I backed the zine 'Home - A light in the Darkness' which is billed as a sandbox toolkit for TTRPGs. Given the mileage I've gotten out of the d30 Sandbox Companion I thought this was worth a look.
This is a lot packed into a 36 page zine, a little sparse for someone coming new to the concept but a great, taut workflow for those who know the basics already.
What do you get in it?
3 pages of Overview
1 page on heroes and the hex map
2 pages of features - road, river, mountain and forests
1 page on travel and time
1 page on the adversary
1 page on factions and clocks
1 page on resources
1 page on seeding the map
3 page of 'the Steading' - a homebase
2 pages on shops and services
2 pages on advancement, downtime and ventures
2 pages of NPCs
3 pages on Sandbox play
1 page of items
4 pages of blank templates
7 pages of an example sandbox
So running through this I would say you have four chunks:
1. Modular sandbox rules
2. Hex-seeding content
3. Blank template worksheets
4. An example sandbox
Modular mechanics - all the elements are intended to be plug-and-play for your game - using whichever ones you prefer. The key concept of Home is that the PC's are local heroes - their mentors are at the Steading, their roots, NPC connections and the like are all tied there. Home uses a seven hex 'hex-flower' map to keep things compact - but with 24 mile major hexes and 6 mile sub hexes that is still plenty of adventuring. My experience, you can get a lot of adventure per hex even with 1-mile hexes.
We get some travel actions, reminiscent of Powered By The Apocalypse moves crossed with old school dungeon turns. The Adversary is set up to be the lurking foe with an agenda, then factions are built up around alliance or opposition to the adversary. We get faction clocks for each that advance with each downtime unless blocking measures have been taken. Downtime length varies - longer for the smaller steadings - starting with a year for a hamlet, decreasing to a week for cities.
Resources, gained through clearing locations, completing quests or bringing factions on side, can deployed to level-up characters, world build or improve the Steading. Resources of the three types (Dungeon, Natural and People) are rolled up according to how large or important a site is and then those can be worldbuilding prompts for that site. We get a pair of alternative inventory rules in 'item slots' - simplified and dead simple. Both nice tools in the toolkit to support an exploration style game.
The guide for Sandbox play condenses down the rules for West-Marches style games in the pithiest way I have read so far - noting the unspoke rules of telling the GM what you are going to do next session and the importance of well curated rumour tables. Lots of old-school goodness here like 'rolls should matter, only roll when it does'. 'retreat is always an option' and 'prep situations, not plots'. We get a page on how to handle information which is great guidance on the difference between obvious, veiled and secret.
Intermixed with these mechanics and methods we get content to fill the map. Across your hex-flower you run the old road, the long river, drop in the great mountains and dark forests using some placement rules. We get our Steading and a checklist to fill in NPCs and details about the place, tying to the PC's in the party - mentors for the various classes - and we get some unusual geography, shops, services and side-hustles. We get a solid set of random tables to generate NPCs, handy given they and factions play a large role in this style of game.
I love a good workflow like this - with a quickly worked up spine such as you get from this process you can easily greeble it with extra detail or weird it up if you need to. Both of these are much easier starting from something like this gets you to.
The blank templates are cool - the hex-map is a streamlined workbook page very handy, the sandbox threats and the steading sheet are nice-to-have, but the NPC relationships map is cool as a blank template, I've seen something like that elsewhere as a finished piece but never as a handy blank template like here.
The worked through example sandbox is very helpful to make all the points super clear. They start with the adversary, then the factions set in motion by the adversary, the geographic elements of the map then seeding resources. Next the Steading and its inhabitant NPCs are created, and encounter tables cooked up. We cook up a site as a 5-room dungeon for a starter quest location and there is even guidance on managing the timing of your game. Again, not for absolute beginners but a great worked example to bring the rest of the zine to life.
All told there is a lot in here that I have seen elsewhere before but it is combined in a masterful way. This is light on explanation for someone coming cold to the concept of sandboxes but a great curated selection of sandbox rules for those familiar with the concept. It picks from the best of ideas out there and slots them all neatly together. Very much tailored to a lower-powered game that foregrounds factions and NPCs and the cunning gathering of resources over the slaughter of monsters. It points to a tricksy game of figuring out the reasons behind that goblin rampage and dealing with root causes rather than hammering every nail that sticks up.
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