Vignettes - A Quick Tool to Bring Your Sandbox World to Life
One of the best pieces of advice I've heard for running a sandbox campaign is making sure there are things going on that aren't directly tied to your player's actions ( The Sandbox vs the Railroad by Matt Colville). NPCs should have goals, and take action to achieve them regardless of whether the characters are involved. When doing session prep for a sandbox campaign, you'll often have to make determinations about what is happening out it the world. Generally you can just apply some common sense logic to the situation and make a decision about what happens, but sometimes introducing an element of randomness can add some surprise and interest to prep. Random tables are an excellent tool for adding that spice of randomness, but sometimes there are particularly consequential moments that deserve some extra attention. Those moments are what Vignettes are for. Vignettes take a small dose of the magic of solo RPGs and mix it with the phenomenal worldbuilding tool of Ben Rob...