Prepping a sandbox #ttrpg campaign is wrecking my health.

In the past, I'd outline ~5 adventures, drop ~2 hooks on the party, then sprinkle the rest liberally throughout my notes with a "hooks to other adventures" section in my encounter template.

But this time around... First of all, my map's too big. I used a planet-generating algorithm to produce geologically realistic continents, and I'm so in love with it, I just can't "kill my darling" like I'm supposed to.

But let's come back to that. Primarily, I just don't know what to put in the world.

A player thanked me for stepping up and GMing.

"I really like to play," he told me, "but I don't know how to run the game."

I almost joked back, "me neither" (which is how I've been feeling, lately) but my new thing is projecting confidence for the players' sake, so I didn't. But later it got me thinking, "what do I know that he doesn't? He knows the PHB and splat-books back-to-front, while I've never cracked most of 'em, so what's he missing?

I think the answer is "notes" or, more philosophically, "ontology" or else "higher order abstractions."

As a GM, I like to the flexibility XP gives me to encourage all kinds of arbitrary behavior that the game designers could never explicate in print. I'm trying a variant of "Three Pillar XP" wherein I divide XP needed to level into ~20 sachets of points, eg 90 @ 3rd. Sizing XP sachets is an art, but to simplify I scale it to the lowest-level PC in the party, so everyone else gets diminishing returns.