Planning a Narrative Sandbox Campaign

One of the things I love most about the Dragon of Icespire Peak D&D Campaign is that there's no pre-baked plot for you to follow. When I first read it, I found that frustrating. After all, if there was no central story, what was the point? It was only after running it that I realized: Dragon of Icespire Peak is a miniature sandbox, ready for you to add your own narrative layer. Adding that narrative layer was the focus of my blog series on running Dragon of Icespire Peak.

A sandbox campaign is one in which the players have the freedom to explore the setting, locations, and NPCs based on what's interesting to them, rather than following a pre-planned plot. Earthmote has a lot of great videos on sandboxes that are worth checking out. I want to explore ways to plan a narrative sandbox campaign - that is, a sandbox that is built for generating stories, what I call a narrative sandbox campaign. We can do this with Dragon of Icespire Peak, another published campaign, or in a your own homebrew game. 

First up, we're going to need a setting. In Dragon of Icespire Peak, this happens to be the Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms. I think a region like this is a nice size - a few towns, maybe a nearby city, plenty of adventure locations, but it feels manageable. It helps to have a few ideas about the history and major players in the region, as this will help to shape your factions and come up with a spine.

A lot of stories in books and movies are built atop what is sometimes called an axis or a spine. A spine is an event, a conflict, or a problem that significantly affects the entire setting and all of the characters in it. In Star Wars, the spine is the rebellion happening against the Empire. In Harry Potter, the spine is the return of Voldemort. In The Lord of the Rings, the spine is arguably the end of the Third Age. A spine isn't the plot, but the plot can develop as a result of the spine. Rather, a spine is some feature of the setting that influences factions, NPCs, locations, and, ultimately, the PCs. 

Matt Colville calls this the central tension and he did a video about it in his Running the Game series, which is what first got me thinking about this. Matt's primary angle was looking through the lens of politics and war, but I think this idea of a spine or central tension can be any kind of ongoing event or problem that impacts the entire setting and the people in it. 

In Dragon of Icespire Peak, the spine is a rampaging dragon that has arrived in the area, disrupting trade routes, displacing other monsters, and threatening the town of Phandalin. In your campaign the spine could be an ongoing war, a plague of undead, a magical mishap affecting the region, or an incursion of time-traveling robots. If I get creative, maybe I'll put together a d100 list of campaign spines.

We don't need to go overboard with designing or planning specifics about the spine at this stage. Just pick an idea that appeals to you and jot it down. Like plague of zombies - nobody knows where they come from. Or an influential cult is growing rapidly with promises of power to anyone who swears fealty to their new god. Write down a few bullet points about how the spine could affect the setting. Then set it aside. You can and should develop the spine further as you plan and play.

Next up you will want a hub. I find it's helpful to establish a central location where the PCs can gather information, trade, meet other NPCs, and generally find trouble. The town of Phandalin meets the requirement in Dragon of Icespire Peak, but this could be any location that's central to your setting. It doesn't have to be a town. It could be a caravan, a ship, or a small fortress. I would suggest you keep the size manageable: something big enough to house 4-8 important NPCs and/or locations is fine. If you try to plan a whole city, it will expand to become it's own setting. Instead, if you want to set your narrative sandbox campaign is set in a city, focus in on a single district for your hub. 

In creating your hub, we will need to populate it with some NPCs. Some of these will be functional in nature - a shopkeeper, an informant or town crier, a healer, etc. Some NPCs will be sources of conflict and plot hooks. Those roles can overlap, as well. The healer may be plotting to poison the mayor for some past transgression. The shopkeeper may be smuggling treasure out of the region. 

There's a ton of great advice out there on developing good, table-ready NPCs. For my games, I try to have a few details for each major NPCs:

• What is their role in the hub?
• What do they want?
• How might they feel about the PCs in specific or adventurers in general?
• What are one or two simple traits that I can use to role-play them?

That's enough to start out with. I find that the NPCs that the players decide are important, like other elements of the sandbox, will develop over time.

Now it's time to decide which factions your campaign will begin with - I say begin with because they can change over time. Factions are a great way of introducing organic narrative into your campaign as they pursue agendas that may align with or compete with the PCs interests. I really like this video for advice on using factions.

Are any NPCs in your town aligned with your factions? What are the factions trying to achieve in the region? How do the factions operate within the hub itself? Having one or more opposed factions within the hub will create immediately conflict as the PCs begin to meet the NPCs and choose to side with one faction or the other.

If you haven't already, now's a great time to think back to the spine of your game and consider how it affects the settlement, the NPCs, and the factions you've developed. Is it a threat to your hub? To specific NPCs? Do others see an opportunity to profit? You can probably already seen mini-stories developing. As the players become invested, the factions' and NPCs' stories will become the PCs' stories.

The other thing you will want to do with your hub is to consider how your spine affects the hub and the people in it. Are they aware of the spine? Can they profit off of it? Are they afraid of it? This can affect how your NPCs behave and how they interact with the PCs as the game progresses.

Next, you want a few adventures to start. I like pre-written modules for this - shorter is better in my opinion as it gives the PCs an opportunity to test the waters in a starter dungeon or whatever. These don't need to tie together to begin with, but you will want to customize some of the details to align to your setting, spine, factions, and/or NPCs. By doing so, you'll start to create the opportunities for emergent storytelling to happen at the table. 

You may also want to consider if there are any possible adventuring locations within the hub itself. Clearing out a haunted cemetery or a local mansion overrun with bandits makes for a classic adventure. 

Finally, you should write down a few narrative hooks. You should have one hook for each adventure location and you should associate them with your hub NPCs. A Job Board is a classic way to present these adventure hooks to the players, but I like to connect them to the NPCs in the town. For example, they mayor wants to hire the PCs to clear undead out of the local graveyard. Or the merchant's latest shipment was waylaid by goblins and he wants to hire you to recover it. 

I like to put together a 1-page campaign guide (example) to share before for your first session or even your session 0. This is a great place to let the players know about the setting, the spine, and the factions. As they create their characters, you have given them a way to insert themselves into the game world. And the information they give you - character backstories, goals, and factions they are aligned or opposed to - will empower you to further develop and refine your sandbox in a way that will feel meaningful and narratively significant to the players. Swap out irrelevant factions for once the PCs have identified as significant.

To kick off your game, start in a simple, brief scenario - guarding a caravan is a classic. Work with the players to find out why their characters are there - if they don't have a good reason, give them one. Play the first session and, at the end, give them a destination: the hub you've created.

This is plenty to get started. As the PCs visit the hub and complete the first few adventures, pay special attention to what engages them, what they seek out, what they ignore. Consider what the NPCs in the hub want, what factions in the area might think about the PCs appearance on the scene, who might approach them. 

As you get a few sessions in, look for opportunities to deepen and reinforce the spine. You can make the spine more relevant and more important by raising the stakes. If it's an undead infestation, maybe the undead start attacking the hub. If it's a supernatural weather event, maybe an important hub NPC gets sucked through a portal. In Dragon of Icespire Peak, I had the white dragon, Cryovain, attack the town of Phandalin and kidnap an NPC. 

You should also be ready to alter or even discard your original spine in favor of a new one. With the information gained in session zero and from your first few sessions of play, you should be refining the spine to see how relevant factions can be involved or look for opportunities to connect the spine to PCs' goals or backstories. And if something more important emerges as a goal the characters wish to pursue, let your planned spine fade into the background as more of a setting detail than a narrative hook. Instead, lean into what the PCs want to pursue and let that become its own spine. 

For example, you might have started with there being a problem with undead in the region as your spine. The PCs, however, get into a conflict with an evil wizard. Their conflict grows to the point where it becomes the central focus of the campaign. You can lean into this, focusing on the evil wizard's plot and downplaying the undead to be more of a complication you can introduce in other scenes. 

The powerful thing about this approach is the players start to care about the story because the story is what the players make important. It's a sandbox, but one built on story. Hence, a narrative sandbox!