As I’ve said before (and any of the players will tell you) West Marches was dangerous by design. Danger encourages teamwork because you have to work together to survive. It also forces players to think: if they make bad decisions they get wiped out, or at least “chased into the swamp like little sissy girls” […]

Did you read part 1 and part 2 already? No? Go do that. Running frequent on-demand games is a lot of work, but because the campaign was set in a fixed region there were ways I could maximize the reusability of some material I prepared. Recycled Maps: Evolving Dungeons Maps were a good example — […]

Players sharing information was a critical part of the West Marches design. Because there was a large pool of players, the average person was in about a third of the games — or to look it the other way, each player missed two-thirds of the games. Add in that each player was in a random […]

West Marches was a game I ran for a little over two years. It was designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game: There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly. There was no regular party: each game had different players drawn from […]

With the Lawman/Outlaw/Cowboy tripod of deceit, characters may or may not have secret allegiances, and more importantly the players anticipate that the other player characters have secret allegiances. The groundwork for mistrust and treachery is nicely laid out. The details behind these choices are fleshed out in the character backgrounds the players create — the […]

Our story thus far: recreating the Paranoia setting of treachery and secret allegiances in a classic Western. Lawman, Outlaw, Cowboy Players were told to be either a Lawman, an Outlaw, or a Cowboy. These are exactly what they sound like: a Lawman enforces the law, an Outlaw is wanted by the law, and a Cowboy […]

Over-preparation (“one continent down, three to go, then I’ll get started on that dungeon”) and trying to impress the players with your cleverness (“your characters have to all be some kind of furniture… no, I didn’t say animated furniture, just furniture”) are the enemies of GM’ing, but like most GMs I am sometimes guilty of […]

GMs run games and players play. Some people do both, but more often than not everyone stays on their side of the screen. There are a myriad of subtle social forces that encourage things to stay this way (comfortable players, GMs threatened by others usurping their position, etc.) but we’re not going to worry about […]