How to Make a Sandbox TTRPG Setting 

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!

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!

Great video. Lots of helpful tips to get me dive into the map creator program deeper. Thanks again!

This was exactly what I've been waiting for. Incredibly useful, thanks for the insight :D

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.

ive currently been building my world and seeing this was perfect

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!

Great video!

Amazing content! I want to run a sandbox Savage Worlds campaign, with just a single quest that can be delayed A LOT (it's not a "save the world" quest, but a "find and save your faction's partners" one, and some of them are able to save themselves while others will reveal their locations under certain conditions, I'll try not to give them such urgency). It's sci-fi AND fantasy, so I must populate not only one world but tons of them (lots of planets and even planes of existence), but this video really helped me. Just one thing I want to add: Unless your world is extremely dangerous or you're running a more roleplaying campaign, high level treads should be rarer than low level ones. This is important in most sandbox games because that incentive you (the player) to explore more as you level up (to go find those more difficult challenges and have better loot) and also gives you reason to fight in lower levels (because if those rats can kill you at lvl 1, now imagine a dragon). Again, this is for your average D&D sandbox campaign, if you are doing a dark fantasy or a political campaign (or maybe a dark fantasy AND a political one -Vampire the Mascarade cough cough-), just don't follow this advice.

This is the best worldbuilding RU-vid channel 🙌 Your approach is perfect for my style

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.

Great ideas in this video

The frame rate was a bit weird, but loved the video!

Great suggestions. 👍 ~ Adam

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.

Hey Icarus! Nice video as always! Which software are you using for your map? Wonderdraft? I really like how it turned out!

Brilliant

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

Thank you so much. I’m wondering if you would mind sharing your method for color/shape coding your LK pins?

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 😊

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

hey. does anyone has tips what tools you can use to draw a map online?

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?

What do you use for the map and map markers?

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?

So I assume you change the challenge of any prepositioned modules or monsters based on when your PCs find them?

What program are you using to make an interactive map?

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.

Natural resources being tied in is a fantastic tip, it's something so easily overlooked but does have a key place in lore/fluff

i cant rlly do the "premade adventure" stuff, i dont got the patience to read a module for even 40 pages...

Are the streams on twitch deleted? Cant find them.

Putting this on 1.25x speed looks freaking wild. Lol. 0.75x speed looks like a dial up connection

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!

Nice Video, weird Framerate

it kinda looks like stop motion

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.)

Had to hide the video and only listen... that framerate bro.... *wince*

you skipped a step. make a map first.