Building a Sandbox Campaign, Part 8: Adventure Sites

Following Bat in the Attic's example, once a regional map is drafted the following steps are to be implemented: 

1. Decide to place Population Locales note their race this includes social monsters
2. Decide to place Lairs (locales that revolves around a home of monsters)
3. Decide to place Ruins (locales that revolves around a site)
4. Decide to place miscellaneous locales. (anything that doesn't fit a above.

The Fells is a campaign set in the magical wilderness beyond civilisation, amidst the various ruins of the vanished Land of the Giants. These ruins represent adventure locations where ancient artefacts, hidden treasures or hideous monsters might be located.

This is a Sandbox campaign: where the PCs venture to is up to them. But some guidance should be provided- not to rail-road the PCs, but to give them some choices about where they might wish to head. Nearby ruins might be well known to the inhabitants of Mutshud (our AdventureTown TM.), whereas the location of more distant ruins might be more vague, with clues, hints and maps obtained during preceding encounters.

Of course, in addition to these ruins are the locations of various lairs. These could be the hideouts of local bandits, the den of unearthly monsters or even whole villages of Keiwosithe. Unlike ruins, there's no obvious geographical features to mark these out, and PCs will either stumble upon them or seek them out based on rumour. Rumours could cover anything from information obtained from random encounters (Bandit: "Look, all I know is that things were fine until those other crooks showed up, about 12 miles south of here"), local heresay ("There been strange creatures spotted in the marshes... weird, unearthly creatures...") or even just the name of geographical features ("The forest, south of here? Oh, you mean the haunted woods...").

Each of these lairs and ruins I've populated (to larger or greater extents), but shan't go into detail here for fear of future players unravelling their secrets. But each lair or ruin also is accompanied by site-specific random encounter tables in their immediate environs, which may give PCs clues as to how to find the lair/ruin, and what they might expect to encounter there when they do....