This post is more me letting my brain run wild and putting it down somewhere, than it is me discussing the history of the West Marches phenomenon and what others are doing with/to it. More so than usual, so bear with me please. A little (more) history first. See how I taunt you by saying I'm not going to talk history and then turn around and talk history?
A West Marches campaign is built on a few fundamentals - there are a lot of players, it is a sandbox game, focused on exploration with no over-arching storyline, and focused less on roleplaying and more on discovery and combat. The focus is not on the politics and intrigue back in whatever chunk of civilization the players use as their home base and safe area, though there is some but all internal to the players, but on the wilderness outside of civilization. The exploration of said wilderness, the conquering of it, the mapping out of it by the players, them finding all the fun rocks to turn over and find all the creepy crawlies underneath. As such, since I am pretty much stuck with 5e for reasons I have gone into detail about before, I need to introduce some rules into 5e that it is sorely lacking.
First off, exploration. Wizards of the Coast and TSR before them both claimed D&D existed around three pillars - combat (fighting really cool monsters), social (talking with really cool monsters), and exploration (finding new, barely rumored really cool monsters). The latest edition of 5e, as I have written about before, has combat down. Most of the core books you get from WotC are about combat, far more than any other topic. They do also talk a bit about the social and exploration portions of the game, but these suffer because they are boring and/or tedious things that aren't flashy like combat, so they get mentioned in passing, at best. Exploration really suffers because at least with social encounters you can award XP to the players based on the CR of the monsters/NPCs they talked out of the party's way, but it's hard to judge the CR of a ruined keep in a vast wilderness the party managed to locate based only on a few rumors they heard at the local tavern (Ye Olde Inne of the Golden Arches). I think I have a solution for it, one that makes it fairly easy to implement and also level appropriate for any party - take the average level of the party that made the discovery, and reward them for conquering that CR of monster. Simple. This is necessary because part of a West Marches campaign is going out there and finding out what lies in the vast unknown wilderness, tracking down the rumors of the lost treasure, the orc horde gathering itself to go fight the giants, or the undying necromancer building up his power to cross the line into lich-hood. Pretty much the basis of a West Marches game is giving the players a blank map and a handful of rumors and seeing what they do with them, and while that is entertaining for the DM, the players won't know they are doing what they need to unless you reward them in a tangible fashion. Well, okay, not so much, but giving the players XP for things you want them to do makes them want to do it as well.
Have to beef up the exploration rules as well, not to mention travel times and tracking supplies and encumbrance. And have to take into account that exploration also means searching locations for secrets or clues, not just finding said locations based on vague directions. I am not doing this from scratch, as I have run across some interesting exploration rules from the Angry GM (a couple of times, in fact) that I have been itching to inflict on some players to see how well they work. And in the last few episodes of the Digressions & Dragons podcast he shared with Fiddleback, they also talked about how to improve searching locations that have got me thinking along those lines as well. At least, my brain is telling me they did, but that podcast ended a while back, and I can't find the episode or episodes that my brain tells me exist.
This is all important to a West Marches campaign, of course, maintaining that feeling of awe and discovery for the players, so that they keep diving back into the great unknown. And the rest of it, the tracking of travel times and encumbrance and how much rations everyone brought with them is also important, as the West Marches is more about a feeling of realism and grittiness, at least as far as a game about slaying fire breathing, giant, flying lizards with magical talking swords and wizards who break every physical law we currently understand can be thought of as "real". Why? West Marches is D&D on a harder mode than what you get in the vanilla game. This is not level appropriate encounter after level appropriate encounter, this is watching the players possibly walking into a fight they cannot win and seeing if they are smart enough to run the fizzock away. Part of creating that reality is stressed other than the immediate, stresses like thirst and hunger, stresses of finding more gold and plunder than the party could possibly carry and watching their greed overcome them or they overcoming it, and stresses like getting lost in the wilderness or still trying to fight that unbeatable foe.
Another aspect of the exploration game that I think is important is the finding of loot. Again, this is a very low magic setting, and magic items should be few and far between (and in the hands of the monsters and being used against the PCs instead of mouldering in some rotting box). Not only are magic items hard to find, but loot and treasure is also scarce. Oh sure, your iconic hoarde sitters, dragons and whatnot will have lots of currency and jewels, but your common monsters that are basically living a subsistence lifestyle have no use for coinage they can't eat. However, the treasure hoards do exist and present their own challenges when found - how do you carry/transport thousands of a thing when it only takes 10 of them to make a pound? When you get back to town and dump said thousands of coins on the local economy, what do you do when suddenly everything costs 100 times more due to explosive inflation? The small group that found it is fine, but what about the other adventurers, the ones who have not found their hoard yet? Yes, I like a little more realism in my fantasy, but I also admit to being an asshole when it suits me, as other people's pain is funny.
Second up is social. Yes, we are still counting things that are important to a West Marches campaign, but wander wildly off the tracks as we go, you will just have to keep up as best you can. Social encounters. Again, a West Marches campaign is not about the intrigue and political maneuvering back in civilization, but about exploring out in the wilderness. That does not mean you cannot let your players talk their way into staying with a tribe of hobgoblins who they overhear are planning on attacking their orc neighbors, and then the party decides to run and sell that info to a nearby band of ogres, either just for the cash or for the laugh riot of watching both the hobgoblins and the orcs get screwed over by the ogres who sell their services to both sides, but provide them to neither. Yes, that is a long, run on sentence, sorry, but the things I see possible in this game just come pouring out from time to time. You have to establish early that talking with the monsters is an option, and from time to time a good idea. You can encourage this by not following the classic slow buildup of monster CR like your classic campaign design tends to call for (more on this in moment), or by straight up offering it as a suggested course of action to the newer players. However you do it, offer them multiple avenues of approach to every group they encounter, from fight it, to sneak past it, to talk to it, to bribe it to go away, and even to join its fight against something else. You never know what you'll see your players doing.
Still, the original and many of the follow on West Marches games have ignored social encounters entirely, but I don't want to do that. I want to have a list of all the political groups in the wastelands and how they feel about each other and where they are going next if they are not staying exactly where they are now. It doesn't have to be high intrigue, that plan within a plan within a plan you see in things like Frank Herbert's original Dune books, just enough to feel like a slice of reality and to keep the players interested. And maybe I will make my list and not one of my hypothetical players will ever do anything more than immediately kill all the monsters they encounter. That too is fine, at least they had the option to do something more.
Third and last, combat. You can take a look at my article on wargaming (which I'm typing at the same time I'm typing this one, so it could be out already, or it will be out at some point in the near future) and either you've read it or you have not. For me, I like big battles with lots of room to maneuver and lots of terrain bits to play around. I like gridded combat, and deciding tactics with the rest of the party. And I like seeing the party push themselves to the limits of their resources to either succeed grandly or die horribly. In short, I want to see more social and exploration from a West Marches game, but I freely admit to being a combat monkey at heart.
Your normal D&D game slowly ramps up the challenge, to kind of match the PCs' abilities and skills, but with a sandbox style open world setting like the West Marches, the best you can do is try not to put too many very high level monsters anywhere near town. The best approach seems to be layering the challenges in zones that steadily increase as you go further from town. As there is nothing stopping the party from pushing directly through stuff they can handle and dive right into stuff they cannot handle, the PCs will still have to be ready to recognize they are in a bad situation, which will come, and know it is time to "yalla yalla imshee" back out of the situation. Again, you try your best and let the players make whatever bed they are going to sleep in.
One of the tricks that Ben Robbins used in the original campaign was to not only put challenges in front of the players, but also layer challenges vertically. Many of his dungeons were multilevel affairs, with secret or inobvious entrances (that wasn't an easily found and avoided pit trap, it was a way down to the next level, stairs or ladder not provided) that were put there for players to come back and discover later (exploration, again) when they were a bit more experienced. His world was layered like an onion (or a cake, pick your favorite metaphor and run with it), and the players needed to slowly peel it away. So why is this in the combat section and not the exploration section, you may be wondering? While it is about exploration, it is more about fighting, conquering the enemy while not becoming overwhelmed yourself. The layering, the multiple dungeons one atop another has always fascinated me, and I have even added it into my own game, though I skip the subtleness and go straight to "it's an apparently bottomless pit, but if you listen real close you can hear voices... what are they saying? I don't know, which one of you speaks Undercommon?" My players still haven't taken the bait, but I'm keeping them in mind when the group needs a bit of an XP boost and a side quest.
Anyway, back to combat. Tactical combat is the name of the game, and be brutal with it. Most West Marches games tend to have a lot of players in them, make surviving with a particular PC a hallmark, something to be awarded or at least a spotlight shone on when it happens. If you have read my Confessions of a Wargamer, you will know I play mostly gridded combat, and am even attempting to change my D&D campaign to 15mm scale down from 28mm scale, and if that happens, I would transfer that right over to a West Marches campaign - can't get much bigger in the combat department than using a scale that doubles your play area. And because this style of game tends to attract many players old and new, the lower cost of the scale is appreciated by both players and the DM(s).
The other important aspect of a West Marches campaign and combat is that this is far more OSR - Old School Revolution, or something like that, basically a return to very early D&D gameplay - than it is modern tabletop RPG, with their fancy plots and character arcs and personal development. This is down and dirty, explore the wilderness, conquer the wilderness, and loot what little you can find in the wilderness. Combat is a huge part of this style of game, make sure it doesn't suck. Keep it moving fast, make the monsters smart and deadly, and don't be afraid to kill PCs. This is why so many West Marches campaigns have large numbers of players, and also why they are allowed to roll new PCs if they do lose one.
That is all for now. In the next post I will talk about the things I would do specifically to run a West Marches campaign, rules, organization, that kind of thing. Enjoy, and see you next time around.
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