Shrink your sandbox
Freedom without high overheads.
This article contains affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you make purchases using these links, at no cost to you.A sandbox to me is any game focused on player directed interaction with an open scenario, rather than following a plot written by the GM. It’s my favourite style of game, whether I’m a player or a GM.
A misconception though, is that sandboxes need to be big. Even a one-shot can be a ‘sandbox’ (more on that another time).
Here’s a secret. Small sandboxes might be the most fun way to play RPGs.
Examples
Think I’m crazy?
How about Doskvol from that ‘little’ game called Blades in the Dark (Blades)?
It’s a sandbox, a city with about a dozen districts and factions for the GM to throw in as needed. This claustrophobic setup is part of what makes Blades so fun.
What about wilderness? Mausritter. One of the best NSR games out there.
This map comes from cmartins. Mausritter maps come in a 19-hex format. It’s small, but there are choices. ~And it’s so cute.~
Heck, a single dungeon can be a sandbox, like one of these pointcrawl dungeons:
No Empty Spaces
Small sandboxes cut ‘null’ content. No district in Doskvol has nothing interesting going on. Every hex in Mausritter has something cool in it.
There are still factions, opportunities, curious NPCs, and player freedom. In Doskvol, if you hear a nobel bragging about a recent inheritance you can decide to go rob their mansion. You can find this kind of opportunity anywhere, they are all around you.
Space and Scale
Having a massive 60x90, 30km per hex map ~guilty as charged, my main campaign is like this~ doesn’t always mean more options, it might just space them out.
Just because you have a big map doesn’t mean it’s full of stuff because GMs have limited time and it isn’t going to be fully prepared in advance ~which is totally fine when you fancy playing in this style~
But with a small space, GMs can make a situation that ties the whole sandbox together that can be prepared in a reasonable amount of time. The reduced scope of the sandbox also means that the situation itself can be less complex - a situation that a town is facing is easier to detail in full than one faced by a nation.
Small sandboxes mean less prep, and you can complete a game in a shorter play cycle!
On smaller scales, player/character actions are ‘felt’ more. Saving a citizen is big news in a town. On a country scale, as soon as the characters move away, having saved a citizen becomes empty history. If you scale down, the sandbox feels more grounded and intimate.
Try it
GMs, next time you are prepping a sandbox, think less about bredth, and more about density. Trust me, it’s super fun, and makes your life easier too.
Players, don’t use size as a metric of potential fun. If a GM shows you a small sandbox, get excited, it could be packed with juicy features.
~Pssst. Massive games are fun too, but I promise these are worth a go!~
If you are looking for a nice notebook to make a sandbox in, check out my hexbooks, notebooks designed for GMs running hexcrawls and mapping dungeons.
Recommendations
Podcast: I’ve mentioned Between Two Cairns before, but I have to shout out their recent discussion of Willow. They had a lot of praise for this module (check it out here), and it’s a strong contender for a future purchase!
Blog: Over on Play Material, I looked at an older article where Jack talks about some of the lessons the Ironsworn/Starforged books can teach us about core rulebook structure. I join him in the admission that I almost never read large core rulebooks cover to cover. ~If you haven’t already guessed, I rather like a compact RPG~
Book: Derelict, a Death in Space module by Christian Eichhorn, has made it into my spaceship oil stained hands (affiliate link). I’ve enjoyed my first read through, it’s full of freaky scenarios perfect for sci-fi horror. I’m hoping to use it in my current campaign.
This raises an interesting question derived from the two ways in which we use the word ‘scale’ in RPGs - as a measure of geography and of the scope of play and the relationship between them. It is not an original point to observe that, if one were to take a quasi-medieval fantasy world (my own particular jam and/or preference and/or prejudice) one could generate hundreds of hours of play from one small corner of one minor English rural county. Given the density and spacing of arable villages and market towns there would be a ‘point of interest’ every few hundred metres, half a dozen stories within a slow morning’s walk. Just look at an OS map of modern rural England and notice how much ‘stuff’ is in any given square mile - and this in an era when the rural population is tiny compared to pre-modern times. The stories found there should probably be ‘small scale’ (although if one wants to have a hidden temple to the evil gods under every marketplace, have at it, it’s just not my thing…). But this need not equate to ‘trivial’. The hardships and joys, loves and hates, dilemmas and conflicts of peasants and farmers can be as vivid and compelling to play out in an RPG as a continent-spanning, world-shattering campaign. A sandbox can therefore absolutely be ‘small-scale’ in both senses of the word and such is my personal preference. Conversely, as a purely practical matter, if you’re going to run a game that centres on the dynastic war for the the throne, one will drive oneself mad trying to create landscapes of such intimate detail that will, in any event, probably never come into focus as the party moves between court, castle and battlefield.
Just curious. If you were to put some numbers to this thought what would you use Hex wise? Is a map of 6 mi hexes where you only map about a days journey in all directions a good small hex crawl? More? Or less?
Also, thank you for your continual posts. Helps me a lot personally with navigating the sandbox style of play I continue to fall in love with.