rolls are great here.)
Brilliant
How would you do this for a multi-planet/plane game? Star Wars for example, there's thousands of planets across the galaxy, how would you handle it, just treating each planet as a pin?
Pretty much. I'd have the sector/galaxy map be my main project page, and then have each major planet or sector be its own pin.
What do you use for the map and map markers?
The map was made in Inkarnate, and the pins were added in Legendkeeper, which is what I keep all my campaign notes in. I've got videos talking about both apps here on the channel 😊
So I assume you change the challenge of any prepositioned modules or monsters based on when your PCs find them?
Yeah, I'll adjust things where it makes sense to do so.
@@IcarusGames there’s a video that’s waiting to happen... I’m new to DM’ing 5e and I have issues balancing some encounters
Are the streams on twitch deleted? Cant find them.
They are bundled into an unlisted playlist, which should be available on the main channel page.
Or you can find them here: th-cam.com/play/PL3cwve_r0qbFW-vk2IHZUMu4bq-hurOlG.html
i cant rlly do the "premade adventure" stuff, i dont got the patience to read a module for even 40 pages...
Hey Icarus! Nice video as always! Which software are you using for your map? Wonderdraft? I really like how it turned out!
This map is made using inkarnate, I'll have a video on it soon!
@@IcarusGames oh perfect! Thanks for the answer
What program are you using to make an interactive map?
The program is legenedkeeper, which you can see more of here; th-cam.com/video/dQLNil0wn2I/w-d-xo.html
Very good information. I really enjoyed the books R.A. Salvatore wrote back in the day....Ten Towns was a favorite location. I am always late to the show....just bought Rime of the Frostmaiden to enjoy and sandbox up on my own for some solo games.
I started way smaller for my sandbox hex crawl (6mile hexes, 14x22 hexes. About the size of Vermont). And focused on a few major landmarks in the area. Then fleshed out the area around the starting town to get things started. I’ll then fill out more details as I have time and the players show interest. You do not have to start at a high level map except to have a bit of an idea of the nations/people groups around that people would be broadly familiar with.
25 mile hexes are just way to big for me to start with personally. I have found it also often leaves the world feeling underpopulated. (I could just be bad at this 😅) Vermont would be a 4x4 set of hexes on that scale and it feels a bit weird for me if there are only 16 interesting things in Vermont. But do what works for you and your table!
Random encounters are wonderful, but they have to be tailored to the area. So basically a random table populated with the kinds of encounters described here. (Having established regional factions helps here a lot. And they can even be things like signs of a monster lair in the next hex over. They don’t have to be combat.)
I agree wholeheartedly. In my opinion one should generally think of around two or regions around the starting region and what their general dispisition towards each other are and then go from there to the area itself I went with 18 mile hex's cause in the system I use that is a day of travel per hex. Which also means there can be several interesting things in a day, but at the same time it gives a general overview. It's only an 8x17 hex map, but it got enough stuff in it to get the ball rolling also it includes 2 border regions which immediately can create interesting conflict scenarios. I also agree with your point on random encounters as long as one puts in the effort to create custom tables with good motivations for each option these can add to the unpredictability and therefore fun of a true sandbox. Starting big and then zooming in often creates the issue that much of the map will probably never be explored. So as you said always start with a densely populated small area and then work your way out from there. You can add stuff as your characters explore rather than front loading all the work and having every port town behaving the exact same, because it's a port town only this one has problems with a sea dragon where the last one was plagued by a kraken.
hello icarus! I was wondering if you or someone in the community could help me with a problem. How to order the NPCs of each region of my country? How do you order or categorize them? Have you already made a video about this? Well I didn't find it. Thank you very much!
Because I use legenedkeeper, I use the tags system to add the region and city name, as well as race/class of the NPC to the tags of the article, which makes finding them really easy.
@@IcarusGames this is a free app or some sort? In that case, it ss available for Android?
@@leandro7313 I use Pocket Campaigns if you're looking for one that works well on your phone. It takes a little bit to set up (and it doesn't do maps at all) but it's a great way to separate your Nations out, have each city have its own page. On that page anything you write that is also a title of another page is hyperlinked so I find that's a real good way of having nations set out, then cities and having NPCs and shops having their own pages and hyperlinking between the pages as needed. It's free and well made I use it all the time!!
@@NearlyH3adlessNick I was testing the app and the truth is that it is fantastic, thank you very much for sharing this information
@@leandro7313 Happy to help! 😁
it kinda looks like stop motion
Had to hide the video and only listen... that framerate bro.... *wince*
Yep, as mentioned in the pinned comment, I'm aware of it. Don't know what caused it but it should be fixed now for future videos.
1:47 one thing that made my life so much easier when dealing with regions is, they don’t technically exist. The main governing body of my world is a resource and land hungry government who simply wants ownership. Whatever the government’s decisions are after that they don’t really care about, they simply want to own land, resources, and promote economy. The players will start on The New Continent, a land filled with opportunities, jobs, and most importantly Land and resources. They jumped at the opportunity to grab this land and are actively fighting for it against wild orcs who have made their way there as well. This government body doesn’t wish to senselessly kill and have even made it their mission to prevent as many deaths on both sides; which is what is taking the war so long as well as why the war won’t end for another 500 years, because it taking so long will prevent the most deaths. Nobody really knows why they are so adamant about ownership, nobody knows why they are so adamant about not killing the orcs, and nobody knows how to return back to the empire (name of the largest city and where the government originated). They got here via teleportation through an old portal, ships exist but the oceans are so vast and dangerous non have been able to cross the oceans, so the only way there is via portal, and it’s one way.
Because of this governing body territories can’t really fight or bide for land, because they don’t technically own it. So territories are assigned through what is most efficient and effective for the empire. So, a mining city is given territory over the mountains where the mines are, no more is needed, farming cities are given enough land to support themselves and the surrounding cities, no more is needed, etc etc. with this I don’t have to complicate over the complexity of territorial war unless it is on the scale of country vs country, which will happen when sufficient boats are created.
you skipped a step.
make a map first.
Having a map is preferable, but not actually essential. You could do this sort of thing with nodes and just knowing the relative distance between them.