I run a lot of sandbox style campaigns over linear campaigns. Not only because I genuinely enjoy running them, but I’m also a bit better at running a sandbox.

A big problem with sandboxes that a GM needs to solve is getting your players invested. With a linear campaign, you have the advantage of the adventures themselves providing sufficient hooks and a goal for your players to build their characters around, and good players will often incorporate themselves into the world through their backstories. With a player-driven sandbox campaign, however, they are the ones deciding their goals, which can be quite difficult for a lot of players to get invested in without a sufficient process.

There are a few different things I want my players to cover during a Session 0 that both help get those first few sessions going less awkwardly, and to help them make decisions during a game to help push the story forward. But before we get into that, let’s define what I see as a sandbox, and what I see as a linear campaign.

Defining a Sandbox Campaign

A sandbox campaign, in my eyes, is one that is inherently proactive. The players pick their own goals for their characters, and the characters spend their time in the campaign pursuing those goals. They have a lot of freedom in terms of how they pursue their goals, and the GM’s role here is to provide interesting and fun challenges between the players, and their stated goals.

This doesn’t mean you need a big map. A sandbox can stretch across an entire planet, region, or city. What matters is that the players are the driving force behind what their characters goals are.

Defining A Linear Campaign

Contrast this with a more linear campaign, which is inherently reactive. This is one where there is some sort of stated goal in the campaign presence: Slay a vampire, stop a cult, find a derelict station, capture a notorious space pirate, etc. The players design their characters who are motivated to complete that goal, and the campaign revolves around pursuing that goal.

Little Bit o’ Both

A campaign doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% sandbox or 100% linear, there are shades of grey here. You can have a linear campaign where the goal is to capture a notorious space pirate, but what happens between Session 1 and the final encounter can be a goal driven sandbox. The players could have that predetermined goal, but make some sub goals they want to accomplish while they try to find the bandit, and those aspects would fall under a sandbox.

Alternatively, you can take the goals your players make for their characters, and find connections between them to come up with a big, overarching goal for them to pursue. This has the sandbox feature of the players proactively chasing their own goals, then reactively pursuing the final, Big Bad Evil Guy goal.

Setting Up a Sandbox For Success

Now that we have a definition of what I think of as a sandbox versus a linear campaign, let’s dive into the nitty gritty of how I set up my players for success to be able to play in a game that is primarily a sandbox. All of this should be covered in a Session 0, with the presumption that the players are creating their characters together.

Building Connections

When I start a sandbox campaign, I typically present some sort of lore document that gives an overview of the setting. This will typically include a few things like well-known factions, current problems, major locations, and major NPCs. But these are just broad stroke things, and can be difficult for players to engage with in a practical sense. Having your players create connections between their character and the world is crucial, so there are a few different ways I help them make these connections.

Character Connections

I like to require that they make a connection with at least one other character, though it’s obviously fine for them to have connections to multiple characters. I recommend checking the Daggerheart classes for examples of connections they could use. They are very system and setting neutral, so they can work whether your game is fantasy, sci-fi, modern, cyberpunk, etc.

A few simple example questions you could pose to the players if they struggle with building connections:

• Which of the other characters do you share a secret with?
• Which of the other characters do you go to in your time of need?
• Which of the other characters has saved your life?

NPC Connections

Another connection that’s important is to have at least one significant NPC connection in your game. The backgrounds in Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition each have a 1d10 roll table for players to roll on to establish an NPC connection, though they can make their own of course.

To give an idea of what these look like, here’s three examples from the Convict background:

• Your old cellmate, who insisted they were innocent.
• The cruel guard who made your time incarcerated even more miserable.
• The leader of the prison gang you joined or avoided joining at all costs.

This gives you free NPCs that you can incorporate into the world that your players will have an immediate connection and investment with, and helps them get a bit more involved in the worldbuilding process alongside you.

You can also have them together choose or create a patron that they are all associated with. This can be someone who hands out jobs, an information broker, or simply someone who lets them stay at their hotel for free due to some favor. Whatever it is, it immediately creates an singular connection point that each player has, a free NPC for you, and grants you an easy way to move the story forward when the players are stuck.

Location Connections

The locations listed in the setting document aren’t the only locations abound. There are thousands upon thousands of unique locations that exist in any particular setting. An easy way to get your players connected is to have them create a location tied to their character:

• The town they grew up in and where their family still lives.
• Rumored cache of a lost technology on a distant moon.
• A space station they made frequent deliveries to during their time as a cargo hauler.

Let them come up with the basics and tie it either to their character’s backstory or their goals, and they now have a method to generate their own location-based plot hooks.

Event Connections

A final connection I find is important is for the player to think of an event their character was involved in that’s a bit larger in scope than just their character and immediate family.

• They had fought in a major war on their home planet.
• Their town was taken over by a warlord bent on gaining control of their planet.
• A natural disaster made their home planet inhospitable.

The key is to almost create their own important event that would be listed in the world’s timeline that they had directly been impacted by.

Goals

I talked a bit about goals above, but to elaborate: you want each character to have at least one major goal that they are pursuing (though ideally three to four), and to set up some sub-goals that lead up to that goal. This is covered exceptionally in Proactive Roleplaying by Jonah and Tristan Fishel and is highly recommended reading.

The main takeaway is that the goal should be something that is actionable and has a fail state. The player should define both what success in their goal could look like, and what would it look like if they failed their goal. This adds some tension and pressure to the player to chase their goal, and gives you clear objectives to track the progress of.

Making a Goal

Each goal, as mentioned above, should have some sort of fail state, but we also need to know the reason that the character is pursuing that goal, and what complication has arisen that has so far presented them from achieving that goal.

Example Goals

Here are some example goals that a character might undertake:

• The character’s home town was taken over by a ruthless warlord who they wish to eradicate.
• The character was once a researcher on an incredibly dangerous piece of military technology that they were a whistle-blower on, but has been cast out of the sector and deemed a traitor. They now vow to prevent this technology from being used.
• A close friend of the character had a falling out with them and has disappeared. The character has now heard rumors that they’ve joined a space pirate crew and are terrorizing shipping lanes, and they wish to reconnect with their old friend and bring them back from their new life of crime.

REason

Let’s take an example of someone who’s town was taken over by a ruthless warlord, and their goal is to eradicate that warlord. Some possible reasons:

• Revenge, pure and simple.
• The character does not care for change of leadership, but the former leader is paying them good money to get a resistance together and return the town to the former leadership.

Complications

Now we need to find out why the goal isn’t easy to accomplish or, if the goal itself is theoretically simple, why it hasn’t been accomplished yet. Continuing with the goal of taking back a home town from a warlord, the following could be possible complications:

• Another faction that the character does not want involved is also moving in to take out the warlord.
• The character has a good relationship with an NPC that is part of the warlord’s administration, and it would destroy their relationship if they succeed.
• The character has been banished from the town and would be immediately be recognized upon returning.

Sub Goals

This part can be a bit tricky, and you may need to give more assistance to your player on this aspect than with any of the connections or their main goals. A big goal is nice to have, but without steps to achieving it, it’ll be hard to navigate the numerous possibilities of a tabletop setting to start moving toward that goal.

Returning to the above example of removing a warlord that has taken over the character’s home town, we can think of a few different possible sub goals:

• Find out incriminating information against the warlord.
• Find a common enemy to help you take them down.
• Recruit allies to form a resistance to take on the warlord’s forces head on.
• Sabotage the town’s security to make infiltrating it unnoticed easier.

I recommend each player to get a few of these together prior to the first session, but likely committing to one being the main sub goal they’ll pursue. Sometimes, they’ll fail at that sub goal, and can try another. More often, they’ll succeed, but more sub goals will now be possible to get them closer to achieving their main goal.

Wrapping Up

If each character has three to four goals, it’ll naturally end up that multiple of these will align, and the players should feel invested in not only pursuing their own goals, but also the goals of their party members. This should make them feel more equipped to make decisions that work towards these goals, find ways to make plot hooks you present help achieve their aims, and create a fun, collaborative game that could last years at your table.

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