Welcome to the Sword Coast

Cartography by Mike Schley

It seems as though sometime early in the run of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, there was a significant revival of interest in running "sandbox" style campaigns, especially among "old-school" players. It may have been a general reaction against 4E and its perceived emphasis on carefully designed set-piece encounters tailored to the PCs, or it may have been Ben Robbins's posts describing his West Marches hexcrawl (both 2007), but almost overnight it seemed that grognards were talking about sandbox campaigns again.

True confession: I've been playing D&D for thirty-five years, which should probably qualify me for the Old School, but I never played in a true sandbox campaign. Here, I mean specifically a campaign in which the DM details the setting and the PCs can do most anything they wish within the constraints of the "box." In fact, I never met anyone who ran that kind of campaign back in the early to mid-80s. The closest was an honest-to-god grognard my first year in college who'd started with wargames in the 60s and took up D&D after it was created in the mid-70s. He ran a Castle Greyhawk-style megadungeon he'd been working on for ten years. That's a kind of sandbox, but not the anything-goes, world-spanning sandbox you started to hear about on old-school blogs and forums.

Not only did we not run these kinds of sandbox games, our settings ("Greg's World," "Mike's World," "John's World") were little more than corkboards on which to pin adventure modules that we purchased or created. Our campaigns were a series of adventure modules, and if you wanted a metaphor, the best one might be "playground campaigns." The patch of ground it was on didn't matter much -- the swings, slides, jungle gyms, seesaws, monkey bars, and yes, sandboxes, were the points of interest. You might use Greyhawk or Wilderlands of High Fantasy as your real estate, or you might make your own vaguely described corkboard, but what mattered were the location-based adventures you pinned to it.

This kind of "playground campaign" is what I think of as old-school D&D.

And despite the catchy title of this blog, what you'll find here is more playground than sandbox. But I think it's the kind of campaign that most players really mean when they use the term "sandbox": non-directed, unscripted, location-based adventures with no predetermined plot or story-arc. The PCs can't go anywhere and do anything ("We're going to become gem merchants in Waterdeep!") -- they're assumed to be adventurers looking for wild lands to explore, monsters to battle, and treasures to win. But they always have choices about where to explore, what adventures to pursue, and whether to make a stand or retreat to fight another day. They're not on the clock and the fate of the world doesn't hinge on their hitting the next story goal on schedule.

As of the time of this post, Wizards of the Coast or their partners have released one sandboxy (or playground-y) adventure in Lost Mines of Phandelver, along with two more scripted "story" campaigns in Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat. In the online community, at least, there is some disappointment that Wizards hasn't offered more one-shot and location-based adventures suitable for sandbox play.

The good news is, I think there's more available than most people think. This blog is my effort to pull together published, location-based adventures for D&D 5e set in or around the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms, and to provide notes and suggestions on how a DM can use them to run a sandbox (or playground) campaign without having to create it whole cloth.

Here is my working list of adventures or adventure locations thus far, along with the published source and tier of play:

Adventure	Source	Tier
Fane of the Sun Swallower	Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle	Tier 1
Julkoun	Scourge of the Sword Coast	Tier 1
Phylund Lodge	Scourge of the Sword Coast	Tier 1
Harpshield Castle	Scourge of the Sword Coast	Tier 1
Firehammer Hold	Scourge of the Sword Coast	Tier 1
Floshin Estate	Scourge of the Sword Coast	Tier 1
Cragmaw Hideout	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Redbrand Hideout	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Triboar Trail	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Agatha's Lair	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Old Owl Well	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Ruins of Thundertree	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Wyvern Tor	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Cragmaw Castle	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
Wave Echo Cave	Lost Mines of Phandelver	Tier 1
The Cursed Crypts of the Ambergul	Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle	Tier 2
The Fall of Ilefarn	Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle	Tier 2
Dragonspear Castle	Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle	Tier 2
Assault the Bloodgate	Dead in Thay	Tier 2
Doomvault	Dead in Thay	Tier 2
Vault of the Dracolich	Vault of the Dracolich	Tier 2

LMoP is available in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Starter Set, of course. The other modules were released as part of the D&D Next playtest, and all but Vault of the Dracolich are available as PDF downloads at D&D Classics. All told, these modules offer twenty-one adventures and adventure locations -- along with setting locations and NPCs -- up and down the Sword Coast. The playtest adventures are based in Daggerford, a town between Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate, while LMoP takes place in and around Phandalin between Waterdeep and Neverwinter.

Shortly after this is posted, Wizards will release Princes of the Apocalypse, which from early reports seems to be a sandboxy campaign by Rich Baker of LMoP fame. The campaign is set in the Dessarin Valley, more or less sandwiched between the Daggerford and Phandalin regions. My hope is that this product will help us fill out our list of adventure locations, particular for those in the third tier of play.

In coming posts, I'll lay out my approach to this site and offer notes and suggestions for how to use these locations and adventures as part of a Sword Coast sandbox campaign. Once my hatchlings are in a row, I plan to run the campaign on Roll20, supplementing the content here with session reports and lessons learned. My hope is that this will help time-constrained (or lazy) DMs run a sandbox campaign with a solid foundation of published material to work from.

I'd love for this to be collaborative, so please leave your ideas and suggestions in the comments.