The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm currently running a campaign for my players based on the mythic-history of Nine Provinces era China and the folklore of the surrounding region. The characters are just about to bust out of the city-sized sinkhole the Imperial authorities use as an oubliette/prison and have expressed a firm intention to take to the seas (there's an enormous range of islands and archipelagos surrounding the continent they're currently on) and take up a career as freedom-fighting pirates.

The campaign has been sandbox-style so far (saving ridiculous amounts of effort, which has been nice) and I'd like to continue it in that vein, possibly drawing some inspiration from the hexcrawl/exploration campaign structure that I've been seeing a lot of material about on the OSR networks recently.

My question is, how do I turn an ocean-based pirate campaign (traditionally featuring a lot of random encounters with boats at sea and opportunistic looting) into something more sandboxy where players have or can gain access to information with which they can make meaningful decisions where to go and what to loot/pillage/plunder.

Do I generate a map that leaves the interior features (anything more than a few hours walk from the coastline) of the islands/continents blank and key hexcrawl-style locations/encounters to every settlement, island, and point of interest along the coast? Do I create a map that includes a detailed map of the common wisdom on the best ways to get from point-to-point and all of the shipping routes used by various parties complete with information on what is shipped. Do I produce some kind of magic item that allows for limited-scrying and spits out three opportunities that will produce great wealth and enough facts to distinguish between them. Or am I going about this all wrong?

Thoughts? Feedback? Suggestions?

You could even forgo a map and instead just write a list of rumors and have a table of islands and general distances from each other.

X isle is FAR from B isle which is NEAR to C and D isle.

Then, the players gather rumours in a tavern somewhere and you auto generate where the rumours lead, then have sea encounters on the journey!

Quote from: Light Dragon
You could even forgo a map and instead just write a list of rumors and have a table of islands and general distances from each other.

X isle is FAR from B isle which is NEAR to C and D isle.

Then, the players gather rumours in a tavern somewhere and you auto generate where the rumours lead, then have sea encounters on the journey!

I think this is actually a pretty cool idea. The hard thing about sandboxes is that they can grow really fast complexity wise. Anything you can do to abstract or simplify things will help immensely. You might consider though writing up a few notable characters/ships/towns/etc without linking them to any particular area. Then you have some things to use if your players surprise you by going off in a strange direction.

Quote from: Light Dragon
have a table of islands and general distances from each other.

X isle is FAR from B isle which is NEAR to C and D isle.

Mapping things based on proximity rather than exact geography sounds like a fantastic idea, and probably far truer to how most pre-modern sailors would have understood distance and spatial relation than if I worked out a totally exact and precise map.

Definitely going to be incorporating that - thanks for the idea!