i get down to :-
1) old threat ( historical enermy, forgtten war, dead wizard, Drow wizards grown up and back for more revenge after his families defeat )
2) new threat ( somethings just move in.brougth in, could be natural or abberant, for me was a magic spell book takes posseion of a local wizard and wants to start an army take over )
3) Balance of power ( cival war, rivalrys, power bases compitions, who to work for, royalist and anti monarciests, the possed wizard would love a civial war to create bodies for his army., so would the drow devided enermy is easy to kill so help the other side )
4) Consquenses of all of the above, eg the whos whats where and why after it over to spark the next generation
5) Passive threat dangerous to all (dragon, giants, volcano, sea, just extra story filler side quests, souorce of info/ help/ danger, )
6) mix it up, (the anti royalist tutors the young monarchiests, or the romeo juliet approch )

so the old and the new threats will target groups in the balance of power and that will have knock on effects
meh i ramble to much

I ran my steampunk-ish campagin off TiddlyWiki, but OneNote, Evernote etc would probably work just as well.

This means you can flesh out NPCs as the players interact with them. The downside is you might need to take 5 minute timeouts to write down whatever information has just been revealed about an NPC (or whatever) at inopportune moments, depending on level of prep (i tended to run the above-linked campaign very low-prep) and short-time memory capacity .

@Yan: I will heed your warning. As I look at what doing this entails, I’m starting to fear not having time to have enough playable material for Friday. So what I’ll do is complete one of the 5X5 and if time permits I’ll flesh out others. So this might end up being a classic adventure after all. We’ll see how much prep I can manage till Friday.

He can choose to believe it or not, but either way you give him hints during the day that it will happen soon.

Also, you could use this “device” to expose the players to one of the suggestion you got from the Twitter brainstorm.

Like this one “A slighted council member booby traps the infrastructure of the city, group must find and disarm a series of traps.. “

One thing I frequently use is prepare a few token encounter that is related with the thread. Here is a snippet of my actual game prep.:

“The Ruined city is home of the undeads. This section of the city is in utter ruin and complete section of wall can fall with the slightest push. Nothing of value remain in these ruins it as been emptied a long time ago only death remains. Falling wall make a blast x (x is length of section of the wall) +7 vs Reflex 3d8+4 squares become difficult terrain.
1 ghoul (200)
3 Wights (600)
1 specter (175)”

This was all I had for the scene. An other thing I do is prepare unconnected drops. Be it parcel or hint these are not as related to place as they are related to what will the player do first.

I.e.: In my game I was planning on introducing an artifact. So I had several hint I wanted to give the players before they actually found it. So when they investigate the ruin city first I introduced it right after the undead encounter describe above. “You search the hole area and found nothing. The place as been loot multiple time and nothing remains. As you strike an old lab desk, in frustration of your fruitless search, it breaks. Revealing an hidden compartment that previous looters missed. In it a old journal with [...]” Had they investigated something else first they still would have found the journal only it would have been introduce by an other means.

I improvise the interconnection of all these components and the map layout (if one is needed).

As for the prep required for a sandbox game. I would say it depends a lot on your improvisation skills, the knowledge of your world(world building can take a lot of time) and how much your players are predictable.

That’s actually quite false. Read more on the subject, particularly among the grognard blogs out there. If the PCs go somewhere on a whim with no reason to be there and following no leads, they are not guaranteed to find anything worthwhile (but it still will be an adventure, just from the travel and encounters.) Also: what do you think random tables and wandering monsters are for?

And yes, that works in 4E, too.

(I may whittle this to 3 if time runs out on my prep)

A well dressed foreigner from an exotic locale stumbles into the inn at night and dies of his wounds in the doorway.
.-= Zzarchov´s last blog ..A follow-up to Social Conflict Mechanics =-.

I suggest writing them all out on individual index cards, shuffling them and draw five. The inspiration will hit far quicker and patterns form more easily than if you just try to eyeball the lot in one go.

The results may well surprise you

Best of luck!
.-= greywulf´s last blog ..Character du Jour: Blackbird =-.

A local alderman was found unconcisous this morning; a small, red creature attached to his neck. It does not seem to be harming the alderman if left alone, but it resists all attempts at removal.