Super curious to see how you manage the sandbox! My group is about to start Tales,* but given that it took us like four months to get through the intro adventure in the core book, I’m not expecting much.

I only have Darkening and Heart in PDF, which makes them a bit of a pain to work with, but I love the idea of opening the whole thing up as a quasi-hexcrawl. Hopefully, my experience with the very linear adventures in Tales will give me enough confidence with the rules to try something. 

*Edit: just the four linked adventures, I think. I ran the first two for them long ago, with different characters.