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 Robin's Microscope.

Solo RPGS

For those unfamiliar, the idea of a solo RPG is to use existing RPG rules along with an oracle system to act in the place of the GM. It's an interesting blend of the GM and player experiences because you are prepping scenarios for yourself, but the resolution is between you and the oracle dice. An excellent example is SoloDark by Kelsey Dionne (which is available for free). The oracle in SoloDark can be summarized as this:

Ask a yes or no question, and roll 1d20. 1-10 is a no, 11-20 is a yes. 1 is an extreme no, 20 is an extreme yes. Any odd numbers are a "yes, but" or "no, but".

 Microscope

Microscope is a non-traditional RPG where rather than playing out stories as adventures as individuals, you're collaboratively creating the history of a world. I have used the system to build out a rich history for my current campaign setting. Within Microscope there's a concept of scenes where you focus in on a single moment of history, and play out what happens. Robins refines the idea of scenes in this blog post (Scenes 2.0).

 Vignettes

During prep, the idea of a vignette is to pick a particular moment of uncertainty, and play it out like a Microscope scene but with a solo RPG oracle to add some mechanical robustness to it. The intent of this method is not to turn your sandbox prep into a series of solo RPG sessions, rather its to add some extra weight an detail to important moments for the world. The key is to keep the scope limited. You can go as in depth as you want, but limiting the scene to be about a specific question ensures that there is a trajectory to the scene to drive the action.

1. Choose a specific NPC, in a specific moment of uncertainty, and establish a specific yes or no question about the character in the scene. "Will Anun Dhee infiltrate Hougar Garrison?"

2. Using an oracle, play out the scene with the chosen NPC as your character.

3. Once the question has been answered, the scene ends. 

 

It's that simple. If you end up using Vignettes in your sandbox prep or have any feedback on the method, I'd love to hear about it!