A Riff on the West Marches Campaign

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Random

At some point in my D&D Career - if you’ll indulge me calling it that - I got the itch to create a persistent world in which players could come and go as they please without affecting the campaign’s longevity. I had been burned before by campaigns where things just died on the vine because people either lost interest or scheduling became too fraught. I didn’t want to get into a loop of “over-preparing” new campaigns that would just fizzle out and die. All that work down the drain over and over again. Plop.

And that’s when I came across the idea of a West Marches campaign. It seemed perfect for what I wanted to do. It would allow players to come and go as they please and it would encourage them to dictate the kind of prep I needed to do as a DM. I could develop the world on an ongoing basis and focus on the areas that the players were interested in first and not waste time prepping stuff they may never get to. Player led, yet immune to player drop off. Perfect.

I started creating the campaign and came across my first problem: the Setting. I had already made a couple of settings before and I didn’t exactly have the energy to go through that whole process again. Same thing with the pantheon. In each of the previous campaigns I had painstakingly created my own versions of the typical D&D pantheon and given them each a unique flavor and all sorts of interesting bits of lore. I almost stopped right there, but decided to try something that made me a bit nervous instead.

The setting would be randomly generated, and the pantheon would be minimal and follow the same rules as the West Marches campaign; new deities would exist when the players needed them to. Cities, towns, and villages. Factions, Kingdoms, and villains. Everything would have an element of randomness that I could then customize and flavor as needed. As someone who is used to controlling all the details of his fictional worlds, introducing a bit of randomness was a bit of a scary prospect. Of course, that meant I had to jump in and try it.

So, I generated the overworld and the major cities, villages, and towns. I made a pantheon that had a “starter kit” feel and…well…I came across another hiccup. This campaign needed a game loop that could withstand the chaos of scheduling a large group of players with varying schedules. It needed something that could effortlessly allow for one-shots and multi-session stories and be able to bounce back and forth between those without complex tables and charts. It needed to be newbie friendly so I could introduce and recruit new players, and it needed to be able to shift gears and give the experienced players the kind of campaign that could live with them forever. Remember, the idea of the West Marches campaign emphasized not over-preparing, so this loop needed to be able to do the work.

Some time before I started this journey into a West Marches campaign I tested out a funny idea I had as a one-shot. In it, adventurers in an adventuring guild with “temp agency flavoring” were sent out from a cramped guild hall to take on a monster for a client. The gag was that in the world of this one-shot adventuring was a gig economy. I found myself looking back at this idea with renewed interest and it was here where I started to formulate the conceit of this game.

The Halfhand Adventurers Guild would be the focal point for the players. It would be but one of many guilds out in the world that sent off adventurers to fight monsters and deal with the world’s problems. The setting would exist within a time when this kind of adventuring was the norm, and so it wouldn’t be too crazy to see adventurers taking jobs for clients through a guild middleman (I still find this really funny, btw).

With this idea in place, I could formulate simple one-shots as if they were client requests. I could also use these “jobs” to focus the players at the top of the session, giving them an idea of the goal and what they needed to achieve before the game ended. This also allowed me to simplify my session notes and to break free from what I’ll fondly refer to as my “prose notes era.” It would be easier to pivot to a player’s tangeants since only the most basic details were set in stone. If the players decided to approach their mission in a different way, I had the flexibility to indulge their creativity within reason.

From there the game kind of took off. And now as I sit here reflecting on everything I’ve learned, I’m realizing I could write quite a few posts about my journey through this West Marches “experiment.” Heck, this could even be a regular post series. Might get me back into writing on a regular basis, which is something I’ve come to miss over the years. I guess we’ll see.