thirty questions for sandbox campaigns

22 Oct, 2026

Josh has revived the popular twenty quick questions for your campaign from so many years ago. The original was concerned with setting information that players actually care about rather than elaborate worldbuilding that doesn't matter. The new one is explicitly concerned with what players need to know about a setting when they begin playing.

So, anyway, player driven fantasy sandbox campaigns can be hard to kick off. If players are supposed to come up with their own plans, what the fuck do they need to know to do that?

Here are thirty (YES I EXPANDED IT I DON'T CARE) questions about how the world works and what players can do in it. Fill them out and give the answers to your players as a handout. Here we go.

1. How do we discover places worth exploring around here?
2. What places do people travel great distances to visit?
3. Where do we go for a meal, a bed, and some good company?
4. Who else is out there exploring dangerous places?
5. What are people fighting over around here?
6. How do we stock up for a week in the wilderness?
7. How do we find out what we're getting into before we set out?
8. What dates should we mark on our calendar?
9. How else could we make our fortune around here?
10. How do the seasons affect where we can go?
11. Where do we find people willing to work for us?
12. If one of us is hurt or ill, how can we get them back on their feet?
13. How do we find out what we've got our hands on?
14. How do we turn the treasure we find into coin?
15. If we stayed here for a few weeks, what could we get involved in?
16. How can we send word to someone several days' travel away?
17. How do we become more than strangers to the people here?
18. How do we keep our treasure safe while we're away?
19. If we needed a miracle, where would we turn?
20. What if we want something nobody sells?
21. How can we get an audience with someone powerful?
22. What happens if we're accused of a crime?
23. What could we learn to do here that we can't do yet?
24. How do we get our hands on something we're not supposed to have?
25. How do we get others to back a plan we can't afford ourselves?
26. If someone dies working for us, what are we expected to do?
27. What could we do with a fortune around here?
28. What if we cleared out an abandoned fortress and wanted to keep it?
29. What would it take to change who makes the rules here?
30. What would make people remember our names?

How to answer this shit

Keep three things in mind.

• Actionable
• Specific, but not exhaustive
• No answer is fine

An answer should tell players what is possible, how something works, or what stands in their way. One useful contact or concrete example is often better than listing a bunch of options. Players can explore more on their own later. Stick to what their characters could reasonably know. There's still plenty to discover through play.

Answering with "nobody knows" or pointing out a restriction in the setting is fine. That's useful information too. If you don't have an answer for something yet, that's also fine. Leave it unanswered for now. This is not a demand to do more worldbuilding.

One way to approach the answers more deliberately is to tie them to the players' starting location or region. Some answers will naturally be relevant throughout the setting, while others will be very local. This could be a living document that you expand as you go, or maybe you could hand players another FAQ for a different settlement. Maybe many answers will be exactly the same there, while others are very different. Repetition is good! It makes the setting feel consistent.

Make sure not to confuse information with adventure hooks. The goal isn't to present players with thirty situations that need resolving. Rumours and ongoing conflicts are good but you're explaining how the world works, not telling players what to do about it.

I like the answers to be short and matter-of-fact. For one, I feel this leaves less room for accidentally suggesting a plot. For another, many players will not fucking read it, or they'll read it and forget. That's FINE. It's a reference document, not homework. Something they can come back to when they have an idea and want to figure out how to pursue it. If they don't use it, that's on them. Maybe they don't even need it!

Still, answering these questions is worthwhile prep for the referee as well. This is as much for you as it is for your players. It gets you thinking about how the world works beyond just where the next dungeon is, so you can give more informed answers when players come up with plans of their own.

Why bother

Because player agency depends a lot on player knowledge¹. Players might not know they could try to claim a dungeon they've cleared out. Or they might know, but have no idea what it would take to do so.

Many games focus on character sheet abilities that tell players what their characters can do. Push the paper button to do x. This is kinda similar, but rather than making it a character focused thing, it's aimed at the players themselves. They need some understanding of how the world works before they can imagine what they might want to accomplish, without a GM guiding them through an adventure.

Setting primers already do some of this, but they're usually more concerned with getting the campaign started². I want something players can come back to later, when they've made their own plans and need to figure out how the world works.

Some games try to encourage this through player principles. Cairn tells players to set goals and ask questions. Yeah, that's good advice, but what goals? What should you be asking about? The principles aren't tied to the particular world we're playing in. I've had plenty of players read them and give me a thumbs up. But when we started playing, they immediately fell back to old habits. So maybe we should combine the principles with some actionable information.

Here's an example I filled out for my Dolmenwolves campaign.