Tonight I ran Low Fantasy Gaming with a group of friends (over Roll20), using the Midlands setting for the system. I've been curious about it for a long time, because in addition to what I like about the world (magic is vanishingly rare, sorcerers are killed, casting spells is dangerous, and fighters and rogues actually have a lot of customization options: this is pure Conan/Fafhrd sword and sorcery!), the Midlands book not only has lots of encounter tables, but it ALSO has fifty pre-written short adventures you can drop in anywhere, including maps and monster tables and the whole shebang. And, in true OSR style, it's not balanced, so it's up to players to decide whether to press on or quit. Anyway, once I got player buy-in, I had to prepare for...who knows? So I figured we'd start out in a city beside a forest. Then I rolled two random city adventures (one sewer crawl and one involving bar hopping) and two forest adventures (fighting an owlbear and seeing a wizard's tower) and then, just as a bonus, I rolled on the Regional Events table and got "The king has died." Okay, I thought, that's going to have impact we'll be able to see too. As I expected, I didn't use most of what I'd written down to run, but that was fine because I hadn't needed to prep much. (The adventure frameworks in the Midlands are pretty simple to remember in broad enough outlines to just start them without looking.) The PCs went looking for an owlbear...and ran across a group of rogues who had a mysterious masked prisoner who--upon being freed--turned out to be the dead king's half-brother, being whisked out of town to be held for ransom while succession wars raged in the city. The players were still trying to figure out what to do about the king's half-brother....when the owlbear attacked. It was a nasty fight. And a different kind of fun that happened just in time. Then it got weird. They examined the owlbear's lair and found--in among the random loot--an iron gate key with the words "Star Door" on it. (New side quest!) Also, there were dead bodies in front of the owlbear's lair that clearly hadn't been killed by the owlbear. (Part of the original owlbear quest they elected not to pursue.) And THEN, while taking the king's half-brother to safety in a neighboring kingdom, they ran across [random encounter] a cave mouth leading down into ancient ruins. They poked their heads in (and I quickly found a set of ruins in among the adventures in the back),they got overwhelmed in the first room, ran away, and brought the king's half-brother the rest of the way to safety in the neighboring realm. And the king's half-brother said, "Do we part ways here, or are you going to help me claim my brother's throne?" That's where we had to stop after three nonstop hours. It was, as I said, the first experience I've had with genuine sandbox adventuring, and it has taught me a few things. 1.) The Tools Matter. I think if I didn't have The Midlands (or some similarly detailed and table-filled resource like Veins of the Earth or Ultraviolet Grasslands), this would have been difficult to pull off. Even so, I needed--and will clearly need to continue--to have nine different tabs open so that I could easily swing among various frequently-used tables (random magic mishaps, random treasure, random encounters, etc.) without wasting player time. I was very glad that I'd made some of those rolls in advance, too. 2.) We Will Never Run Out of Adventure. I was simply not expecting what a target-rich environment sandboxing can produce. The fun part of the evening was watching players be genuinely torn between searching the owlbear lair or getting the king's brother to safety. There is SO MUCH TO DO, the players will never catch up, and it's only been one session! That was a surprise: I expected adventures to roll out in an orderly manner. I did not expect sidequests to pile up like urgent mail. It adds a different kind of tension I'd never experienced before. 3.) The Dramatic Arc Was Different. I come from a narrative RPG background, where you can generally predict that the adventure with start with the usual flunkies and proceed to the boss monster at the appropriate dramatic moment. That's a perfectly fine adventure framework (see: every single movie and TV show), but the sandbox nature of this story put the tension elsewhere: instead of ending at a boss monster followed by a denouement, we ended on a cliffhanger, and I have a few days to figure out how to complicate the empty-throne storyline, and even I'M excited because I don't know the ending yet! 4.) The Possibilities Continue. For the first time in my gaming life, when I asked, "When can we get together again?" at the end, it was clear that I didn't have to get everyone together! If three people wanted to do the next session, that was fine, and then the larger group could pick up the larger story a few days later. It was so incredibly freeing, and it looks like it makes gaming even easier to get done. I'm free from a restraint I didn't even notice I was restrained by! I was expecting this to be an interesting experiment. I was not expecting to be so completely won over so quickly. This is now my favorite way to run things, and if my group manages to pull off the other thing Low Fantasy Gaming/Midlands promises--rotating GMs--I think I'll be in love for life. Highly recommended.