West Marches: Running Your Own
Alarming fact: brave GMs all over the place are taking up the torch and starting their own West Marches games. Scary isn’t it?
I’ve already had some private email conversations about how one would actually build and run a West Marches of their very own. Maybe you’ve got the bug too. Early symptoms include a desire to build vast wilderness areas and enlist hordes of players to explore it. Sound familiar? Then read on for a few (hopefully) helpful tips:
make town safe and the wilds wild — Having the town be physically secure (walled or in some cases protected by natural features like rivers or mountains) is very useful for making a sharp “town = safe / wilderness = danger” distinction. Draconian law enforcement inside town, coupled with zero enforcement in the wilds outside town, also helps. Once you are outside the town you are on your own.
keep NPC adventurers rare — Or even better non-existent. It’s up to the players to explore the wilderness, not NPCs. As soon as you have NPCs going on adventures of their own you move the focus away from player-initiated action. NPC adventurers also makes it harder to explain why interesting things weren’t already discovered — players love being the first to find the Horned Tower or the Abbot’s Study. Keep this in mind when you devise the background for your region. Is it a newly opened frontier? Or is adventuring just something no one in their right mind does in this world (the West Marches premise)?
build dungeons with treasure rooms, locked rooms, pockets of danger — A solid party may be able to wipe out the primary critters in a dungeon, but there should always be spots that are a lot harder to clear. On those rare occasions when a group _does_ manage to clear a dungeon or crack a treasure room, they will stand on the tables in the tavern and cheer, not in some small part to brag to the other players who weren’t on that sortie.
appear passive — The world may be active, but you the GM should appear to be passive. You’re not killing the party, the dire wolf is. It’s not you, it’s the world. Encourage the players to take action, but leave the choices up to them. Rolling dice in the open helps a lot. The sandbox game really demands that you remain neutral about what the players do. It’s their decisions that will get them killed or grant them fame and victory, not yours. That’s the whole idea.
provide an easy lead to get new players started — Once players are out exploring, each new discovery motivates them to search more, but how do you get them started? Every time I introduced a batch of new players I gave them a very basic treasure map that vaguely pointed to somewhere in the West Marches and then let them go look for it. Whether it was the dwarven “treasure beyond bearing” or the gold buried beneath the Red Willow, a no-brainer “go look for treasure here” clue gets the players out of town and looking around. Of course once the players are in the wilds, they may find that getting to that treasure is much harder than it looks.
the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town — As per the discussion of NPCs above, be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration. You can have as many NPCs as you want in town, but remember it’s not about them. Once players start talking to town NPCs, they will have a perverse desire to stay in town and look for adventure there. “Town game” was a dirty word in West Marches. Town is not a source of info. You find things by exploring, not sitting in town — someone who explores should know more about what is out there than someone in town.
let the players take over — Don’t write game summaries, don’t clean up the shared map. You want the players to do all those things. If you do it, you’ll just train them not to.
competition is what it’s all about — Fair rewards, scarcity, bragging rights — these are the things that push the game higher. You could have a “solo” West Marches game with just one group doing all the exploring, and it would probably be a fun and pleasant affair, but it’s _nothing_ compared to the frenzy you’ll see when players know other players are out there finding secrets and taking treasure that _they_ could be getting, if only they got their butts out of the tavern. (Hmm, is this why I get a kick out of running Agon? It’s true, I’m a cruel GM.)
require scheduling on the mailing list — It doesn’t matter whether a bunch of players agreed to go on an adventure when they were out bowling, they have to announce it on the mailing list or web forum (whichever you’re using for your scheduling). This prevents the game from splintering into multiple separate games. If you notice cliques forming you can make a rule requiring parties to mix after two adventures. Conversely if you notice players being dropped from follow-up sorties too often just because some people can’t wait to play, you can require parties to stay together for two adventures. That forces a little more long time strategy in party selection, less greedy opportunism. Season to taste.
fear the social monster — This is the big, big grand-daddy or all warnings: even more so than many games, West Marches is a social beast. In normal games players have an established place in the group. They know they are supposed to show up every Tuesday to play — they don’t have to think about that or worry about whether they “belong” in the group. On the other hand West Marches is a swirling vortex of ambition and insecurity. How come no one replied when I tried to get a group together last week? Why didn’t anybody invite me to raid the ogre cave? And so on and so on ad infinitum. The thrilling success or catastrophic failure of your West Marches game will largely hinge on the confidence or insecurity of your player pool. Buckle up.
Running your own West Marches game? Post a link in the comments so everyone can take a look and grow green with envy. I’ve got some links I need to post but if you hurry you can beat me to it.
Is there such a thing as too *many* players? It looks like that may happen with my upcoming game.
Congratulations and beware..!!!
Yes, definitely. It’s supply and demand: if there are too many players you’ll have a harder time running enough games to let everyone play as much as they want. It totally depends on how often your average player wants to play versus how much you can GM. And if you let too many people play in one session, no one has fun (or everybody has less fun). We had a few eight or nine player games and they were pretty chaotic, so I capped party size unless there was some really good reason.
Think of how often you’re willing to run games. Say it’s once a week. If you’re willing to have an average of five players per game, you can accomodate 5 players in your pool if they all want to play every week, 10 if on average they’re happy to play every other week, and so on.
In other words, the GM has to be willing to play (player pool / 5) times more often than the average player does. Of course a teeny bit of over-demand is not so bad. Keeps the competitive spirit. But too much can lead to serious bad blood.
I had a waiting list to join for a lot of the campaign. There’s always the urge to bring in more people and share the fun, but sharing too much waters down the fun.
Is there such a thing as too *many* players? It looks like that may happen with my upcoming game.
If I had many players, I would definitely run a campaign like this. Unfortunately, I don’t even have enough players for regular gaming.
Ben,
Great system. My dad raised me on 1st edition D&D as an ‘interactive storytelling’ from the age of 3. As I grew older I was able to participate in his real sessions which can only be described as open sandbox with a lethal reality. To this day I still prefer this style to all others.
I’m contemplating a ‘West Marches’ style and was wondering if you could pass along your large map as well as the contract you had all of the players agree to. I love the idea of a fractal map and have recently begun to use the ‘Fractal Mapper’ software to build my map for the setting.
I’ve had the pleasure of looking over a copy of the Microscope game. Have you thought of using that system to develop the campaign setting background for a setting they would later roleplay in? Great free-form system.
A fellow roller of the die,
-Jay
@ OJW: cookie accepted!
@ Mike: I made the maps in Illustrator, but during games I had paper printouts and just drew a line to plot the course the party was taking each hour of the day. So I always knew exactly where they were even if they didn’t. Make a little dot when they camp, put a date beside it if you want, then draw another line as they start marching the next day.
Ben,
Thanks again for writing this all up! I am hoping to kick off a west marches style game this weekend.
You said you used “just an open terrain map where I drew vectors to keep track of where the party was” and “I didn’t use hex maps, just free movement and distances”. It seems like you also mentioned zooming in and out.
Did you use vector mapping software, or was this just plotting vectors on a gridless paper map? If you used software, what did you use?
First of all, a homemade, chocolate chip cookie to Ben for not only writing this up but also for continuing to answer comment questions years after the fact. A big pat on the back to everyone that contributed to ideas and posted links to their similar campaigns. That helps me out alot mainly because….
I have only run 2 campaigns so far so I am a fledgling GM. Vampire the Masquerade and now Pathfinder…Both were prepublished modules (NY by Night and _I still can’t believe they talked me into this_ The World’s Largest Dungeon). That 2nd one is the price I pay for being the most knowledgeable player of the group after our previous GM’s left for one reason or another. If you want to play, someone has to run it
I think I may try to steer my group towards this Western Marches/sandbox style as it is the style of play I am most used to. I first got into RPGs many years ago and had more fun playing in these style games than following plotlines and over-arcing stories.
I have read through the pages plus all of the comments on each of the pages and put together a good listed of tips and things to look out for. Especially since I only have a 3 player pool right now. But if they pass along the word to others, maybe (hopefully) it will grow. My planning begins tomorrow…
I just came across this and it resembles (in some ways) a game I played until for a while. We did that one in 1ed with the vast majority of XP coming from treasure and not from monsters, which changes the dynamic a lot. I wonder how much of the dynamic in your campaign came from XP coming mostly from killing monsters and how much it would change if monsters give a pittance of XP and getting gold is where XP comes from.
I’m so glad I found this, the game I’m running is a mixture of this and a normal campaign, and the tips here will help. One large campaign world with a West Marches feel to it, where it could either go story-driven or sandbox depending on what the players choose. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to end up, but I’m excited to give it a try and see where the players decide to go with it, so I might just be back asking for tips.
Oops, *Michael Pfaff, sorry typo!