Sandbox World Generator
A downloadable tool for Windows
The worst four words a DM ever hears: "What's over that hill?" Players are notorious for wandering off the map into uncharted lands. How does one create not just encounters, but whole kingdoms, on the spur of the moment, while making sure these lands are reasonably consistent with the rest of the world? Now, with the push of a button, you can have an answer.
The generated world is only a static sketch, but you can edit the world (either in Sandbox itself or with any text editor), adding or removing monsters or whole kingdoms. Insert your own adventures, or scroll through the random ones, making up histories and personalities as needed.
Sandbox creates continents based on the guidelines laid out in the World of Prime game supplements. It uses Lords of Prime to create kingdoms. It also uses Explorers of Prime to create encounters, and Merchants of Prime and Generals of Prime to create armies, but these are easily customized via the configuration files.
The map starts at the Continental scale, displaying an area 10,000 miles square. Every zoom level is a factor of ten; Domains are 1,000 miles square, and Regions are 100 miles square. The smallest element is a Realm square, 10 miles on a side, suitable for an overland adventure map.
A quick way to start a sandbox world: press "New", zoom down to a likely looking kingdom, roll up some characters, and keep playing until the party can challenge the Domain overlords for absolute rule of the continent.
A number of guides and adventures derived from the default continent of Scorpus (click "Load" to view) are also available on DriveThruRPG. These supplements are based on D&D 3.5 but are generally compatible with 3.0 or Pathfinder.
Download
Install instructions
Just unpack it from the zip file and double-click the icon to run it. Click "New" to make a new world. More instructions are available from "Help."
Note: please don't click "Apply" until after you've generated a world to apply your changes to. :)
Comments
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cooool!
This is awesome! I'll learn better how to use it and I'll make really good use of this software. Thank you very much!
This is so cool. Thank you for making it customizable. I switched all the graphics around for a post-apoc hex-crawl and it looks awesome. Thank you!
Sounds cool! Did you also redo all the encounters? Although, unfortunately, there's not much you can do for the kingdoms.
Glad to know someone found it fun. I'm still running the D&D campaign I started in it, 2 years ago.
I left the encounters how they are. I'm using them to generate general threats in the area, not tied to specific coordinates (for the most part: I do use the ruins and boss monsters, just re-interpret for the setting). I changed the encounter and luxury sprites into various run down buildings (I used SNES sprites). I'm treating those icons as rumors, "Your character heard about 'x' at that place" - so they're all visible to the players at the start. I'll be using additional generators to then fill out the maps with "secrets" to find.
I'm using all the kingdoms to represent settlements and stuff. It's super helpful. By using your program I've easily avoided like 40 hours of game prep, at least. And it's also a lot of fun to use! If you're curious, this is the map your program generated for me https://imgur.com/a/ITuE7Cb. I hope you don't mind that I'm using it this way. I rarely comment on stuff, but Sandbox World Generator is by far one of the most useful pieces of software for campaign prep that I've encountered. I'm running a "west marches" styled game for people online, and the map this outputs is fantastic!
I have to say, the truck icon is my favorite. :D
I'm thrilled you're finding it useful. I do apologize for the rivers not actually connecting; I never did quite find that bug. You can actually edit the rivers if you want, but I've never found it worth the time.
My original goal was to have the map zoom in to the 5'x5' tactical level, but then I remembered I have a day job. :D
West Marches was always my goal, but I've been running a fairly traditional campaign. My players decided to move a domain square over, and now I'm struggling to flesh out the dragon that lives there (I write everything up and put on-line as adventure supplements). Having all the kingdoms laid out gives me a framework to invent the politics, which admittedly the players don't care so much about. Yet. :D
Constantly clicking that "close program" button because the program does not respond gets repetitive real quick. I'd suggest maybe fixing it just a tiny little bit so i can at least get past running the .exe.
Not sure what you mean? I don't have any issue like that. There shouldn't ever be a "close program" pop up; there's nothing for the program to respond to.
Can you describe what you're doing or what your set-up is?
Hi Yahzi! This tool is very interesting. It is really creative and nice. Maybe it will be useful for people's projects!
I've been running a D&D game off of it for the last two years. So you can see it in action at my blog.
Iam using it for my project :)