So, a few years ago I ran an open tabled West Marches campaign in 5th edition. I did this because it didn’t seem like enough of my in person playing friends could commit to a weekly game, and a West Marches campaign seemed like a good way to get people to the table without a commitment to showing up every week. I’m going to talk about what the basic set up was, what my experience as a referee was, and how it worked out.

It terms of basic set up, it was pretty much identical to the West Marches by Ben Robbins. A core town on the southern border of a frontier; a revolving party of characters where many players had multiple characters; the deeper into the wilderness you get, the more dangerous it got. Under the hood it was a little more complicated. I built in four layers of history, back thousands of years, and tied all dungeons and treasure to these different layers. They had unique powers and iconography and their own script and their own documents out there. Modern societies out there were tied in some way to this history, and fast travel was tied to one of these societies and translating their artefacts. The world itself was a huge hex map which I filled completely close to the town, and then gradually built out as we played further from town. So my prep every week was “make more world” and then “change the world” according to the player’s actions. Oh, and I realised pretty quickly they wouldn’t ever plan to return home, so I added a roll to return that was pretty punishing.

As a referee, this was a very prep intensive set up. As I have no idea where the players are heading, I have to prepare for as far as they can travel in a session. That’s a lot of hexes for session one. It took weeks of preparation. But it was also pretty satisfying to see the random encounter tables and locations interact and respond to the player characters as they travelled around.

The decisions the players made also confounded my prep a lot: They didn’t want to delve deeper, they wanted to see what was in every direction. This has the effect of firstly expending a lot of my early encounters fairly quickly, making the closer locations a lot dryer (else I have to restock them,), and secondly triggering a bunch of events and then ignoring them while things progressed unchecked. This was both challenging and really, really interesting, because it resulted in a really dynamic world that was clearly operating independently of the player characters, but also escalated things relatively quickly at low levels, making play very dangerous very quickly.

The players who started coming, eventually just formed a regular group anyway, which made me feel like all the prep was a waste of time, as for a small group we could have as much fun with my doing a small percentage of the preparation, if we ran a more traditional campaign. This is why the campaign ended: We had a ball, but it was very challenging to run, and the payoff wasn’t worth the amount of work we were putting in.

But, that payoff was a really fun, dynamic and memorable campaign full of unexpected twists, meaningful and funny deaths, and compelling characters and location. The players loved having a rotating cast of characters because they had the opportunity to experiment with the huge potential characters available in fifth edition.

Ok, so take-aways:

For the players, there was a huge joy in running this in a system that rewarded having a bunch of characters. For the referee, though, fifth edition was quite punishing. If I were to run a West Marches game again, I would run it in a game that offers a lot of support for a wide range of character options, without the complexity: Something like OSE (with Black Pudding or something similar added) or GLOG strikes me as excellent options.

For the referee, the prep was excessive. The scale of prep is difficult in the west-marches model to avoid, but there are ways to minimise it: The easiest is to run this entirely in a pre-written world: Dolmenwood or Wolves Upon the Coast strike me as recent options that are of sufficient size to sustain this type of play long-term, although to both you’d have to add restocking and more global interactivity to replicate the dynamics, because that was one of the best parts of play. You could do that simply by building random encounter tables that feature adjacent region incursions, and by making sure different factions are actually actively competing for territory.

In terms of the town, my players really wanted to increase in it. I’d use Downtime in Zyan or another similar supplement (maybe On Downtime and Demesnes) to facilitate this natural inclination towards active, interesting downtime.

Building big, map-spanning linguistic and other puzzles and history into the world made for interesting and compelling play. I’d do that again. Maybe use this to facilitate this stuff. Breaking groups of hexes into regions, giving each region an iconic boss with existing relationships with the other bosses around it really worked. These bosses were not necessarily all aggressive, some were creepy, some oracles, some good, most were mixed.

I would never run a game like this for my home table again. It just didn’t work and I wasted a lot of time on unused prep. Your home table might be different, but I think my home game wanted to be a regular game and not an open table, and it self selected for that. I would run West Marches for a public table or an online game, though.

Oh, I’d arrange the organisation differently if I ran it again, too. My group had trouble organising themselves, but part of that was paucity of information. I would provide a map with lots of rumours pinned to it if I ran it again. Make the rumours visual. Tie them to expeditions and scraps. Jobs. Make it easier to be directed out in the world. This might impact the broad exploration inclination that my group showed.

This isn’t exhaustive at all, but rather a free association and remembrance. I don’t have any notes from this campaign, unlike my Dragonlance campaign I wrote about a few months ago, sadly. If anyone has specific questions, I’m happy to answer them tov the best of my recollection, of course, and I may add them to here as well if you do.

My conclusion: West Marches, for me, didn’t work. I could facilitate similar play at an open table more easily than I did back then, with some of the considerations mentioned here. I think that it takes a very specific group to be as independently driven as Ben Robbin’s group was, and sadly at the time I ran this, that wasn’t who I had. So your mileage with any of this advise may vary.

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