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:
Building It
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.
Running It
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.
but wait, there’s more: West Marches: Secrets & Answers (part 1)
Leave a reply to harlequin
I’m having the same problem in my game, I have one pc who has survived longer than all the others and he’s getting powerful. I’ve sorted out the loot inflation problem by creating situations where treasure is lost after the pc dies. For example, one day I rolled a goblin ambush on the random encounter table and started the fight. My pcs had never encountered a war band, so they didn’t realize they were enormous, on the first round three crossbowmen attack and the pcs scatter to fight them. Suddenly, they were surrounded by goblins and bugbears. The pcs fought for a while, but eventually a bugbear dropped a pc who had a serious magic item. The pcs had to run, leaving all the loot as they tried to escape. They still haven’t returned to search for the loot, which is good because it’s gone. I also have an encounter with a wyrmling coming up, if anyone dies the treasure will be taken to its lair, which the pcs have yet to discover.
There’s always the good old acid pit, too.
I hope this wasn’t asked before, but in our Co-GMd West Marches style game recently we were debating the issue of “loot inflation” in terms of PCs dying. How was that handled in West Marches?
If you have a near TPK, but one or a few PCs survive, what happens to the dead player’s stuff? It seems like over time the looting of the looters will get out of hand, and you suddenly have large concentrations of wealth in particular PCs. I don’t think any of the DMs having a problem with an imbalance in general, it’s just that at higher levels having an ally get killed off becomes more of a boon for other PCs.
Svafa, substituting skill challenges in lieu of start-to-finish last-man-standing combats is indeed the appropriate way to deal with fights you’d rather quickly roleplay in 4E. In 4E, healing surges are perhaps the most valuable daily resource, so having to spend a surge or two after losing a fight will apply appropriate tension without taking up too much game time. The nice thing about skill challenges (that the RAW doesn’t emphasize enough IMO) is that it’s a good way for the players to get creative with regards to what they can do with their skills.
For a 4E WM style game, I would try to restrict random encounters in the wild to skill challenges as much as possible and save the tactical skirmishes for pre-designed areas (dungeons or otherwise). This also reduces your prep and gives you more time to be creative — a skill challenge can be almost any hazard you want to have in a certain area, and all you need is a brief description, target number and number of successes required (along with XP for succeeding, and I do recommend giving half xp for failing). When it comes up, just let the players tell you what skills they want to use and *how* they’re using them, and if it sounds good, let them try.
“With that in mind, how did you script the higher level locations and encounters? ”
What about instead of the demon worshippers centered in one particular region, their ancient, hell-releasing seal could involve three separate stone crests in three different regions across the map, in a triangular shape. Eventually you would have to (or would be obligated to; it’s still a sandbox, but consequently letting them “do their thing” would populate the entire map with demon-monster encounters) eliminate them from each of the three areas before a set date (such as, maybe “in 3 months” or something). And of course, a different party could go out after a different one than yours, creating a sort of “separate, but with equal intentions” unity between them.
Very inspiring series of posts, Ben – they got me preparing a knock-off of West Marches of my very own. A question, though: the sandbox-model seems to demand any plots you have going on in the various locales to be focused on the immediate area instead of being world-alteringly epic. There might be demon-worshipers five days from Home Base, but if their plan is to conquer the region, this puts too much of a spotlight on them and their plans and steals center stage from the players.
With that in mind, how did you script the higher level locations and encounters?
Also, I’d like to add some ideas, might be useful for others:
West Marches connected with an idea that’s been bouncing around my head since I read “Heart of Darkness” this summer. Basically, that the PCs travel through various areas, further and further from civilisation, and that they can find information about surrounding areas in the place they’re at. The further a group is from a location, the more shrouded in rumors it will be.
For instance, while at Home Base, the only meaningful information on Spiderhaunt Wood would be “dangerous, huge spiders – don’t hunt there”. A bit closer, it’s “there are men in there that have made pacts with the spiders” and once in the woods themselves, you can discover werespiders or demented druids.
Of course, this works both ways: the people of Spiderhaunt Wood know a bit about their Goblin neighbours in the adjacent hills, but next to nothing about the Dwarven citadel in the mountains beyond. The PCs might even know more about the Dwarves than the locals, if the mountains are close to Home Base.
Me and a group of people are actually going to try to start a modified version of the Western Marches for our school this coming semester, but our big twist is that we are going to try to do a multi-DM world building exercise. Basically, we are all going to collaborate to create the world and the basic landmarks, but then if a group wants to go somewhere in particular, a given DM can volunteer to cover it and write out the big details. We feel like this may help reduce our work-loads and it should also create an interesting dynamic where people get to experience different DMing styles, which should show up, even in a universal world. Also, it will let the DM’s play to a limited degree as long as they did not participate in the design of a given location.
Any thoughts?
On that line of thought, I have been toying with a simplified fight system for 4E. I saw something somewhat similar elsewhere, but the gist is that it becomes a series of skill checks or attack rolls. The players are given a number of skill checks to make and need to at least pass half to win the encounter. If they win they (may) get treasure and some exp; if they lose they get nothing and (may) take damage. However, each passed skill check does give a little exp, and each failed skill check causes some damage to the character. Skill checks could be modified through powers, action die, or similar. The base DC would be determined by the level of the party and/or the level of the zone. Here’s a basic example:
The party is attacked by a group of 5 Goblins. They must make 10 skill checks, and must pass at least 6 to come out victorious. The DC is 15 as this is a low level area, and the damage they take for failing is 10 hp. The players go in some predetermined order.
-So, our Rogue goes first. He makes a base attack roll and manages a 17. That’s 1/10 passed.
-Next is the Fighter, and he decides to use an At-Will to mark his opponent. He manages a 15, and now will take the damage from the next failed check (his “mark”). That’s 2/10 passed.
-The Warlock goes next and fails with a total of 12. However, the Fighter takes the 10 points of damage due to his mark. That’s the third attempt.
-The Cleric takes his turn and gets a 9. He takes 10 points of damage (the Fighter’s “mark” is a one-time thing). That’s the fourth.
-The Ranger gets a natural 20 and passes his check. That’s 3/10 and the fifth attempt.
It then starts back over at the Rogue. After all 10 skill checks, they manage to come out with 6/10 and win the encounter. They get a little bit of extra exp and move on.
As you can probably tell it’s a little more than a simple “roll and beat this number” from the marking portion. I’m thinking you might get a +1 for using an Encounter and a +2 or +3 for using a Daily. Plus, you might be able to do some AoE attacks to count one roll toward multiple checks on a success, but only one check on a failure.
Anyway, I realize it’s not entirely on subject and not well fleshed-out, but any thoughts on the subject would be welcome, especially concerning applying it to a WM-style game. I’m considering adding such a system for higher level parties traveling through areas they easily out-level (i.e. level 4-5 in a level 1 area), and then only at the players’ option. Hopefully cutting some travel time and allowing them to spend the majority of their encounter time on the areas they were aiming to explore (whether overland or dungeon crawling).
I was recently inspired while playing Etrian Odyssey (old-school-style dungeon crawler for the DS) to convert an old 3/3.5 campaign into an open-ended exploration game (most likely for 4E). A friend pointed me here (likely due to Penny Arcade), so I’ve made my own venture through articles and blogs while adding a few comments along the way.
I do have a few questions and thoughts though.
First, being inspired by Etrian Odyssey, I’m considering a retirement system that would allow a player to retire their character and gain some benefit on a new one. I have a few ideas for how it might work, but was looking for a little insight from outside our playing group. I know Pfaff mentioned something of the sort (possibly on his blog), but was wondering if the original WM considered such a system or whether others experimenting in the same style had such a system.
My own plans are that on retirement the player explains what happens to the character (through narration, short story, whatever). They then reroll starting with 1/3rd their former character’s experience (thus a level 9 starts at level 3). The main intent was to stop progression at level 12 and possibly level 10, and to help keep the player base near one another in level.
Extra bonuses might be that the retired character might open a blacksmithing shop, alchemy lab, chapel, or similar where the active characters would receive a little more benefit than the town previously had to offer.
Second, while I realize that random encounters are essential, I’m wondering what others think on speeding them up and/or simplifying them. I’ve read a number of different ideas and responses along these lines over the past few days, and even in this thread. I’m mostly interested in how others think this would affect a WM-style game, and not necessarily how it might be done.
I’m adverse to the idea of removing random encounters, as they are essential to this sort of game, but I don’t have as much time to play as I did even 2 years ago.
Hi Ben,
Two questions: You talk a lot about your encounters tables. Where did you get them from? Or did you make them yourself? If so, can you show us an example please?
Also, what ways did you use to give players information about the zones ahead? I can imagine getting rumors in town, and encountering letters and books and runes, but since most is wilderness, what other ways did you use?
Thank you,
Wim
Frost said:
There was never a competitive aspect (at least I didn’t see one) to West Marches, it was us (the PCs) versus the environment.
Frosty, I have to really disagree here. There was rampant competition. Competition for treasure. Competition for knowledge. Competition to level. Most importantly, the sheer competition to play more which is what made the game great except for when it turned into jealously, resentment and offline grumblings that others were playing and they weren’t. All this competition was because players cared a lot about the game (good!) but were also often insecure about it (not good).
So then, back @Thumper’s original question about the importance of competition. Sure, you could have a very fun “sandbox” game with a single, small group, but it wouldn’t be West Marches.
Healthy competitiveness amongst a large pool of players fuels the fire and keeps the game going at a very high pace. The players create a vibrant game community with constant chatting, creative game summaries and in our case, even poetry. People want to play as much as they can and make it the #1 priority in their social calendar. Tons of games then of course leads to even more fodder for the community.
The community needs a large pool of players to sustain itself and so when some become complacent, other players’ excitement inspires them and vice-versa. That said though, you have to start somewhere, so start with 3-4 players as long as you are open to growing it as new players emerge. Just make sure your starting players understand fully that this is the deal and your plan.
As for the unhealthy competition, I don’t need to explain it. Ben already did above when he warns, “fear the social monster.” All I can say is if you see it, do something about it and don’t wait around for its inevitable destructive consequences.
One note: Frost is correct that there were never formal parties. Certainly people played more with some than others out of familiarity or having characters closer in level – not unrelated aspects, but there were never formal parties. I would advise DMs to encourage or force players to mix it up.
As a corollary, I don’t think mixing levels is an intrinsic problem, and you really can’t avoid it either because people are just going to level at different rates if they play at different rates. I actually played a character 3 or 4 levels beneath the rest of the party in several games and my character ended up in danger and hiding a lot. But, I chose to go along to places more dangerous than I could handle so really couldn’t complain when they ended up being just that and neither could anyone else in the party. That’s the beauty of West Marches. So while this isn’t ideal for every game, for purposes of mixing it up and adventuring with a wide-variety of players, it worked.
Nice, Chris! I really like seeing the evolution of the tabletop map.
This post has inspired me — I’m gonna try to set up a Traveller game like this. It seems that Traveller is pretty well suited to this kind of set up, especially in that there’s no XP or leveling, so I don’t have to worry about power gamers being too high level to play with people who can’t play as often. The characters can “live” on a space station, and go exploring as they see fit, to other planets, each with its own adventures, politics, history, etc.
I’ll be interested to see how it goes, and if anyone is interested in following it, I’ll probably be using Obsidian Portal to track it. We won’t start till late Feb. though.
Our local gaming club (Heroes’ Guild of Maryland) is running a West Marches-style game called the Eastern Expanse that is open to all comers, so if anyone in the Baltimore area is interested, check out our forum and set up a game.
http://heroesguildonline.forumotion.com/eastern-expanse-the-maul-mattock-inn-f87/
Ben, if you get a chance, stop by and tell us what you think.
I noticed one other person who has run a GURPS campaign in this style. And I thought I’d contribute my own notes about how I ran one of my favorite GURPS campaigns in a sandbox style, and why I think GURPS is particularly well suited to this style of play when you’re running many groups/large numbers of players.
Firstly, my campaign was scifi, set in a dystopianesque future that combined elements of medieval romances, cowboy stories, and standard standard empires common to the pulp. This allowed me to make most weaponry and items basically slightly futuristic equivalents of medieval weaponry, while still having guns and other neat, modern items. As anyone familiar with GURPS knows, character point values are very important, and modern level items can be lethal very easily when characters barge into situations head first. Firearms do as much damage as one would expect, and even a single strike of a sword from a stronger enemy can kill. It’s a dangerous world. Then I play by the book. I have my own ration rules, and other things to make it grittier and harder.
But enough about that. The problem with GURPS is the lack of character progression in the sense of “leveling up.” Sure, you gain character points and cash, but those tend to give large rewards over long periods of time. And it can be difficult to reward players effectively. My solution to this was very simple, and I feel pretty standard. For one thing, ammunition for firearms was scarce, and finding any was a big reward cause you had bullets again (I strictly enforce ammunition rules). Ammunition is proportionally more expensive because of this, when buying from merchants – who often have very limited supplies in stock. I also use in-house maintenance rules to ensure that complex mechanical items (motorcycles, guns, the occasional airship that a player might build out of scrap) require an investment to maintain, but also offer powerful advantages. I also rewrote the weapons rules, so that the base firearms were weaker than standard (using WWI/II weapon stats as my base) and making things better than them real treats to find (since enemies were generally well armored, a weapon with higher than average armor pen was always welcome). I also chose to write out money, for the most part. Instead, I replaced those things with usable scrap metal and other mechanical items that couldn’t be bought or easily constructed. I did this for flavor, and used hidden value charts to keep things consistent.
Beyond these things, I found it conducive to make the “dungeons” and encounters very clever, always requiring strategic thinking and different situations. Extensive use of traps helps, since combat in GURPS can be over in the blink of an eye if you’re shooting at each other. This made combat situations very rewarding for PCs, as they had to carefully overcome difficult challenges. Then, I built the world in great depth, defining attributes for regions and areas so that encounters followed logically and there was always a sense of discovery about the history of this world. I would engage in storyarcs from time to time, but these plots usually lasted only a few sessions and were intended to be like “season finales” for the PCs.
The last thing I liked was the nature of the GURPS system and how it makes level disparity a non-issue (for the most part). A 50 or 75 pt character (my base point values for the campaign) can still take out a 100 pt character, in general. And skills (which should be exploited to the fullest) a 50 pt character has may not be possessed by a 100 pt character. Ergo, even for the most difficult challenges (taking down an ancient, mechanical titan to harvest the processor in its head, for instance) could benefit from the addition of low point characters to the group. This also meant, with my 9-14 players who played at least semi-regularly, that they could always group up with other players and head out without feeling horribly gimped. (I’m also stingy with points, rarely giving more than 3 per session, so characters don’t grow too terribly fast).
@Mark Langsdorf: As for prep time, it didn’t take much. I’d advise you to have generic concepts of “standard enemies” in mind for your different regions, and then just outline their vital statistics. After all, the players don’t need to know that the enemies don’t conform to the same point value rules as players. You just need to make them convincing and standard. For instance, for an normal gun-toting bandit enemy, I simply assigned HP and FP, and other absolutely vital stats, then gave him a score in firearms [Type]. Usually 11-13 as 10 tends to be average. More complex enemies received more complex treatment, and I emphasized role playing over just running around murdering everyone.
@Thumper:
Is the “competitive” nature of having multiple parties a big enough draw
There was never a competitive aspect (at least I didn’t see one) to West Marches, it was us (the PCs) versus the environment. The closest it came to that was that sometimes when a group had found something interesting, but wasn’t “finished” with it, they might not tell everyone else about it. But even that usually didn’t last long since it was rare that the exact same group would go out together again.
Also I would not describe it as “multiple parties” – it was a large pool of PCs that would arrange themselves based on the schedule and what the plan was. I think I played with every other player in the game at least once, probably several times. This removed a lot of competition between the players.
I think one of the interesting things about West Marches for me was the fact that there was a large pool of players in the game. Each session was with a new mix of players but each PC still had a rich, connected history to the game. That and the fact that other stuff was happening in the game and things would change when I was not “there”. Reading the game summaries from a group that went out and realizing that the items in the cave they found were related to the Kinslayer sword I was (somewhat secretly) tracking down, made the environment seem more realistic.
So you will lose a bit of that if it’s the more standard same group of 4-5 players each session, but there’s still a lot of fun just running a sandbox environment where the players drive the action and plot and decide where they are going. In fact the first several WM games were just 4 of us playing until Ben recruited more people. Even then the sandbox style was really fun. Even your pool of 6 (5 PCs?) mixing it up should give you some of the feel of the full WM experience, and maybe you can get some more players. We found it was easier to get people to join the game since the schedule commitment is much lower – play when you can it’s no big deal and you aren’t blocking games if you can’t play.
I’m curious as to how well this would work with only a handful of people (just one party). My friends and I are newcomers to D&D, we all started with 4E Keep on the Shadowfell just last summer and have played a bit of Scales of War. There’s only 6 of us that play (and our usual sessions are usually 3 or 4 PCs).
Is the “competitive” nature of having multiple parties a big enough draw that only having one group would be a game-breaker? I suspect not, but it might make the world feel a little more stale. Has anyone tried with a small group, is it even worth attempting without finding more players?
Oh, and Mr. Pfaff, I read through your blog, it answered a lot of questions I had about a 4E version of West Marches. I look forward to more posts! The mountain range on your group’s map with a big “NO!” arrow pointing at it made my day.
I’m currently running a D20 Modern story-driven game, but shifting it towards a more sandbox approach has been on my mind since the beginning : your post (and the comments of others) have given me tons of ideas. I owe you all!
Congratulations, Ars Ludi. You’ve just been wanged by Penny Arcade. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/1/6/
@ James A Beggs
if you have different members rather than a single established group, what do you do if a set of players end the session “still out there” in the wild, and next time some of those players show up, and others do not, with some not involved in last session also showing up?
The key was that the scheduling was all done over email beforehand, so you know who is going to be there and it was simply forbidden to schedule a game with a mix of people “still out there” and people in town. If a party did not make it back to town then they had to schedule their next session as a group. That is they did not get to play again until they could all get together – this was the main incentive to the players to get back to town at the end of the session. And since they didn’t get back to town, while they were in schedule limbo the other players would be scheduling other games and going out and playing.
On very rare occasions there would be exceptions but for the most part it was just enforced that only people in town could join a “new” game session.
[…] the last West Marches post advises “be careful not to change the focus to urban adventure instead of exploration”, […]
@ Stanley (#167) — That’s awesome Stanley! Kudos to you and everyone else running their own game.
What did you do to retain new players? I don’t like watching their characters die in the first session, but at the same time they did it to themselves. Yet I’d like recruit more people into the game.
Clear communication, which it sounds like you’re already doing. Tell them flat out that the world is not built to keep them safe, that they have to pick and choose their battles. Recruit the veteran players to help convey that message. It can be a rough adjustment for people used to adventures designed to adapt to them — it certainly was in the original West Marches. And some people just won’t like it. That’s cool, it’s not for everyone. So long as you’re clear from the start what the model is, they should have no reason to complain.
Telegraphing “danger!” can be a challenging. Showing the players something completely out of their league can be a better hint than things just slightly above their level. Players think “hmm, maybe we can beat a gargoyle…” but if they spot a thirty foot tall giant strolling through the forest in the distance, ripping out trees looking for things to eat, they are more likely to realize they have to pick their battles.
Also, don’t rely on players having Monster Manual knowledge. Not all players know what different monsters are more dangerous than others. If it isn’t really big, or they don’t see it do something scary, or a classic concept (aka basilisk, vampire), players have no way to know a monster is particularly dangerous unless someone says to them “avoid those things, they’ll kill ya…”
(its such interesting and fun dynamic gaming with different mixtures of PCs every session).
Yes it is! That’s one of the most fun parts, and a key ingredient of the West Marches. Constantly shifting parties keeps everyone on their toes (GM included).
@ Neil Carr
How long was a typical game session? Four, six, eight hours?
6-7 hours average. Some very long games. We often planned to quit by a particular time, but then people would get sucked in and stay late.
So while in a sandbox game anything goes and players can spend lots of time planning or do other non-encounter activities
Shift as much planning as you can to email. When players show up, it’s time to head out.
Ultimately what we’re trying to do is achieve a frequency of encounters that will allow most outings into the wilds to be done in one session. The players have a great deal of control of whether that is possible with their own actions, but the DM is in control of the frequency and percentage chance of encounters occurring. Basically, unless the players choose to be slow, wander, or get themselves into some kind of trouble, then the math should see them back at town by the end of the session.
Here’s my simple advice: make no plans whatsoever about how many encounters you have in a session.
Let it depend _entirely_ on what the players do. If they go somewhere that’s crowded, they may have constant encounters. If they go somewhere lonely, they could have zero encounters, but still do lots of exploring, info gathering, etc. I know it goes against normal GM instincts, but it’s how the model works.
Let the players figure out their own pacing — they should look at the clock and decide when they should turn around and head back to town (or stay out and force the group to schedule together for a second session). If you start doing that for them, you’re taking them out of the driver’s seat. Tell them that’s the deal ahead of time. It’s part of their job.
I’ve been in games like this before…. like, over 20 years ago. I’ve noticed that GMs have gravitated generally towards modular-like games for the most part.
For me, as a GM, I tend to run metaplot campaigns, where every session is towards some long distant goal: defeat Lord Sauron kind of stuff, and I’ve been told overall its my best work.
That being said, however, I’ve always wanted to run a sandbox like I had played in with other GMs when I was much younger.
And I must say, being a very experienced GM now, overall this idea sounds very doable and fantastic. I just have to ask, however… if you have different members rather than a single established group, what do you do if a set of players end the session “still out there” in the wild, and next time some of those players show up, and others do not, with some not involved in last session also showing up?
How long was a typical game session? Four, six, eight hours?
Two friends and I are putting together a WM style campaign and we’re experienced with living games like Living Greyhawk and Pathfinder Society. In those games they are designed to be played in 4-5 hours, so we’re used to episodic play and enjoy it because we all are busy with our lives.
So while in a sandbox game anything goes and players can spend lots of time planning or do other non-encounter activities, we’re still trying to gauge a general idea of how many encounters one could expect in a session on average.
Living Greyhawk was around three encounters, and Pathfinder Society is around five encounters. Now those games are designed we prebuilt encounters, so it won’t line up with the randomness of sandbox play, but I guess I’m trying to figure out some mathematical average that can be aimed for with random encounter checks.
I’d imagine lots of encounters would be over quickly due to imbalances, with either players tromping the encounter or running away quickly. So a guestimate on my part would be that in a six hour session we’d maybe have 10 encounters, with some fast, some slow, a lot of them random, and some the players seek out.
Ultimately what we’re trying to do is achieve a frequency of encounters that will allow most outings into the wilds to be done in one session. The players have a great deal of control of whether that is possible with their own actions, but the DM is in control of the frequency and percentage chance of encounters occurring. Basically, unless the players choose to be slow, wander, or get themselves into some kind of trouble, then the math should see them back at town by the end of the session.
Do you have any advice on trying to achieve that kind of result?
@ Neil Carr
Gold – How much gold was handed out and what did the players use it for?
Treasure was generally pretty scarce. The players could answer better what they bought, but it was the usual array of masterwork-everything, scroll writing, and healing potions (when they could get them).
Many PCs who struck it big revelled in conspicuously blowing their money in town, earning fame and popularity with the locals. Wealth is a character motivator, but player’s are more motivated by XP. Treasure is best when it’s spent, so the player can get their character back to doing what they want, which is adventuring.
I can see an issue evolve where people are wandering around looking for interesting things and using the meta game of a GM asking for various skill rolls as a way to play “Battleship” in deducing where a hidden feature is. “Well, we know there is something interesting in the woods because the GM kept asking for spot checks. Let’s go back until one of us finally makes the roll.”
Nothing truly interesting was ever found with a die roll, especially not a passive check. Take a look at Don’t Roll, Think. Sometimes I used secret Wilderness Lore checks to see if parties were going where they intended, but never to discover new things.
I spent a good portion of yesterday reading through all of these posts, very inspiring stuff and reminding me of the good old days.
A few things that I hadn’t seen asked before:
Gold – How much gold was handed out and what did the players use it for? I can see with low level play that if you are a martial character then saving up for plate mail will use use up a lot of your treasure earnings, but outside of expensive armor what were people spending money on? I’m quite happy with the idea of no magic shop in town, but what “bling” did people get to purchase with their piles of gold?
Dice in the open – I’ve been playing this way for years which is a great way to keep up the drama and not descend into a pool of fudge, but what about all of those spot and wilderness checks? As a GM were you making secret rolls for players? I can see an issue evolve where people are wandering around looking for interesting things and using the meta game of a GM asking for various skill rolls as a way to play “Battleship” in deducing where a hidden feature is. “Well, we know there is something interesting in the woods because the GM kept asking for spot checks. Let’s go back until one of us finally makes the roll.”
Just wanted to reply to a lot of these 4th Edition sandbox comments.
I’m running a 4th Edition D&D West Marches Style Campaign and I’ve run into a few of the issues mentioned here, but I definitely would NOT change the system for anything. I believe the “dungeon-crawl” focus of 4th Edition suits the West Marches style very well. I have had to do plenty of tweaking and yes, some extra preparation.
Notably, I’ve modified the Treasure Parcel system a lot and I’ve had to spend a lot of time building custom random encounter charts. You can check out my West Marches blog – http://porthavenholde.wordpress.com – I’ve been writing in to specifically document my struggles with 4th Edition as a sandbox system.
I went from 4 players up to about 12 in a matter of weeks. We play about 2-3 times A WEEK. That’s how much my players love this game. I used to play weekly at the most. We’ve been playing for a couple months now and the highest level PCs are only 3rd level – that’s partly because of PC death that seems to run rampant.
I would say for those of you folks who are giving 4th Edition a shot, it takes a little effort – it takes a little finesse, but eventually those hurdles can be overcome and it really pays off with the dungeon crawl focus on tactical combat, interesting creatures and locales, and the slew of awesome player options and classes (this seems to help with PC death, because players are always eager to try out a new “build”).
Thanks! You know, I think I saw this on another website before, but I forgot all about it!
That is exactly what I do!
Well, maybe it’s just me, but this strikes me as a job for Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom.
Hey, I started a sandbox game with Zodiac Final Fantasy RPG and just after my first game, I ran into a problem which persisted to my second game:
How do you get people to return to town before they end the session?
See, I’m running on OpenRPG, and trying to attract other people to the group (which was originally just 4 people by the time the first game started) The session ended abruptly with somebody starting a fire just inside the dungeon entrance and to make a long story short, people left while we were stuck.
To complicate matters, a few new players from other games in OpenRPG or who dropped by wanted in, and I wanted to grow the players so I tried to write them just for the second session.
The end result was that the second session is looking a lot like a standard game, and people quit the game even more abruptly, so we’re still in the dungeon with everyone thinking they’re all one big happy family of players.
Help?
After three sessions and a ton of work, I am now confident that 4e was a bad choice for me running a West Marches style campaign. This was made even worse because I tried to stay very strictly to the 4e rules. The net effect was not fun for me to run.
I think that while the West Marches style games need to be consistent, the still GM needs to have room to improvise and good tools for doing so. While certain things need to be fleshed out, if each session makes you go “crap! I can’t figure out when I’ll have time to prep this!” then something is probably wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “thing that’s wrong” in my case was simply a lack of spare time – but if spare time is an issue for you and you’re thinking about running this way, learn from my mistake!
Big thanks to Ben for reminding me of a key feature I love about fantasy gaming that I had forgotten – the joy of exploration. It’s become all too easy to use published modules, focus on critters or characters, and ignore the lure of the unknown.
The group dynamics rising from this type of campaign are fantastic. They could definitely keep a GM on his/her toes – group competition, intrigue (is group A revealing an accurate map? – who got there first?), and interpersonal mayhem could be unleashed.
For those of you using Savage Worlds in your West Marches campaigns, I ran across Joel Sparks’ Advanced Dungeons & Savages. Great conversion from old school D&D complete with spells, magic items, & detailed classic character roles. It’s a free download (no registration required & no malware from my download) at Dragonsfoot — http://www.dragonsfoot.org/sw/
I also found a wealth of Savage Worlds materials at http://savagepedia.wikispaces.com/
Thanks to everyone here posting about their campaigns – it’s a great read!
Hey,
Just thought I’d drop in and say how my “Expeditions in the Northlands” campaign is going.
I have a pool of around 7 players now. It was around 11 but three people moved away or are too far away to make it regularly. One person played a few sessions then decided that kind of campaign wasn’t for him. We’ve been playing since last spring. Summer saw about a month hiatus of the campaign. But overall, players and myself–The DM–have been enjoy ourselves. One of my players set up an email list for everybody to use. So far its working great. The highest PC level is 3. I’m using D&D 3.5e.
Just as mentioned in the West Marches campaign, players do a lot of running away–but only after they get in over their heads.. I have had plenty of character deaths so far. Sometimes they run into things beyond their level. The most famous being the gargoyle in a nearby dungeon. While the rest of the dungeon was easy (even for 1st level characters), I planted this gargoyle at the entrance to a vault with the real treasure within. The gargoyle trounced them the first time (killing half of the group before the rest ran away). They had no weapons that could really harm it. Despite this, they came back a second time. It beat them again. The almost defeated it on a third try after a couple got to second level. Finally, some one came up with casting “magic weapon” on the fighter’s greatsword. The fighter destroyed the gargoyle in two hits. It was almost anticlimactic. But man, did the players cheer after that gargoyle went down!
Some players have complained how tough the campaign is. One player remarked “I can’t believe you threw a gargoyle at us a first level.” To which I replied “I can’t believe you went down the corridor after I told you how menacing the gargoyled looked and I certainly can’t believe you kept fighting the thing after it tore apart the fighter in the first round.” That player is no longer with the group.
In fact, I’ve noticed that new players have a rough time. They have a tendency to charge into situation and get themselves in over their heads. And this usually leads to character deaths. It fact, my main problem with this “West Marches”-style campaign is retaining new players. They don’t have this “old school” mindset, thinking that encounters are balanced in their favor. They either soon realize that teamwork and problem solving are needed to overcome certain situations, or they quit the group.
Veteran players (that is, players who’ve been around 3+ sessions) usually act with caution. And they love it, because they know they earn what the get.
What did you do to retain new players? I don’t like watching their characters die in the first session, but at the same time they did it to themselves. Yet I’d like recruit more people into the game.
(its such interesting and fun dynamic gaming with different mixtures of PCs every session).
Thank you Ben. I hope we can meet someday, I owe you a beer, sir!
@Nick – I think there is a myth to the idea that one has to write reams of information before one can start a sandbox campaign. It is true that one has to do preparation, but I tend to be a “just in time” preparer – I try to stay about 1 to 2 games ahead of the players. With multilevel dungeons, that’s easier – those can soak up about 4 to 5 sessions, easy. One of my dungeons has seen about 10 sessions and they’ve not finished 2nd level! Of course, it’s a dynamic dungeon where it can and will be restocked.
If my players decide to head out somewhere that I’m not prepared for, then I have broad brush-strokes of about 2 weeks travel already established (vague ideas) and I ask for a few minutes (about 15) to prepare. They don’t know if I have detailed stuff or not (a couple of things I do because I got so “wee” about the idea, I had to detail it out…) but I have been known to also let the dice tell the story of what they find.
Congrats Chgowiz! I read your 20th session post and it definitely sounds like you’ve gotten the knack.
@ Nick – A sandbox dungeon could work, but you would definitely want lots of entrances/exits to avoid absurd bottlenecks, parties stepping on each other, etc. It wouldn’t hurt to move the first encounters several branches past any entrance (so you don’t even see spiders until you’ve gone down a few hallways).
@ Ara
Others have asked this question, but I’m going to ask it a little differently. How _big_ was your map? How many miles, or days of travel (whatever you were using to measure it)? How big were the various regions?
I’m trying to figure out how to answer this in a useful way. Regions were not evenly shaped and rate of travel varied based on whether the party was exploring or rushing through a known area.
In very crude terms, most adventuring took place within 5 days travel of town. Most low-level places were a day or two away, scaling up as you moved farther away. The longest expedition on record (that I recall) is a party that went all the way to the Sacred Lakes and then explored/camped out for weeks. No one ever expected to see them again.
But don’t do it that way just because I did. Physical distance only matters in proportion to the difficulty of travel (random encounters + how much detail you spend describing overland travel and pathfinding). You could have the nearest action five weeks away so long as it was easy to summarize traveling for those five weeks. Personally, I prefer smaller.
Nick, the mega-dungeon idea is a great one — a distilled sandbox experience where the competition between the various conquerors and cartographers would be most fierce, and every player would have every incentive to play as often as possible. I like it a lot. IMO, it would be less prep work, and were I to run a “proper” WM game outside my little circle, I would take that approach due to the instant accessibility of dungeon crawling.
Also for anyone playing 4E, the DMG2 just codified the inherent bonus house-rule: goodbye vanilla magic items.
I’ve been hearing about these “Western Marches” campaigns for a long time now, but never came here to read up on them. The idea is genius, especially for watching all of the players interact as players and as characters.
Anyway, I’m a big fan of mega-dungeons. I think that a mega-dungeon campaign could be run in the Western Marches style, and I think that it would be fantastic. The single greatest problem that I see is that DM/GM preparation would have to be massive before the campaign even started. I’m curious to hear what anyone else thinks.
Hi Ben! I wanted to drop you a note that the Dark Ages campaign, styled on West Marches, just celebrated its twentieth session. We’re about 9 months into it, averaging about 2 to 3 sessions a month – we’ve had two interruptions due to illness and my father’s passing. I’m up to two groups, with about 8 to 10 core players in total. I’ve had 21 people play in the campaign so far, several one-shots, a few threesie/foursies and the rest are pretty hard-core now.
The players are around 2nd to 3rd level – we had one near TPK that reset everything. They’ve finally started really wilderness exploring. There are 3 main areas they’ve been working on, with two others that are starting to get interest. 99% of the advancement of “the story” is player driven or random encounter driven. They’ve explored roughly 40% of my initial “2 day out” maps.
I wanted to pass this note on and say that if anyone wants to trade tips/tricks or their own long-term ideas for a West Marches style campaign, I’d love to start that dialogue.
Ben,
Others have asked this question, but I’m going to ask it a little differently. How _big_ was your map? How many miles, or days of travel (whatever you were using to measure it)? How big were the various regions?
Ryan – Thanks for the pdf. I’ve been following that discussion on Storygames as well. I will be using BW as my system for the sandbox game.
This discussion is highly relevant to anyone trying to do “West Marches” style 4e.
http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=10373
Basically, don’t expect to have a 7-combat-encounter expedition take a single 3-hour session (I made this mistake in my first game). In my case it looks like 2 or 3 encounters rounds out a good 3 to 4 hour expedition.
This means that with 4e, we can’t make the players roll random encounters going through each region – any regions but the closest, just going there or back will eat a whole session. I decided to get rid of random encounters entirely from my version of the model and just build 3 combat encounters (1 on the way, 2 at the site) based on where the players say they’re going.
As a rule of thumb, I’m saying that if your level is higher than all the things in a zone, your party travels through it unmolested.
Well, I’m not Ben, but I put everything important onto 1 page and the players really responded to it.
http://tagsfolly.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/out-in-the-wastes3.pdf
If I could do it again I’d try for half as much text.
Ben,
How did you pitch the game to your players? What did you tell them? Thanks! I just found this series of articles. They are great!
ara
I’ve started running a West March style game. The wiki for the game is here:
http://westmarchsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Saga_of_Westmarch_Wiki
It’s a little unusual in that it is a online game, so sessions run a little slow. In the first 4 hour game, the delvers only managed to travel for 1 day and only had 1 combat encounter.
I’m also running it using GURPS, so I’ve had to do a lot more prepwork than most people. GURPS doesn’t have anywhere near as good a monster list as the D&D clones do, so I’ve had to create a lot more of my own monsters. So far, it’s been good.
The players haven’t been doing much to contribute to the wiki. I want to kick them, but I recognize that’s their choice.
@ #142, Cr0m:
Check out Jeff Rients Carousing Rules at http://jrients.blogspot.com/2008/12/party-like-its-999.html — they work pretty well for a WM-style game.
I had a lot more time to think about this and I’ve decided that most of the sites in the environment will be built for 1-2 encounters, and the random encounters will be less likely.
I’m aiming for an expedition to be 3-4 encounters, which is 4-5 hours of play.
Thanks Ben. I am using 4e, so the combats are about an hour each, and since the players schedule during evenings that means only 2 combats per night.
I wanted that play-to-win feeling and my player base was clamoring for it. I do find it a very good game, but I get the feeling that my parties won’t mingle much since they’ll be together for 4 sessions at a time. I’m highly tempted to solve the problem with a network of linked portals, though (and it’d fit the history of the setting).
[Ryan, I moved your comment to this thread, since it’s where all the “how to” discussion is going on]
Because I set up my first dungeon about 3 days out from the town, and checked for random encounters night and day. At this rate an “expedition” to a pretty local place will take 4 or 5 sessions.
Four to five sessions? Yikes. There are only a few variables at work: either you have too many random encounters per day, fights are taking too long, or the dungeon is too far away.
IMO three days walk is pretty far for the closest spot — the closest locations in West Marches were less than a day if you knew the way, but could be two or more if you were wandering/searching for them. Of course those are level 1 or 2 areas, except for sealed higher level pockets. But that’s just personal preference. Your setting could have the nearest dungeons weeks away, you just need to speed up the process of getting there to make it work in a game session.
If you’re playing 4E, you may have to jettison small fast fights in favor of fewer but more involved fights. The system is not as geared to quick-and-dirty as 3E (which of course is slower than 1E, etc — you could run a whole fight in Basic in a matter of minutes, but of course you are making fewer choices).
Ben, my biggest stumbling block is setting up the map. How did you relate
days of travel : locations : random encounters?
Because I set up my first dungeon about 3 days out from the town, and checked for random encounters night and day. At this rate an “expedition” to a pretty local place will take 4 or 5 sessions. How did you work it out?
@147 Harlequin, I’ve tried 4e and it’s not for me. Thanks for the rec though. The combats did seem more peppy!
In the West marches, did the PCs ever interact with the “outside” civilizations of the world, or was every interaction hostile?
Basically, I’m looking at skills like Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate (outside of getting the bloodied bad guys to run), and wondering if the monsters (kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls, etc…) ever communicated formally with the PCs? And, if not, how were these types of skills used considering NPC interaction in town was at a minimum?
Pretty hostile. There were NPCs in the wilds you could deal with, folks like the Mad Hermit, the Keeper of Bees or the Witch of Pike Hollow, or even bandits, plus some talking monsters like goblins if you wanted to try them. But those were a small segment of the game. Charter was exploration and danger, not diplomacy.
In town those skills were useful to speed things up (Want to find out what the guard knows about the bandits? Roll Diplomacy. Want to convince the gate guard the unconscious rust monster is dead so you can sneak it into town? Roll Bluff.)
Also, how did you use knowledge skills such as History – considering this is a unexplored territory, how did you handle history skills?
Taking a blanket “History of the West Marches” was right out. Entirely cheesy. History of particular topics, like “History of the Duke’s Wars” was fine and could lead to interesting snippets in some cases. But generally I was pretty strict about it. The idea is not to buy something that undermines the fun of the game — you want to go out and gather info, not just roll to get info.
As far as using up treasure, characters had a weekly “upkeep” cost in town that was scaled to level. So a 1st level character only had to spend a modest amount on room and board (and clothes and largesse) but a higher level character spent more. The key was the increase was voluntary — a 6th level character could be frugal and only spend as much as a 1st level character, but that determined how the people of the town perceived them, as either important figures or paupers. If you spend like a 1st level character, they see you as a 1st level character. You could also spend above your level to impress the townsfolk. 90% of the time big spending gave you a bonus to interactions, and 10% exactly the opposite (“grr, who does he think he is, throwing his gold around?!?”).
Tactical combat was an important part of West Marches, but of course different groups will have different preferences about that (let’s not get derailed into a 3E vs 4E discussion). The essential bit is that player decisions impact the results, that good choices help you survive and bad choices hurt.
And that’s a good reminder: some of these details of how I ran West Marches are just personal preferences. You might run it entirely differently. Just keep in mind the core principle: players are in control, they decide their own fate.
Cr0m, regarding this: “I ask because one reason my group stopped playing 3/3.5e was the glacial pace of combat. The other was the arms race of optimization for combat (”Hey guys, he didn’t take Weapon Focus! Haha!”).”
Have you tried 4E at all? I ask because I don’t think you’ve mentioned it, and it does shore-up those two issues in 3.5. Combat is fast-paced, and character optimization isn’t nearly as important (at least not in heroic tier). Also, all the classes are genuinely interesting and unique, which may keep your players interested.
@143 P Armstrong: I’m a fan of your blog! Thanks for the ideas for spending gold.
@145 Tommi: double-dipping gold for xp would definitely be popular among the players, especially considering the mortality rate. I’ll have to think about that.
The other reason I’m wondering about 3.5e is because I think eventually my players are going to want to play something other than the B/X classes. I’m the big nostalgia freak among them and I think they’re humoring me. :)
cr0m; how about gold spent in ale&whores (or the equivalent; any non-adventurous thing really, like paying for someone to build a house for oneself) turns into experience? Other adventurers selling maps? Every now and then, a wandering merchant with an interesting item or few. A skilled healer so that gold spent provides faster healing rates, maybe.
Michael,
4E skills are broad in scope and they encourage you to use them via the skill challenges (but there’s no reason you can’t modify or work outside that framework). Diplomacy allows you to parley with that band of orcs, history allows you to determine the origin of a strange artifact. Hell, in a WM style game, I’d think History would be king — (“Ah, this is the seal of old King Rockbottom — his castle must be close. The songs of old tell about a valley with a river running through it…”) Arcana, religion, nature, dungeoneering and the like all represent a character’s ability to “figure something out” based on those knowledges. Intimidate and bluff can even be used on monsters in creative ways (to scare them off or lure them into your trap).
I have also been using classic D&D (B/X in my case) for a WM-style campaign. Mortality rates have been high in my game as well – classic characters are fragile.
As for gold – as you say gp’s are an end unto themselves with gp = xp.
Other uses, in order of immediacy, are:
– retainers (as you mention, they go through a lot of them);
– information (buying the Captain of the Guard drinks to find out if he knows anything about the abandoned monastery);
– donations (the party will be popular with the local high priest later);
– spell research (everyone should be interested in the M-U coming up with some new spells to help);
– magic item creation (far in the future); and
– building a stronghold (also, far in the future).
Nice to hear of another classic D&D game!
Hi Ben/Frost/other WM players,
How long were your typical sessions? How many encounters were typical? I ask because one reason my group stopped playing 3/3.5e was the glacial pace of combat. The other was the arms race of optimization for combat (“Hey guys, he didn’t take Weapon Focus! Haha!”).
Did either cause a problem for WM?
Also, I’d like to take a moment to plug my own WM-style game (the url linked in my nickname). I tried a sandbox last summer using Savage Worlds, but the system didn’t have the crunchy incremental boosts needed to keep players hungry.
This spring, I started up again using Redbox D&D, and it’s been a massive success. Two regular groups of players and loads of exploration/note comparing and competitiveness. Nothing like a system where the amount of loot recovered translates directly into xp for driving play.
The only hiccup is that they haven’t explored much of the wilderness. They keep heading back to the same two dungeons. On the other hand, now everyone shivers when someone mentions “the rope bridge”, LOL.
The combat is very fast, as is prep. My only dissatisfaction is the lack of anything to strive for other than xp. Mortality rates are high among PCs (45%) and ridiculous among henchmen (65%), and there’s nothing to buy after you’ve made your first 1,000 gold pieces.
Hence my interest in 3.5e for this style of game. :)
In addition, I do have another question:
In the West marches, did the PCs ever interact with the “outside” civilizations of the world, or was every interaction hostile?
Basically, I’m looking at skills like Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate (outside of getting the bloodied bad guys to run), and wondering if the monsters (kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls, etc…) ever communicated formally with the PCs? And, if not, how were these types of skills used considering NPC interaction in town was at a minimum?
Also, how did you use knowledge skills such as History – considering this is a unexplored territory, how did you handle history skills?
Hey guys thanks for the excellent responses. We’ve actually played two sessions now and I think the players are getting the hang of the “get back to town”. I’m also getting the hang of DMing and using navigation rules to determine whether the PCs make it to their intended destination or not. And, when rolling for random encounters, I usually give the PCs the option (so far anyways) to engage the encounter or not (perhaps they see them on the tree-line and have the option to attack or not).
I definitely didn’t mean “save points” in the sense of ‘well, if we die we can reload the game here’. No. I meant it like you suggested – the PCs find a place, hack some trees down, get some stone, refurbish the tower, and build it up into an outpost. I’ve actually already had players wanting to add to the town – building churches, etc… I’ve let them run with these ideas thinking it would make them more invested in the world and simply fluffed it during their “downtime”.
I’m still working on developing a calendar – any suggestions for online tools to help with this?
Another thing I’m struggling with is the “Treasure Tells A Story”. I’ve been trying to flesh out the treasure by putting profiles on coins, tapestries with figures and places, a ring that alludes to a mysterious ring of trees, but I’m finding it hard to come up with unique ideas. I don’t know if this is because only a small portion of my world is fleshed out or if I’m just stumped.
Can I request a follow-up article from Ben “Treasure Tells A Story Techniques” or something?
Haha.
Thanks guys. You’ve really helped me make my West Marches campaign great so far – I think my players are having a blast and I owe a lot to the advice given here.
One quick comment that Tacoma’s msg made me think of:
It may be no fun slogging through the same old stuff. But again, once they get the hang of the game world, it isn’t that slow.
I don’t think that you shoudl be “slogging through the same old stuff”. If the party is returning to an area they’ve been to before it should either be quick & easy (if they know the way really well); or it should be longer and more difficult. But this should not mean “the same stuff”, they may get lost and wander into a new & different area, find something else new (at least to them), or hit new encounters.
Unless they are doing something stupid like always heading out of town on the first day of the full moon into the wolf infested moors over and over again (a common WM tactic) they should be mostly getting new stuff. A different encounter, finding new stuff wahtever.
They just may not be getting to their ‘goal’, which may be ok if they are in the right mindset. Really these ruins that you just got lost and stumbled on may not be the ones you were looking for but they do seem interesting.
Mind if I chime in on the “save points” and “quick travel”?
If players want to build a safehouse, there’s no reason why they can’t, right? Get out there with your tools, fell some trees, dig some basement, etc. Or take over a dungeon space and re-fortify.
The problem is that if these characters don’t return to a central place (the town) they cannot group up with another team and go out elsewhere. If they’re in a safehouse in the forest, a player with his character in the safehouse could come to the game and wait just in case the other group comes by so he can join them. But that’s farfetched and the timing may not even be right. After all, Group 2 starts out effectively on the same day Group 1 does.
I hope you don’t mean that a “save point” would actually be a place where the game could revert to in case something bad happened ;)
As for quick travel, on one hand I think it’s horrid and on another I think it’s worthwhile.
Con: The reasoning behind quick travel is that you can get there easier because you already know the way. If you do things how Ben describes, they will naturally get there faster because they know the way as players. And if they screw up, they will get there slower or not at all. It organically creates a quick travel system.
Pro: It may be no fun slogging through the same old stuff. But again, once they get the hang of the game world, it isn’t that slow.
I guess if they want to handwave the exploration (walking through something once doesn’t make it “Area Complete” and permanently eliminate fog of war), it’s up to you to humor them or not.
I think that scaling what is a “magic” item seems like a great way to work this into 4E. having the lower plusses simply be high quality and not necessarily ‘magic’ in the usual sense.
BTW, keep in mind that there does not need to be a correlation between item value & historical/plot significance. You could easily have a treasure that had a +1 sword and a rusty old sword hilt that had the clues to the location of ; if you are doing your job really well they will be just as excited about the rusty old hilt as they are about the +1 sword. Obviously the more powerful the item is the more likely that it has some story.
As for the “end in town each session”; (speaking as a player in WM) really that’s more of the goal one that’s very strongly encouraged. As you mention, a group may spend the session just finding the dungeon and if they are still in good shape why would they turn around and head back instead of going in?
Really I think this depends on how long a session is and how much you want to spend on wilderness encounters vs. “the dungeon” (whatever that happens to be). If folks are enjoying the wilderness encounters does it matter if they don’t get to the ‘dungeon’? If they are annoyed that they are spending so much time traveling and with wandering monsters, reduce the number of encounters and gloss over the travel more.
One other thing that may be contributing to this is if you are focusing a lot on the ‘locations’ and less on simple exploration. If a game is always about finding/getting to a specific location (i.e. ‘the dungeon’) then they will of course be impatient to get there (the random encounters can feel too much like delaying the “real” game). But if exploration of the wilderness is a goal then spending a whole game session “wandering around” is fun & productive.
Your mention of “save points” (what is this a video game? Oh right its 4e ? ) and quick travel times brings up one possible solution. If the group (or some members of it) have traveled to that location before they should have a much easier time getting there and avoiding encounters and so forth. Especially if they have some skill in wilderness survival (the wizard who just followed the ranger the last 3 times he went won’t be as much help, but if you take that ranger along you get there easily). This really made those skills much more important and makes things much more realistic. It’s better to take a skilled tracker/woodsman with you and there’s a real difference between trying to explore new territory and going somewhere you have been before. So the first time the group goes to the cave in the mountains they may get lost and spend a week looking for it (many random encounters); next time they actually find it, but are too wiped out & low on food to really do more than a cursory exploration, the next time they easily get to it and can do a full exploration.
I would not say that they “have to head back to town”; but it should be encouraged. Especially as groups got to higher levels (and could survive in the wilderness longer) we did get into situations where we did not get back into town by the end of the session. In that case that group had to game together again and they were not able to mix in with other groups until they get back to town (of course). They are paused until they can game again, which should really push them to set up the next game ASAP. This sort of thing can make the scheduling tricky and makes the game time calendar complicated for you to keep track of. I think our rule was that if the group wanted to pause and play a second session they had to schedule it at that game, and if it looked like it might be too long until the next session then they had to head back to town.
One interesting thing about the calendar is that if group A has a game session where they spend 2 weeks exploring and return to town, in most cases they just advanced the game calendar by 2 weeks. The other players not in that game were resting/studying in town. It is sometimes possible for group B to say they want to go out and do something during that 2 weeks, but in most cases once group A comes back and announces to the town that they found X or whatever that’s pretty much set the calendar. Of course if group B scheduled their game before group A played you can make sure that this works out. But of course when a group goes out and pauses, they have not really advanced the calendar and other groups can schedule games where they leave town the day after they left or whatever. But then working out the return dates can be tricky.
So really the “must return to town” is about scheduling and keeping the game calendar sensible.
Of course Ben probably has a better perspective as the person who kept the calendar.
You’re right. Perhaps the +1 items have simply less historical value (in the Treasure Tells A Story sense), and the high-end items (+2) are more flavorful and have greater ties to the world. The +1 might be all the weapons forged by the great dwarven master Kurjo, but that one +2 out there might be his masterpiece.
Excellent idea.
I do have another question for Ben and Frost – or whomever.
My players are having “issues” with the whole, “end in town at the end of each session”. They have ideas like, save points (forward bases) they can crash at closer to the wilderness, quick travel (to places they’ve been before), and they are also worried about time constraints and getting to a location and finding it and then having to head back to town before exploring it.
I’ve explained that they might spend a session simply finding a dungeon – and it’s motivating for them to come back and play again so they can loot it before someone else. In addition, I’ve explained that if they do “pause” out in the wilderness, they can’t adventure with other folks who go out during that same time.
Did you have similar complaints? How did you handle the “end at town” rule? Did you have paused groups? How did you handle that? Were there ever “forward bases” parties could rest at relatively safely (they’ve had ideas like clearing out a fort or something and requesting troops from the Duke to “hold it”)?
Any suggestions, advice?
Michael, you can always downgrade the color of those +1 items (e.g.: exceptional quality, no particular lore save in the collective sense perhaps (elvish longswords of great antiquity…)). By RAW they only pawn for about 50gp and doing so won’t cheapen your world (“…His Grace the Duke adds it to his collection…”). Meanwhile, you can save the +2 items-of-bad-ass-property for the great rewards. They won’t need more than +2 anyway, and even +1 is “enough” to push-through the baddies most of the time.
[…] August 25, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment So, after getting some advice from Ben and Frost, I’ve decided that magic items should be rare, but because of 4th Edition’s reliance on […]
Ben, thanks for the kind remarks about the blog. You’re right, I just need to jump right in and get things going. A couple players have set up a game for this Wednesday so I’m pretty hyped about it. Thanks for replying to my questions/concerns and coming up with the excellent concept.
Thanks for the feedback guys. Honestly, I’m torn because unlike 3E, 4E has the math of magic item bonuses “built in” to the math and without the +1 sword, a 6th level fighter just doesn’t match up with monsters of that level. I’ve considered just giving a flat +1 to all defenses, attacks, and damage at certain levels, but I don’t see that really being a fix considering other items will still be sought after and created.
So, I guess I’m going to have to allow magic items (considering they can be created with a ritual available to PCs). There’s little to no way around it. But, one thing I can do is this – I have a level cap of 10. Perhaps the really “rare” items, the ones there might be only one or two of are level 11 and higher (items the PCs can’t craft) and maybe even a relic or two.
In addition, all the items found in the world have history clues (good read on the Treasure Tells A Story blog entry) to hopefully make them more memorable and “magical” so to speak – make the flavor magical and the function functional.
There were magic items in WM? how come I missed that?!
(just kidding, _I think_ I remember seeing a magic item or two).
Seriously, I felt that the scarcity of magic items was a cool thing. Made finding treasure that much mroe interesting and special. I find that often in games you end up with a very analytical (and even bored) approach to magic items: “ok the sword we found is a +2, who wants it? I’ve got a +1 firebrand, lesse you have a +2 dagger, I guess we’ll give it to…”. It’s just another piece of equipment, instead of something “magical” and special.
Not sure how well this would work with 4E though.
Speaking of treasure and making it interesting & special, make sure you read Ben’s post “Treasure Tells A Story”. Having treasure that is also a clue to other plots and areas to explore really makes the WM/sandbox style of game great. If your players spend more time discussing who’s profile is stamped onto the coins and what that might mean then they do discussing how to split the loot you are in a great place.
This was D&D 3 not 4, so the assumptions about magic items were very different. In short: no magic shops. Magic items were very rare and precious. If you want mundane things like bushels of wheat, stay in town. If you want magic and mystery, go into the wilds and crack open some ancient tomb.
Likewise if the PCs are the only adventurers in the area (the West Marches premise), there isn’t much market to support anything like a magic shop. It’s a low-level game in a remote area.
One practical exception was the town’s apothecary, who in addition to cures for common ailments could brew up healing potions for a steep price. He had a limited stock, since he was making them himself. Needless to say, wise adventurers bought them when they could, at least until the PCs inadvertently threatened him with blackmail and drove him out of town…
By the way, very nice blog Michael. Don’t worry about being prepped enough — just start playing and see what happens. The whole model of on-demand gaming is to prevent you from delaying because you’re not sure you’re ready.
Got another question: How did you handle magic item shops? Was there a shop in the West Marches? If so, was anything available – or did you have random items, a percentage for a certain item, etc…? Was treasure randomly generated? Did an economy develop? For example, did people barter items they found for items other people found? Anything else you can tell me about the economy and magic items in the West Marches?
Thanks.
I’ve set up a design blog for my new West Marches campaign for anyone interested – here’s the link: http://porthavenholde.wordpress.com/
Yep, that’s basically how he started it. I believe Ben set up a list that we could use, and then told everyone that scheduling/discussions/game summaries should be sent to that. And that there would be no games run without a scheduling mail sent to the list.
Another effect of having the players drive the scheduling, that I’ve experienced when I GM and do this, is that it feels very different. Instead of trying to get people to come play this game you’ve created, they are coming to you asking to play. Seems like a minor thing, but its not.
Hey thanks for answering those questions so quickly. I’m so used to being the initiator as a DM, I guess I get into that mode easily. I’ll take both of your advice and avoid it. Good stuff.
How did you initially encourage the players to take initiative as far as the email list? Did you just compile a mailing list and send one email out to everyone to get it going or what?
Were there ever times when you didn’t really have a player ask to play but you wanted to keep things rolling?
You certainly could, but I don’t recommend it. If your players aren’t motivated, bring in more players.
Yeah. It’s a slippery slope you’re better off staying away from. It should be the players that want to keep things rolling. You can say, I have a lot of free time coming up, but I think beyond that, you have to obey the rule that the players initiate scheduling. If this core concept is undermined, the players will start having less stake in the game and get passive, the true death knell. Same goes for the DM writing game reports, maps or things in the player’s sphere.
As a player in the original WM, I can say with certainty that the best way to get existing players motivated is to play with other more motivated people — but first revisit Ben’s “Fear the Social Monster” section of this blog entry for it is so true.
So, are you using a real world calendar that simultaneously works in game, or are they separate?
You’re tracking game world time. Say it’s the beginning of the month in the game world. On Monday (real world) you get together to play and the party spends two weeks of game time exploring the swamps. On Thursday another party goes out, but they’re still at the start of the month, so the characters from the Monday game can’t join them even if the players are available to play that day.
It’s a loose process, so fudge when necessary. It just helps prevent some characters from going on every sortie. Remember, the people waiting in town don’t know when the other parties are going to make it back, so unless they have a really good reason to wait indefinitely they should just go.
A crude but effective motivator is rent: charge a standard upkeep cost for room and board in town. Sitting around for weeks doing nothing costs money. Then the characters try to get odd jobs in town while they wait. It’s tragic to watch. Would you hire Revor the axe-wielding barbarian to weed your garden?
Were there ever times when you didn’t really have a player ask to play but you wanted to keep things rolling?
You certainly could, but I don’t recommend it. If your players aren’t motivated, bring in more players.
Third, you mentioned the players providing game summaries and whatnot, and I think that’s great, but as a DM did you ever consider putting out brief snippets of info yourself?
When you start providing game summaries or organization of any sort, you are discouraging the players from taking on that responsibility themselves. I made that mistake in a previous campaign (Promised Land) and it undermined player initiative.
Really there are two very different types of updates — observable facts and unobservable reports. When you say the temple has been discovered, you are saying what the PCs say when they get back to town. That’s bad. If you say “party X returned to town at the end of the week” but nothing more, you are reporting something anyone in the town could see. That’s better, but I still wouldn’t get into that business.
If it’s an NPC announcement, like the Duke has put out a new wanted poster, you could do that, but again it’s even better if you tell players during games and they spread the word.
Fourth, as far as random encounters, how did you determine WHEN to roll to see if an encounter happened? Was it based on distance traveled “ok they’ve gone 10 miles, roll for possible random encounter”, time “ok it’s been 4 hours in game”, or something else?
I did time (X per day) with most terrain encounters ignored if you weren’t moving (quicksand does not come find you).
Fifth, how “small” did you map your regions? 1 mile increments? 5 mile? 10 mile? Etc…
I get this one a lot, but it’s entirely season to taste. I didn’t use a grid at all, as discussed elsewhere.
Right on.
So, I’m a little confused how the “calendar” works. You mentioned at one point that you tracked a calendar signifying when people were out adventuring and I’m having a hard time envisioning how this interacts with the game world. For example, if I track a calendar and I start my first session with a group of 4 and that session ends – I note on my calendar they went out adventuring. Right ok… But, how does that impact another party that goes out a week later (real world time)? So, are you using a real world calendar that simultaneously works in game, or are they separate? Any details you can spare would be great.
My second question pertains to player-driven scheduling. Were there ever times when you didn’t really have a player ask to play but you wanted to keep things rolling? So, perhaps instead of a player initiating the session, you did but simply by putting out on your email list something like, “Hey – I’m free Saturday. Anyone wanna go adventuring?”
Third, you mentioned the players providing game summaries and whatnot, and I think that’s great, but as a DM did you ever consider putting out brief snippets of info yourself? For example, I’m considering using a Twitter account to put out one or two sentence updates, such as “Eldirk Stormwind has arrived in town” or “The Lost Temple of Manatu has been discovered” – any insight?
Fourth, as far as random encounters, how did you determine WHEN to roll to see if an encounter happened? Was it based on distance traveled “ok they’ve gone 10 miles, roll for possible random encounter”, time “ok it’s been 4 hours in game”, or something else?
Fifth, how “small” did you map your regions? 1 mile increments? 5 mile? 10 mile? Etc…
That’s all I got for now. Thanks!
Mike
What Senor Frost said. Plus a lot of the original West Marches players read this blog (Frost included), so they can provide insight too.
@Michael Pfaff
Myself, I’d really like to hear what others are asking and what things other folks are doing. So unless there’s a reason it needs to be private, I’d love to see your question & the response you get. In other words please just post your question here. Other folks might have the same or similar questions and it could spark further discussions.
Of course this isn’t my blog, I’m just an observer, so this is merely a request/vote.
Hey! I stumbled upon this blog maybe a week ago and I’ve already got plans to start a West Marches style campaign within the next week and a half – that’s how impressed and inspired I was with the concept.
I was trying to get in touch with you to ask a few specific questions as to how you handled certain aspects – is there any way you could email me or I could email you and ask you a few questions I have?
Thanks!
[…] to Ben Robbins’ suggestions, before I can run a session, I need to have the […]
Apart from the multiple/variable adventuring party aspect of it, I’ve always run my campaigns “sandbox” style since picking up the hobby back in the ’70s with “Keep on the Borderland”.
As far as maps go, I give my players a “map of the world” which is essentially a prop, a WYSIWYG, which contains all the information the PCs would have about the world at the start of the campaign. For my first homegrown campaign ever, this was a 8″x11″ page hand-drawn with a style lovingly stolen from Tolkien.
Now I have technology — for my latest campaign, I’ve drawn a map in Fractal Mapper and imported it into Photoshop. From there I have mutiple layers so I can create a player map (the prop which has only the info I want the PCs to have) and a DM map. One layer is a hex grid — I can toggle the grid for normalizing into hexes. The hexes make it easier to compute distances and travel times (1 hex = 10 miles; it’s a no-brainer), and they also serve as convenient demarkation points between different regions / encounter areas. In essence the hexes define the granularity of the world “behind the screen”. One interesting area (“dungeon” in the most generic sense) per hex is sufficient, credible and keeps me from “bunching things up” — the whole point is to wave enough carrots over the entire world to make the players explore it.
Would it be possible for you to post up some of your maps and area drawings (if you still have them)? I remember you saying that they were just normal maps and whatnot, but I personally really like looking at what other people have done for their organization/planning. Regardless of how uninspiring it is to you, to me it is something new.
Oops- yyour= your, Shaoul= It should
Well, the replies are as intresting as the articles themselves!
I am currently finishing up one campaign and starting to design another’ which will be rather sandbox style-ish, though on ilands (some populated and ordered, some in a struggle, and some abondoned. I am just hoping the group will start roleplaying better and will start using more creativity, otherwise they will either die ar get bored/
Kaeosdad- yyour idea is wondeful! Shaoul solve the problems I have with three of my 5 players!
I had just begun to design my own D&D 4e campaign when I came across the ‘West Marches’ articles. The setting is based on Melvin Burgess’ ‘Bloodtide’ novel, where a post-apocalyptic London (in an indeterminably distant future) is ruled by gangs and surrounded by unknown leagues of hostile wilderness. After reading all this, I figure it’s fertile ground to plant some WM-style gaming in.
So thanks to Ben and everyone who contributed here :) You’ve all turned this into a great resource of ideas for DMs looking to try something different!
Pardon that – it’s inaccessible to others. As such, I’m posting them on reedwestmarches.blogspot.com.
Enjoy!
I just wanted to let those who are interested know that adventure summaries and character info for my West Marches campaign will be posted here:
http://sin.reed.edu/wiki/arg/West%20Marches%20Campaign%20for%20the%20Summer%20of%202009
We’re running the first two adventures today and tomorrow, so hopefully there will be interesting things up soon.
Session Two: Woo! Killed my first player!
Allowed him to bequeath one item to a friend with his dying breath. The rest went to support his family during the hard times that are part and parcel of living in a post-Cataclysm world.
He’d died in a recent fight with some gnolls, and the party was choosing to rest in an abandoned dwarven mining facility. To keep things rolling, I had one of the gnolls come awake and surrender to the party, respecting their superior strength. The player got to play as the gnoll until such time as the party could return to town.
Much fun was had!
@ RoninFrosty — plain old Illustrator. Probably not the tool of choice for most folks.
@ Gumby — First off, congrats on your first session! Expect the players to take a while to get used to the new method. That’s normal. Be patient.
Secondly, it looks like I’m going to have a recurring “power player”. Not only is he the most “optimized” or min-maxed of the characters, but so far the player himself has signed up to play EVERY available session.
Two separate issues: first off, some players will always play more than others, and they may advance faster. That’s part of the model. Don’t make them play multiple characters — it kind of defeats the purpose. Enforce game world calendar. When that character is out adventuring, other characters have to sit in town and wait for him (the players missed a session, but time passed for the characters, right?). They may not want to wait.
The min-max thing is just like any other game. If it’s too much or exploitive, it’s no good. That has nothing to do with West Marches specifically.
“it looks like I’m going to have a recurring “power player”. Not only is he the most “optimized” or min-maxed of the characters, but so far the player himself has signed up to play EVERY available session. This means he already outshines the more moderate characters, and also means that he’s probably going to rack up experience faster than the other players, who can’t necessarily show up every single day. ”
Talk to the player and see if he is interested in running more then one character so he can “play as often as he wants, but not out-level everyone else”.
If need be you could point out that it is a lot nicer then “if you out level everyone else by more then 2 levels you can’t come until someone catches up”.
Or maybe it just won’t end up being an issue…
I don’t want to attract spambots to my forum, so I’m going to break up the URL of my game. It’s z3.invisionfree.com, followed by a forward-slash, followed by ARUGULA.
We just ran our first session yesterday, and it was AWESOME. All the players had fun, and I feel like I had a sum total of fun equal to all of their fun IN ADDITION TO the fun of making them fear for their lives (mountain lions), and the fun of seeing all my work and preparation pay off.
I have little fear that we’re going to continue having a lot of fun.
I have a couple of minor questions.
Firstly, I had to do a lot of nudging to get people posting to my forum, making plans, and showing up. I imagine this is normal; how long did it take for the “training wheels” as it were to come off, in West Marches itself or other commenters’ campaigns?
Secondly, it looks like I’m going to have a recurring “power player”. Not only is he the most “optimized” or min-maxed of the characters, but so far the player himself has signed up to play EVERY available session. This means he already outshines the more moderate characters, and also means that he’s probably going to rack up experience faster than the other players, who can’t necessarily show up every single day. I don’t fault him for optimizing his character, but I worry how the other players will feel seeing him in action.
As stated, it went swimmingly, I look forward to future games, and I think we’ll al have fun no matter what. If, however, Ben or others have the time, experience, or wisdom to advise me in this matter, it’d be appreciated.
Thank you so much, Ben, for sharing this campaign model with us. I have always liked the *idea* of a sandbox campaign, but I didn’t know how to give one any life or structure beyond “do whatever your characters want, guys!”
This has definitely inspired me to get my first campaign in my new world rolling, as I’ve been wondering what kind of hooks to use…but if I throw some hooks into a WM style game, I think it’ll be easy to pick up some of those for later use.
Also, I’m curious as to what type of map making software you use? I vaguely remember you mentioning it being a vector map, but I’m not sure that I saw the name.
In case anyone really is interested in seeing how things go:
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/eastport
The first session is on Monday, with three players. I hope it goes well. =/
Sorry for not adding anything constructive.
But, dude! You need to know how awesome you are for taking the time to answer all these questions. I, and I’m sure many others, really appreciate it.
Do you suggest coming up with an overarching mystery beforehand, or would the simple task of “What’s rotten in Lovecraft Country” suffice?
Do you mean that you tell the players? I’d say no. Part of their job is even deciding if different things are related. They’ll spend _hours_ building and deconstructing their own connections and conspiracies in their heads.
Starting up a WM-style game in Oxford. Wish me luck. =P
Keep us posted! I think all the second generation West Marches GMs are very curious to see each other’s games and how things work or don’t work for them.
The original WM game was run with D&D 3.5, right? How did things go regarding level disparity – was there ever a huge gap between the highest-level character and the lowest, and how did that affect gameplay?
D&D 3.0 — West Marches ended before 3.5 came out. Re level disparity, check out comments #34 and also #29 on this page (yes, there are now a lot comments to wade through).
Starting up a WM-style game in Oxford. Wish me luck. =P
The original WM game was run with D&D 3.5, right? How did things go regarding level disparity – was there ever a huge gap between the highest-level character and the lowest, and how did that affect gameplay?
Ben,
Thanks for the advice; I’m really excited about this and considering the hidden evils that populate Lovecraft country. I plan to use the campus or at least dorms as a safe space, and to seed campus life and the surrounding are with clues that will merit investigation: rumors of haunting houses, a chance encounter with ghouls late at night. As I understand it, the key part of the model is player control; scenario structure may remain the same but players choose where to go.
Do you suggest coming up with an overarching mystery beforehand, or would the simple task of “What’s rotten in Lovecraft Country” suffice?
@ AlbertCarruthers — Here are two threads that might interest you:
The West Marches model in CoC?
Sandbox Cthulhu
I think it’s doable, though establishing a safe zone like town might be a little trickier. I would expand the scope to be a city (Arkham?) or a county, not just campus. If you do that I don’t think you need “missions” the way you are describing them — in fact I think missions and fed plot hooks destroy the model.
Don’t make the characters part of an investigative order — let them form one if they want. Or not. Leave them in control. And part of the mythos (I think) is that hell never really openly breaks loose — some people see terrible things in the dark woods but it never happens in public on the 11 o’clock news, superhero-style, so that works fine.
Otherwise I think it could be a very, very good fit. West Marches was really always about finding things out first and foremost.
One other key conceptual shift: in West Marches you are exploring territory, but in a CoC setting you are putting together the pieces of the big puzzle. So even if someone sails off the map to Iceland to look at some ruins, it works just fine. You aren’t exploring the map, you’re exploring the unknowable truth.
“I’m personally not a big fan of rules heavy games; I don’t know if 4e is this way”
4e is way way less rules heavy then 3e (or 3.5e), and indeed any of the AD&D versions. It is more rules heavy then some other RPGs. The do have to fill 3 books with _something_, but much like the monster manual never really made the system “rules heavy” the player’s handbook has a LOT of space taken by magic item descriptions and power descriptions. The dungeon master’s guide takes a lot of space talking about types of players and how to “wing it” (along with a pile of crunch rules).
It plays a lot more like the “rules light” basic D&D games I remember from the 80s (not that it is really _that_ light, I mean you basically need a battle map and if not minis something to stand in for them…but it FEELS very rules light).
Then again, that may be just the way the groups I’m playing in run it. One of which is a “go in the dungeon and kill stuff” game, one of which is westmarches-like.
Hey Albert, just an idea, but if you were doing modern Cthulhu you could switch Miskatonic for like… Mishkavek university, on the edge of the giant “national park”-like no-go zone area near Chernobyl in the Ukraine. Apparently the whole place has gone back to nature and the radiation levels are in the “don’t live here, birth defects will be higher” rather than the “flesh peels off” level.
Ben,
Do you know of anyone who has adapted this to Call of Cthulhu? Your articles have inspired me to build this sort of world, but I’m personally not a big fan of rules heavy games; I don’t know if 4e is this way. I’ve toyed with centering the campaign around the incoming class at Miskatonic University. Ideally, the group would form some sort of mythos-investigating brotherhood.
The trouble is that Cthulhu is largely plot-based; the terrible things are hidden just around the characters, not off in the wilderness. Do you think this kind of campaign could succeed if I provided characters with particular hooks out of game and they decided which to investigate (your favorite professor has gone missing, freshman initiation into a club requires a night spent in the morgue beneath the medical building)?
I’m also concerned that characters would be too close spatially; if all hell breaks loose why can’t they get their roommate to come explore? HE may have a test the next day or something, but… it feels like it could get a bit thin.
Thanks for the quick response, Ben!
@ Ryan
Knowing what you now know, how much should a GM prep before putting it out to players that he’s ready for them to schedule session 1?
That’s a little hard to quantify Ryan, but I’ll give it a shot.
I recommend starting with one solid lead to get them out the door (treasure map, X marks the
spot), then let them bump into more info while they’re exploring. Have at least three regions drawn in rough outlines leading to or around that target. You don’t need a lot of detail, just a concept (the Stinking Swamp) and _solid_ encounter tables for each — those tables are really, really critical. Sprinkle in a few stationary landmarks (the Hag’s Hut, the Sunken Rock) which may or may not be very small monster lairs — two per region is fine for now. And of course the write up for the destination of the rumor/map/whatever.
The known destination establishes a vector of travel, so even if later on they could set out from town in totally different directions and explore yet-to-be-built regions, for now you know the flight plan.
If you have ideas for things you haven’t written up yet, you can seed clues — just make sure you don’t make it so clear the players make a sharp turn and walk to those new areas you haven’t written yet. Learning that a ruined monastery exists, but without any idea where it is, is a perfect clue — later the players may ask questions at the town church, but now in the wilderness they have no way to find it.
@ Stanley — Excellent! It’s a wonderful transformation isn’t it?
Do I let them keep getting the cold shoulder and having nothing happen? Or do I point blank tell them that they are wasting time? OR…and this just came to me…do I let the other players, who want to leave town, tell them to knock it off?
All of the above. You can speed up dead-end interactions by dropping out of verbatim roleplaying and just summarizing what the NPC says: “He says he doesn’t know anything about that.” If you keep speaking in character you are encouraging more roleplaying.
It’s tricky because sometimes you will introduce info in town. Here’s the key distinction: in the wilderness, digging may uncover unexpected things. Exploration is profitable. In town, if there’s information it will be on the surface, easy to get at. Questioning everyone in town will not get you more. In town exploration is not profitable.
Flat-out telling the players this is the model is not a bad plan.
How much did you have prepped before the first game started?
Knowing what you now know, how much should a GM prep before putting it out to players that he’s ready for them to schedule session 1?
How many rumors should I share with the player base so they feel like they can plan an expedition?
I am having A LOT of fun running my own West Marches style campaign using 3.5e. My players are having a great time, too. Though, at first, it took some time getting used to the idea of a “player driven” story. In many ways, I’ve discovered that the players have greater sense of achievement and, therefore, enjoyment at the table when they are totally in charge of their action.
I’ve seen a change in their demeanor. Instead of thinking, “What does the DM want us to do?” they realise that their decisions are their own. And I love that I don’t have to subtly guide players toward a specific course of action or adventure. The players discuss this well before a session via email (saving TONS of time during a session), and then write-up an adventure to suit their needs. I can work on each adventure knowing that it will get used–at least for the most part. (I hate preping stuff that doesn’t get used).
So, thank you so much for the inspiration!
I do, however, have one question (please pardon me if you’ve answered it elsewhere):
How did you break the players of the habit of roleplaying in town?
Some of my players keep trying to roleplay in town. While I allow a bit of last minute information gathering at the start of session (i.e. they can roll a Gather Information check to hear about any rumors, usually unreliable, about a certain site), some players will try to roleplay with NPCs for more information. I’ve had NPCs give them the cold shoulder, but this only seems to encourage these players even more: “What are you hiding?” “Why, oh town guard, do you not care about the ogres in the hills?” etc.
Do I let them keep getting the cold shoulder and having nothing happen? Or do I point blank tell them that they are wasting time? OR…and this just came to me…do I let the other players, who want to leave town, tell them to knock it off?
@Ben – there is still basically one group – but they come/go as they can, so there’s only about 2 or 4 people who show up regularly with people who vary in their attendance. I haven’t been able to get a truly separate second group started up, but I’m always trying.
The new “characters” have gone where the older ones had started, they’ve not gone back to the bridge. There is much muttering about revenge at level 6 :D
I had some good suggestions about how info would have probably been carried back and forth, hirelings, the two survivors, etc, so for now, I’m probably going to let that go unless its REALLY egregarious, then I’ll ask for a justification on how that could be shared. It would have to be really specific because, like you say, it’s going to get annoying and I don’t feel like being a conversation policeman. I’ll mention this next game.
@kaeosdad – I had a similar grumble and I sat them down and pointed out that 1) they had explored maybe 25% of a dungeon and hadn’t found “phat lewt” yet, so they weren’t going to see a lot of treasure/xp from fighting wandering monsters. 2) They’ve dipped their toes by poking around alot, but they are gaining XP, roughly 200 to 400 a session – which may not seem like a lot, but there are usually 5 to 9 players a session.
First off I wanted to thank you for putting up this series of article, like many I also launched a west marches style campaign mine is called No Heroes and its going pretty good so far. You can check out our campaign wiki @ http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/no-heroes
Anyways so far one problem I encountered this campaign is that my players felt I was stingy with the xp rewards and suggested that I reward xp for role playing. After nearly breaking my brain about it for a week almost I finally came up with a solution that I posted up on my blog here: http://symptomsofmadness.blogspot.com/2009/04/roleplaying-rewards-solved.html
I bring this up because I think this might help with the meta gaming problem of character knowledge. What I plan on trying out this upcoming session is offering the players a 15% bonus to their xp for roleplaying that is to be rewarded at the end of the session. Whenever a player breaks character or meta games or causes a disruption by off topic chatter and the dm catches them the bonus lowers by 5%. This gives them 3 strikes and hopefully will encourage players to stay in character and focused on the game. Also for players who get stuck in situations where they might want to ask the group out of character for advice or to get together and strategize also out of character they begin a session with meta tokens which can be used to “pause” the game for 3 minutes or until the players are ready. Meta tokens are handed to the players on a one token for every two players ratio.
I think this could help encourage players to stop using out of character knowledge and to stay in character for the whole game.
@ Chgowiz — I think I remember you saying you still had a mono-party at this point (i.e. you do not have different groups of characters adventuring separately). Is that right?
If so, there’s no motivation for outside information sharing when everyone in the game was at the table — it doesn’t really serve any purpose between the players, it’s just documentation. Without separate adventuring groups it’s just homework.
Yes, out of character info can be annoying, but after a TPK you might be better off cutting the players slack and letting them get back in the game. Don’t put the cart before the horse, right? Or instead, encouraging the new characters to go somewhere different, not right back to places their last characters explored. West Marches players will remember the disaster at the Lizard Mound — one party got wiped out (“…and they never came back” another WM catch phrase meaning no info came back because there were no survivors) so those players made new characters and went off and explored other places. In a separate session a totally different group of players, who only knew some people had gone to X and never returned, went to the Lizard Mound to find out what happened and wound up wiping the place out, avenging the fellow adventurers they had never met.
Question for the West Marches players:
With the recent TPK and new characters, we’re running into some “metagaming” issues where players know XYZ, but their PCs shouldn’t/wouldn’t. I had to actually step in at one point and shut down the conversation, as a person was recounting something a former dead character knew and was relating to the new character. In general, given that we might have some (a lot) of 1st character turnover, I’m curious how you handled this in your games.
My concept had been that if it’s not written down somewhere (wiki/list, notes) or not shared, then its not known, but as some players have complained, real life and their perceptions of the world make it hard to partition. What do you think?
I have to speak up here. I am currently running two traditional style games while deployed for my second tour in Iraq with other soldiers from my unit. We are having some SERIOUS scheduling conflicts and I am considering pulling everyone into a WM style game. Thanks for the inspiration and the re-motivation. This site is amazing.
AzaLin- my email is rjjr71@yahoo.com. Email me and I’ll reply with some details.
81 – Peccable: I was really fired up by a book by Goodman Games called ‘Points of Light’, and I would recommend it to you as a source of inspiration. Despite the 4E blurb on the cover, it is a very old-fashioned product — it is in fact very reminiscent of the old Judges Guild stuff, hexmaps and all.
As a DM I like hexmaps for the convenience, although I would agree that the players should just start with a blank piece of paper and take it from there. Fight On!#4 also features a neat section of the Wilderlands; it can easily be goldmined for your own map(s).
(And if you need numbered hexmaps, I must strongly pimp Hexographer. You can find it here: http://inkwellideas.com/?page_id=160)
I love this concept. Thank you for sharing it Ben. I’m going to start building my own version of the WM this weekend!
Thanks for the replies!!!!!! Every piece of advice has been taken to heart!
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Peccable:
Actually, I’d love to see your maps also, if your willing. I can’t give the expert feedback, but i’d still love to see them.
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Ron:
To clarify-
2. Knowing what to look for when searching for a wolf den is one thing, getting there is a different story, yes?
-I’m unsure how to use this though; it ties in with describing exploration, which i guess is somethign else i should have asked about. How should I be describing a forest exploration, versus when they’re looking for the den, and how do I handle it if they don’t have nature and they find a hint that the den is there? do they pass it by, or do i give them a hint? if i give them a hint, isn’t that the same as recognizing the spot using nature checks?
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BEN:
I read the thread you indicated;
Yeah, the encounter was quite foreshadowed. Lots of dead bodies nearby, a captive kobold who tried to refuse to explore that area of the dungeon, a sign indicating ‘dogs,’ and they fought the same creatures when level 4 in a previous campaign and had a tricky time of it then, and there were less dogs that time. There was also 8 alcoves, etc, so they had pretty good warning that there were more than the two they saw initially, especially sicne they heard growling from the alcoves.
We played again tonight and the party didn’t leave the dungeon- they fought ghouls this time (not many) and the rogue is dead now. They say they plan on finishing the dungeon without waiting until they’re stronger… They totally believe they can pull it off, despite 4 deaths in 2 sessions in a 3 p layer party (raise dead scrolls, all used up- part of the dungeon, cause it’s a tomb and the scrolls are for posterity)
Given this, I anticipate TPK by next session, or the one after. I didn’t pull any punches this second time, that’s why the rogue died (there was a scroll of raise dead in one area- the rogue died twice actually, for good this time, with a coup de grace). However, if they luck out, because of xp for surviving these ridiculous encounters, they could level enough to pull it off after a couple of sessions. It’s a level 6 dungeon! ONE of them has began acting far more cautiously, but also will not give up. Their perserverance is admirable…
Ben:
First of all — thank you so much for this series of articles. The Western Marches idea has really sparked my imagination and I’m planning on running a WM-style campaign myself.
A question on detail: you mention that there’s a lot of up-front work, but that the concept’s designed to allow you to minimize that, with the real detail coming once player’s have registered a flight-plan.
I’m running into big-picture-detail issues, myself. I really want a coherent backstory/history for the ‘Marches’ and I like some of the ideas I have, but I’m coming up short with how detailed the immediate areas/regions around town should be. Is a general overview and a few landmarks enough, combined with the random-encounter tables? Or were your wilderness maps initially more detailed?
If you’re at all interested, I’d love to forward some of my maps and get your feedback. :)
Thanks again!
-d-
had an optional level 6 encounter area that they charged headlong into
…
I didn’t have the heart to kill the entire party (the cleric at least died). I think I should have killed the entire party. Would you guys have done it?
I was just having a similar discussion about another West Marches-style game. Did the players have any way of knowing they were going into great danger? Were they voluntarily taking a risk?
First of all, thanks for the attention and the advice Ron!
After browsing this site last night i introduced about 6 or 7 mechanic-tweaks and tested them tonight on level 1 characters. It was great! The newest player in the group used his 6′ long sword every step of the way poking for pits after their guide was skewered in a spike pit trap, and he’s never heard of the 10′ pole from od&d and had no hints from anyone! It was awesome. Some truly creative trap disarming, including using coffins from another area to jam a pit trap so they could climb down afterwards- the quality of the playing skill doubled.
ISSUE: had an optional level 6 encounter area that they charged headlong into, after they did ridiculously good and refused to lose heart even while on potential-failed-death-saving throw 3 (a natural 20, couldn’t believe it, he was back on his feet), I didn’t have the heart to kill the entire party (the cleric at least died). I think I should have killed the entire party. Would you guys have done it?
AzaLin,
I ran my game in a similar fashion as the WM. I’m a regular reader of this blog, and I think if you read some other posts regarding game theory, you can reckon an answer to your own questions:
1. Yes, the wilderness/city analogy is accurate. Gathering info depends on how much you want to rp it. Let the players tell you who they’re going to talk with, what they look for in the library, what questions they ask, etc. Here’s the spot to toss out some new hooks or give a bit of info they missed earlier. Note there’s no ‘Gather Info’ skill in 4e…a move toward more role-play?
2. Knowing what to look for when searching for a wolf den is one thing, getting there is a different story, yes?
3. See post 45, above.
4. Interesting wilderness maps: vary the terrain: gigantic pine forest; ancient, dense, choked forest; tall grassland slashed by shallow streams. with twisting caves bored throughout the hillside; cliffs (tons of cinematic possibilities); magical areas (pools, fairie rings); areas that are haunted or touched by another plane; submerged forest; Everglades-type swamp. Use the mundane and fantastical. Read or watch the LoTR series for inspiration.
As for random encounters, think of the ecology of the area: giants and trolls will be near the top of the food chain, and maybe they’ve eaten most other creatures nearby (infrequent checks); maybe the gnolls are at war with the neighboring hobgoblins and both sides send our regular patrols to keep watch over their turf (frequent, predictable checks). Or perhaps an area is just a bad part of the woods, and you check once per (in-game) hour.
*Relate the random encounters to your question #8. Lots of wandering will lead ot lots of encounters that will wear the party down, making an even-level encounter a bit tougher. This forces the party to consider their resources more carefully.
5. Decide who built the dungeon there and why. Was it a dungeon beneath a keep? Probably a few jail cells and an armory. A wizard’s tower? Alchemy room, exotic zoo, etc. Evil temple? Torture chamber, sacrifice altar, portal to the abyss. Dwarven stronghold? Many levels, but overrun by mind flayers…
6. Depends on the distance the party is travelling, the landmarks along the way, their familiarity with the area, the party’s mapping skill, and of course, die rolls.
7. The players should have a destination in mind, if not a goal once they get there. If the players are not experienced or they’re foolish enough just to decide their PCs will knock around the wilderness for a while, the players will come to realize what a poor choice they made. Don’t let your party wander just because they missed the ruins by a square or two- and really, with wide-open, uncharted lands, what’s to say that the ruins are not right where you need them to be?
8. Again, random encounters help. Also, remember that the party is probably on unfamiliar turf (literally). Environmental hazards (dire leaches in the swamp?), traps set by cunning monsters, even bad weather can force the PCs into places where they can’t rest. Attack them when they’re in a disadvantagous spot- crossing a river or climbing a hillside or while they make camp. Make sure you’re using all the wit, firepower and resources at the monster’s disposal- 4 levels above the party level *should* be a tough fight.
I wish I was a PC in a campaign like West Marches.
I’m dungeon mastering a 4e game, and it’s going great; are you familiar with the (massive) changes? I have a lot of questions! if you answer half of them you’ll invogorate my game in a huge way!
1. Streetwise; you mentioned your players poking around town, gathering little tidbits of information; how much was rolling dice, and how much was roleplaying and exploring town and stuff? This would be less-important in the west marches setting, but nonetheless, i’m unsure how to handle this without it feeling like a grind. I bring it up because scouring a city for information in a freeform way is similar in many respects to sandbox wilderness exploration, just that there are npcs and city places instead of monsters and swamps.
2. Knowledge: Nature, Arcana, and Dungeoneering; when my druid rolls a nature check to discover the location of the wolves den, i have no idea how to handle the situation, because it somewhat bypasses the whole exploring motif that i want to encourage.
3. Foraging, part of Nature checks: how do you handle hunting and foraging? do you simply make the player roll the dice and reward him with food?
4. Wilderness maps: how do you make interesting wilderness maps? how frequent are random encounters? whats the ratio of random encounters versus location encounters? (i know it depends, but if they’re exploring a new forest, how many randoms do they fight before they find the ruins and go to the dungeon in an average session?)
5. Dungeon design: 4-5 room dungeons? I’m not sure how to make those interesting. Could you give an example of one you ran?
6. getting lost checks: how frequent? every mile?
7. exploration grind: with only random encounters, unlucky directional choices, and somewhat similar terrain, finding nothing exceptionally interesting for a while, how did you prevent this from becoming a grind for the players? once again, i have my rogue in mind.
8. THE IMPORTANT ONE: in 4e, the characters are more powerful than in other editions. A first level character can kill about 8 townspeople or a squad of guardsmen, and a 40hp (level 2) character can heal, without a cleric, 110hp a day using ‘healing surges.’ I dont know how to make combat dangerous for them because encounters 4 levels above them can’t take them out, and after the fight they’re as fresh as can be, but more importantly, i dont know how to inflict attrition upon them over the course of a trek. There’s no incentive for avoiding fights unless there’s zero chance of surviving.
@ Ckutalik
Did you ever find yourself at the point where you needed to encourage players to break up a little?
Oh yeah. The infamous “Opal Caves congo line” comes to mind.
Being heavy-handed or not isn’t really the question. It’s part of the GM’s job to moderate the event, and inviting 9 players just ensures that no one gets to play much.
Just set a hard limit on group size — 5 or 6 is really the high end. If it’s a special occasion you can break that rule (West Marches players are now reminiscing about the chaos of the hydra hunt) but it’s not going to make a great game. Anyone who wasn’t in the last session automatically gets dibs for the next game session, if they can make it. They’ll be scheduling strife and negotiation for who goes in what group and angst over missing a game, but that’s how it works. Remind the players that they are better off playing half as often in good games than all the time in bad games where they get to do nothing.
After a session or two with 9 people, I’ll bet if you ask the players they would be all for smaller groups. Unless they’re just happy coasting in the middle of the congo line.
If imitation really is the highest form of flattery, then your campaign write-up has had it in spades. Kudos for getting this experiment out there into the public sphere.
We have played six sessions down here in Texas in a Castles and Crusades campaign I drew up to accommodate the chaotic schedules of our players–and it’s worked well enough to grow the original group of three players up to a fluid group now of ten. I intentionally tried to incorporate a number of ideas from the West Marches to better match this revolving PC kinda of play. (If anyone is interested you can see our campaign blog at: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com)
It’s already interesting noting some of the departure points that my own players’ style has made for the campaign from West Marches. Despite my initial encouragement, for instance, they have been extremely reluctant to adventure in separate groups. Instead, we have settled into having a core group of four players sticking together with a revolving cast of six others who drop in and out of their party. From my perspective as GM this at first turned out to a bit easier to manage and passed the all-important “is it fun?” test.
But at our last session we had nine players at the table, and while still fun for them the session was pretty chaotic and I fear the long-term manageability of these big party sessions. Did you ever find yourself at the point where you needed to encourage players to break up a little? My players don’t seem to have caught the semi-competitive vibe of yours that seem to have been part of the motor behind separate parties, but we definitely already have some leadership conflicts brewing. Any ideas on how to push a little in this direction without being too heavy-handed?
I wanted to say that my West Marches campaign is 4 games old, only a newborn, but it’s about to spawn a second group and so far, the concept is working well. I’m documenting the games on my blog.
Here are two links:
Specific post after first 3 games: http://oldguyrpg.blogspot.com/2009/02/dark-ages-and-west-marches-style-of.html
All posts regarding my Dark Ages game: http://oldguyrpg.blogspot.com/search/label/dark%20ages%20campaign
Thanks again for the feedback and kind comments, Ben! I hope my game lasts at least another 96. :)
Mostly the real life social issues more than anything else.
Yep. See comment 41. The game started drawing to a close when I stopped enforcing the scheduling rules and let (and even encouraged) parties split off and just adventure separately all the time. That defeated the whole point and made it just an ordinary game. Which was fine for a little bit, but then it was time to try other things.
But keep in mind we played a hundred games before it went bust, so don’t let that scare you off Red. If anything the game lasted longer because of the charter.
I think the level range was between 2nd and 7th (this is 3rd Ed). And even at the end there was still no shortage of dangerous areas as we continued expanding out.
Mostly, I think (from a player perspective) it was just that we’d been playing it for several years and the player mix had changed, people schedules changed, etc. So really just a combination of real life getting in the way and (a little bit) looking for some variety. Mostly the real life social issues more than anything else.
Following up on Red’s query, what level (approximately) were most of the characters when West Marches ended? Did the party’s increasing level contribute to a general winding down of the campaign, once various dangerous areas proved not so dangerous anymore?
So. A long running campaign of mine is about to end from player life and schedule changes. The Western Marches in particular (and your blog in general) have been inspiring.
I’m thinking of a Western Marches ‘troupe’ style sandbox, with either Castles and Crusades or a slimed-downed quickened 4E. I’ve got material and ideas for either.
My question: Western Marches ended. While all good things come to an end, what ended the Western Marches? Was there anything inherent in the premise that contributed to that end? Was there anything you’d do different?
thanks much for your efforts in sharing this.
I’m actually running a West Marches-style sandbox game using Savage Worlds right now.
Rock on, Patrick!
There were a few hiccups in terms of GM fatigue and real-world interference, but we’re back to exploring the hell out of the wilderness.
That’s one nice thing about the player-driven scheduling is that even if you get tired, the players keep pulling you back in.
when PCs died did the player have to “start over” and create a new level 1 PC? and find other level 1’s to play?
That was the method at the start, but after a while we switched to letting people start at half the level of the dead character. It all depends how large and varied your PC population is.
you mentioned regional encounter tables – did you create those from scratch or did you borrow/modify them from some other source? how many encounters did they have 10, 12 or did they vary by region?
From scratch of course, since the whole point was to reflect the character of the region.
Number of entries varied by region. Complex regions with lots of different species and types of hazards (rockslides, etc) had more encounters, but comparatively quiet places like open plains had a lot fewer.
our weekly 4e d&d group is running into scheduling issues now after beginning last summer (is that long?). our DM mentioned WM to me and this sounds like a great possible solution – kudos. i was starting to feel bummed out but this has really re-energized me. i’m going to start mapping out a WM style setting now too and i’m planning on using the dungeon delve for the encounters (i’m a new DM and kinda lazy/short on prep time). i do have a couple questions:
1 – when PCs died did the player have to “start over” and create a new level 1 PC? and find other level 1’s to play? did anybody create new PC’s at a level where there were more chances of getting together with other players?
2- you mentioned regional encounter tables – did you create those from scratch or did you borrow/modify them from some other source? how many encounters did they have 10, 12 or did they vary by region?
3-any chance to see a sample/portion of a region/table/summary?
I’m actually running a West Marches-style sandbox game using Savage Worlds right now. Truth be told we’re only using the Savage Worlds rule system; the setting itself is inspired heavily by Goodman Games’ Points of Light book that came out last year.
We’re about 7 sessions into the game, and it’s going well. There were a few hiccups in terms of GM fatigue and real-world interference, but we’re back to exploring the hell out of the wilderness. Savage Worlds is a fine system for this because of its Raise mechanic. Success or failure is pretty easy for the players to gauge based on their own die rolls, and the benny mechanic gives them a small degree of control over their own destiny.
If you’re interested, hop over to my blog and browse around. The “sandbox” tag should be a good starting point.
After reading this, I immediately decided that I wanted to play this using Savage Worlds. Partly because I’m already running a 3.5 game, but also because I know a bit more about the system of SW.
The first two settings that went through my mind as I read this were Deadlands and 50 Fathoms. Those two settings are almost built around exploration of the unknown, while still keeping the encounters dangerous.
What do you think? Any recommendations?
I’d be interested in seeing your notes for a particular wilderness area or two. Not so much for the actual content (which, as you note, isn’t the remarkable thing about this campaign) — but just to see what information you included and how you organized it.
A strong concept goes a long way. If you have a distinct flavor and don’t just through in random things even a basic dungeon can be pretty intriguing.
Just for interests sake, what was the concept/themes you used?
@ Mitchell
Anyway, one thing that was bugging me… if parties are sort of ‘frozen’ in one spot until they get back to town, what if another party comes to explore the same area?
Originally parties were supposed to get back to town by the end of the game, but there was more and more camping as the game went on. There was a standing rule of etiquette to avoiding going places that were near other parties, to avoid that very kind of situation — we scheduled on-list so everyone knew where they could or couldn’t go. It would have been a logistical pain in the neck (for me) so I didn’t allow it.
On the other hand, if a party went out, found something and raided it but didn’t clear it, then came back to town and meant to go back but didn’t get around to it, there were cases where other players would decide to form parties to go explore that same spot and see what goodies had been overlooked. The players from the first group would cry foul, but that was too bad for them — they didn’t have a flag of ownership on the place. Anyone could go try their luck at the ruined monastery, assuming they could find the place. Of course if they are doing it against the wishes of the people who’ve already been there they aren’t likely to be given helpful warnings, like that they should watch out for the ghouls prowling in the crypts… That’s what you get for not cooperating.
@ Rod
-How complex were the individual dungeons as a rule? 30+ locations of interest? A dozen or less? Varying by dungeon?
Many were quite small (4-5 rooms) but major dungeons were much larger. Small sites were the most flexible.
-For want of a better way to put it, would you say you invested a lot or a little of “cleverness” in each dungeon
There was usually at least one or two interesting things in every site (either something to deal with immediately or a snippet of lore). Of course you never knew which parts players would find or wouldn’t, so lots of the really interesting stuff remained hidden (like the Treasure Rooms).
A strong concept goes a long way. If you have a distinct flavor and don’t just through in random things even a basic dungeon can be pretty intriguing.
-This may be a goofy question, but how big in real world terms was the West Marches? As big as Wales? France? Bigger?
Honestly, no idea. Probably much smaller.
One thing I’m a little unclear on: was there just the one town for the whole game area?
Yep, one town. There were two minor outposts (the Stockade and the Watchtower) that could be used as refuge, but they weren’t someone place you could live.
oh, and by ‘frozen’ in the first part, if it wasn’t obvious, I meant in between game sessions for that party. I’m just trying to get an idea of how time goes by relatively between parties.
Hey, I have a few questions as well, but before that, great post! I spent a good hour and a half reading it and the discussion following it instead of homework… essays to write and whatnot.
Anyway, one thing that was bugging me… if parties are sort of ‘frozen’ in one spot until they get back to town, what if another party comes to explore the same area? What if they stumble upon the first party that’s camped within or just outside of a dungeon? Of course, I’m thinking, what if this happened by chance and how did you deal with it? If the second party bypassed the first party and looted the dungeon and left, the first party would be very pissed off, especially if there was a player or two that really wanted to continue, but they couldn’t because other players had scheduling conflicts…
Also, I’d be totally stoked to play this style with my friends once I move back home for the summer (I’m in university right now), but although our games are quite large on a regular basis (usually around double the normal party size, like 6-10 people on average), can it work alright with smaller parties? Or, if a player is suddenly having scheduling conflicts, can the rest of the party abandon them in the middle of a dungeon so they can continue playing later sessions? Also, some of the regular players wanted to leave around 1am (as we always start late in the evenings), but the rest of us often go for another couple of hours, so any suggestions on how to solve that problem in-game? I mean, my only thought would be that maybe you could give the party a ‘scroll of town portal’ type thing every once in awhile, but it takes 10 minutes to cast (in game), so they couldn’t use it as an escape tool (during a fight anyway), but that way certain players could ‘go home’ while the other players continued without them. But I see problems to that idea, like getting them back in the action… Any suggestions?
Hi,
Since this comment thread is still active, I’d like to to add some more questions if I may. I just read through all the West Marches comment threads so hopefully these won’t be redundant:
-How complex were the individual dungeons as a rule? 30+ locations of interest? A dozen or less? Varying by dungeon?
-For want of a better way to put it, would you say you invested a lot or a little of “cleverness” in each dungeon (by which I mean puzzles, tricks, set piece encounters, bits of setting lore that players can piece together — generally anything more involved than “location, monster or trap, treasure”)?
-This may be a goofy question, but how big in real world terms was the West Marches? As big as Wales? France? Bigger? One thing I’m a little unclear on: was there just the one town for the whole game area?
In any case, thanks for all the effort you’ve put into discussing and clarifying the West Marches!
@ Paddy
Just for interest sake, what scale did you use for your wilderness maps, 1 inch = 1 mile?
It was a vector map, so I could zoom in or out to any scale I wanted. I printed a variety of maps at different scales if I there were interesting things to see in the area. No one needs a close-up map at one inch = one inch of a barren plain.
@ Justin Alexander
(1) How was it handled mechanically? For example, I’m seeing references here to getting lost. But if I’m using the D&D 3.5 rules, it’s just a flat DC 15 Survival check to avoid getting lost.
Players might say “we’re in the forest, we’ll head north because we think that’s where the swamp is” then I roll to determine if they actually did head north. Failure indicates how much they deviate. Marginal failure means they know they got lost, extreme failure means they don’t know. Either way you just note where they really went on your map and tell them what they see. Nothing fancy. Go look at the painfully elaborate “getting lost” rules in AD&D for inspiration — I’m sure that’s where my thinking comes from.
Typically I’d just fudge these types of things, but given the “DM is a mediator, not a storyteller” feel of the campaign, I’m hesitant to adopt that.
There is always some fudge factor, because no two situations are exactly the same (unless you want to make a massive chart with weather conditions, light, percent chance of goblin spore, blah blah blah). The point is to be fair and logical, not just abstain. An impartial referee, as it were.
And beyond just describing the terrain and travel, how did you give the players meaningful choices/input into the exploration? If they said “we go to the Frog Marshes and wander around for a bit”, did you have a way of determining if they found the interesting features of the area? (And, if so, which interesting features they found.)
From my point of view “wander around for a bit” is an illegal instruction: as an impartial interpreter of player actions I don’t know what that means. What do you mean wander? Tell me where you’re going, north, south, what? If the players really do mean wander I’ll just roll random directions, but that’s obviously a bad plan.
Likewise short cuts like “we go to the Frog Marshes” were also illegal (at least until the character had been along a route so many times it was boring to talk about anymore). You say you want to go to the Frog Marshes and I say you’re at the gates of town, tell me what you’re doing. You can say “we walk west following the hills” and I say that’s fine — I don’t deal in long term objectives or abstract pathing, I tell you what you see in front of you. I say things like “you’ve gone 4 miles and now you see the hills turning south and a forest ahead of you.” The players say “ah, that’s Wil Wood, we’ve been there a dozen times already” and I just shrug because there’s no sign on it is there? Knowing whether it’s Wil Wood is their job.
As I said, if a character is a seasoned veteran who has been this way a million times, sure I’ll be more casual and take their experience into account, because that makes sense. If they’ve seen this spot before sure I’ll tell them. I’ll say “yeah that looks like the northern edge of Wil Wood to you.” I’m neutral, not a dick. But when they are in new territory they are back to square one.
did you have a way of determining if they found the interesting features of the area? (And, if so, which interesting features they found.)
Nothing fancy: if they wind up near something on the map, there’s a chance they’ll see it. The odds and method and reasonable distance all depend on what the thing is. Finding a castle in the plains: easy Spot at a great distance. Finding a sinkhole in a forest: much harder check at much closer distances, probably easier if you use Knowledge Nature to determine what kind of terrain would have sinkholes in it. Finding an owlbear lair: easier to use Wilderness Lore to follow the owlbear’s tracks.
Note that for logical searching to work, the design has to be logical too.
If people are just wandering around instead of looking for something specific (“light exploring” as it was euphemistically called), they would usually find a) new regions like forests or swamps they had never seen before and b) wandering monsters. Then they’d run away. Once they put those new frontiers on the map they would come back and take a closer look, maybe scouting around in the new forest they found, getting a better sense of what critters lived there and starting to get a feel for the place. Often that would give them clues of what else they could find there (if there are lots of goblins, they must live someplace). They’d also try to fit it into the puzzle of the surrounding terrain (is this where the goblins came from we saw prowling around in the hills to the south?). West Marches definitely followed the Treasure Tells A Story model: you kill some goblins, but they are carrying dwarven-crafted weapons carved with symbols of a forgotten clan. Hmm, sounds like there’s an abandoned dwarven lair somewhere in this region. If I was a dwarf, where would I build my stronghold?
Of course you could do things totally differently. Just make sure that player decisions still drive results, not random chance.
As I mentioned above, don’t be afraid to be the GM. Make judgment calls about what rolls are needed, whatever. If it looks like the party just walked straight to the ruins, fine they did. Just be fair and impartial. What happens should make sense, not be based on ulterior motives.
I’m curious about how the exploration was handled. This really breaks down into two queries:
(1) How was it handled mechanically? For example, I’m seeing references here to getting lost. But if I’m using the D&D 3.5 rules, it’s just a flat DC 15 Survival check to avoid getting lost. Obviously this could be modified, but I’m wondering if you could share the details of how this was actually handled. Did you just vary the DC of the check depending on the characteristics of the area; the availability/quality of maps and directions; etc.? How often were the checks made? How did you determine the outcome a failed check?
Typically I’d just fudge these types of things, but given the “DM is a mediator, not a storyteller” feel of the campaign, I’m hesitant to adopt that.
(2) Narratively how was it handled. One of the things that make dungeon crawls so attractive is that you’re never at a loss in terms of what you should be describing: It’s all on the map.
And beyond just describing the terrain and travel, how did you give the players meaningful choices/input into the exploration? If they said “we go to the Frog Marshes and wander around for a bit”, did you have a way of determining if they found the interesting features of the area? (And, if so, which interesting features they found.)
I can see how to construct this campaign from the standpoint of “at location A there will be clues leading to locations B, C, D, and E”. But I’m curious to know how (or if) the idea of just “I go out there and see what I find” was handled.
@will
My advice would be to start out by looking at a lot of the source material (dungeon maps & modules and so forth) available online to see how they do things. You can also use them, whole or partially, in your game and also use them as templates for creating your own. But keep in mind that what’s out there may not always be better then what you could do yourself. Even a West Marches style game could still have pre-built modules in it with just minor mods to the material.
Really the dungeon design & fictional history part of the game is not that different in a West Marches game then it is in a ‘standard’ plot-driven game. The big difference (I think) is that you are not designing things around a specific plot or story, its more free form. So if you are already running a game, then the dungeon design & history part of it will not be that much different. But it is true that in a WM game the background history info can be much more important, so if you’ve been avoiding that in your current game that could be a problem.
But really, if you want to run games (WM-style or other) it seems like these are skills that you would want to improve. And the best way to get better is to just do it. Using a lot of pre-made material can help get you started with that; for example taking a pre-built dungeon map and then coming up with your own story/history that fits into your campaign. This lets you only worry about one part of it instead of having to design the dungeon and the history. And then you can work up to doing it all yourself. Also, IMHO, it’s fine to take ideas from books & movies and use them for your history, especially when you are just getting started running games.
Hey, I want to make my own Western Marches game to, but I don’t really know how to design dungeons. Also, making detailed fictional histories is another weak point of mine.
Could you give me some advice?
Just for interest sake, what scale did you use for your wilderness maps, 1 inch = 1 mile?
There were no event-style encounters such as “the first night the party camps in the Black Hills they encounter 2d8 orcs” instead this was all handled by means of the random encounter tables?
Correct. Creatures in the environment reacted of course, so if you raid the kobold caves and flee you shouldn’t be surprised if a hunting party comes looking for you. Cause and effect.
Also, while there was no plot involved, were the characters given missions?
Nope. Well honestly it did happen once or twice, but that was a deviation from the model. There were also things like bandit bounties that anyone could try to collect.
I just recently read through the West Marches posts. Just to make sure I understand, was the entire structure of the adventures location-based set pieces? There were no event-style encounters such as “the first night the party camps in the Black Hills they encounter 2d8 orcs” instead this was all handled by means of the random encounter tables?
Also, while there was no plot involved, were the characters given missions? If so, by whom?
@ Inyssius,
We got the information from all sorts of sources. And because most of the area was populated “a long time ago” there were lots of old stories and legends. Sometimes we would hear of some mention of “the sacred lakes to the west” and then later while exploring someone would say “this area we’ve been wandering in sure has a bunch of lakes & temples; I bet this is that Sacred lakes area”. And from then on that area would be referred to as “the Sacred Lakes”. And there were people out and about in the wilds (bandits, other travelers, weird beekeeper druids, etc) who knew about the area.
There were old writings from way back when that would refer to various areas. Pretty much the only gaming that occurred in town was around plot hooks for going out on an adventure: the cleric finds some old records while cleaning the church that talk about the monastery “at the foothills of the goblin’s teeth mountains, just past centaur wood” so when you find the monastery you might guess that the wood you just passed through was Centaur wood.
And I think we “named” some areas ourselves simply by referring to it as “the frog marshes” or whatever from that point on. Since the adventurers were the ones coming back and carving the new information into the map (see “the table map” in the Grand Experiments: West Marches (part 2), Sharing Info post) even if they got it “wrong” (compared to what Ben had written in his notes, that is) that would be what stuck and everyone used from then on. Possibly to find out later that it was wrong, possibly it would never come up.
But how did the players know that region was called “Sacred Lakes”, or “The Centaur’s Grove”, or “Harbor Wood”? Did they get them from maps, or old legends, or the indigenous bhuka?
And I’m dying to see more in-play examples of this sort of game. What about those links you mentioned a while back?
@ Gamer Dude
The players started to ask that same question, which is a good thing.
They knew there were hunters from the town who ventured into the near wilds and there were rare individuals who lived in the wilds (like the Mad Hermit or the Keeper of Bees).
But more specifically, just because the lands were wild didn’t mean no one had never been there before. There were ruined monasteries and ancient crypts, all of which indicate people had lived in some parts. Then the question becomes: what happened since then?
Those were the relatively near areas: the farther out they got, the less anyone knew anything. The PCs did find human temples in the far-off Sacred Lakes region, but they were clearly from long ago and mostly forgotten in origin.
Another quick question that might have been answered…or not; You’re talking about all of these named regions, and you’ve also mentioned that the characters are THE ONLY adventurers. In other words, no one else really knows what’s out there. So, and this might be kind of thick headed, how did you introduce a “name” of an area to the party?
If no one else has experience out there, and there are no real “maps”, then how does a character know that they’re in a place called “The Centaur’s Grove”?
@PatrickWR
> How often did the PCs get lost?
We got lost _all the time_.
Unless we had been somewhere several times before (or it was an easily visible landmark) we would usually expect to spend time finding it and/or lost on the way. One of the things I really enjoyed was navigating with landmarks and not always taking a the direct route (you’ll get lost unless you follow the stream/cliffs/coast/ridgeline/etc!).
Getting lost is also a great way to explore. Fun quote from one game:
Ranger: To get there I think we need to go about an hour north, then an hour east, then an hour south, then about an hour west…..
@PatrickWR
> How important was food and water in your game?
We tried not to spend too much time with accounting and encumbrance, but it was definitely a factor. When heading out of town we would say how much food we were bringing and then we’d keep track of the days. And if you got lost in the winter you could be in real trouble! Folks with Survival (i.e. hunting) skill were nice to have along because they helped in not getting lost and in foraging for food. As much as I normally dislike this kind of nit-picky accounting I think you need it to really get the feel of being lost (or trapped somewhere*). Best is to use very simplified accounting so it doesn’t take much time itself but still allows lots of concern about food and/or water running low.
(* “Trapped somewhere” seemed to happen a lot too. I still remember the days trapped in a small room next to the Ghoul nest in the ruined monastery, waiting for the cleric to recover enough to wake up, heal us and get out; wondering if we would turn into ghouls from having to eat each other or from the ghouls outside the door. — Fun times.)
I started sketching out my own WM-style game for Savage Worlds a couple weeks ago, and we’ll probably start playing in another month. So I’m totally jazzed to play, and the players themselves aren’t quite sure what to think about this “plot-less” roleplaying style that I’ve been hyping so much. A couple questions for you, Ben:
How important was food and water in your game? I have a strong desire to make my characters mark off rations and hunt for fresh water, which is something I’ve never really bothered with in most fantasy games. It seems to fit very well with the survival/exploration theme.
How often did the PCs get lost? You made a reference to the required Wilderness Lore roll to get oriented…I’m wondering how often they botched this initial bearing.
@ Islayre d’Argolh
A question : am i the only one thinking that West March and E6 are naturally fit for each other ?
In another comment I mentioned that the game stayed in the low-level range the whole time (the highest character ever was 7th).
I think low-level works quite well for this kind of game. Higher level abilities like teleporting, scrying, etc change the dynamic of exploration. High level West Marches could work, but you would have to take these abilities into account. It would be a different kind of challenge.
Hello,
Thirst things thirst: excuse my french.
(…)
Ha, ha, ha.
(…)
Sorry
No, serious, i’m french so, please, excuse my poor english level :-(
I am actually running a West March session since the first days of july.
And its bloody cool: my players really enjoy this “old school game”, i don’t have a lot of work to do (well, actually, all the work is already done: a few days of work before the first game and no more after that) and the all concept is working like a charm.
So i really want to thank Ben for the inspiration (i’m a hudge fan of this blog).
I use a 3.5 OGL-based -mécanic of my own for this game.
The system is, in fact, deeply inspired by the concept au E6.
It’s low and gritty fantasy.
I could see that Ryan Stoughton is reading this blog so i want to really thank him too for this simple but genial idea.
A question : am i the only one thinking that West March and E6 are naturally fit for each other ?
@ Restless
So, why’d you stop?
It was the social monster. It’s a fine line between “extreme enthusiasm” and “destructive obsession.” The game worked for over 100 sessions (which isn’t bad) but eventually the trouble outweighed the fun. But your game doesn’t have to turn out that way…
@ Robert Fisher
How “big” was the Marches when you started?
Do you think the size (number of regions/number of dungeons) should be based on something? (e.g. size of the player pool) Is it relatively fixed? (e.g. you need at least X regions to give enough choices, but more than Y is choice overload) Or is it arbitrary?
The size of regions varied a lot, so it would be hard to say. Most were about the same size, but then there were some “micro” regions and some “mega” regions. The micro regions usually just highlighted one thing — pretty much a monoculture like the Centaur Grove. The mega regions were big enough that they could have whole subregions within them.
You absolutely should have basic terrain sketched out in a full radius around the town, otherwise you have fuzzy grey areas when people look out of town. Not good.
Ideally you want to start with enough regions to make it clear to the players that they have a choice. If they look out from the city gates and just see the rolling expanse of the Black Hills, it’s easy to think one way is the same as another (a faux choice). But if they look out and see a forest, a marsh, some hills and desert, they can see they have real choices right off the bat.
Sorry if this was answered elsewhere and I missed it…
How “big” was the Marches when you started? How many regions and had many dungeons had you “roughed in”? I realize that you waited until an expedition set out for an area to detail it, but you had roughly mapped out some regions and picked locations for dungeons already, right?
Do you think the size (number of regions/number of dungeons) should be based on something? (e.g. size of the player pool) Is it relatively fixed? (e.g. you need at least X regions to give enough choices, but more than Y is choice overload) Or is it arbitrary?
In the end, how many regions and dungeons were there?
I’ve been running games in this style for years. It’s good to see a few others developing it as a concept though.
My current projects for this style of game include a steam-punk/fantasy setting in an ancient city on the edge of a newly developing empire. The city wants to maintain it’s independence and has been a rallying point for lesser cultures who are also trying to resist the growing empire. Situations for adventure in this type of setting would be political struggles against the empire, dealing with local problems in the smaller independent cultures and trying to find ancient relics in the wilderness beyond (so that they may be used in battle against the new empire.
My second project draws on a physical map of my home town, Sydney, Australia. With over 5 million people, and a number of very diverse cultures (middle eastern, asian, various european, native aboriginals). The theory is to run that style of game in a spirit world that exists alongside our reality. The dominant spirits and mythical beings in the otherland are based on the dominant local culture in the equivalent region of the “real world”. In pace where there is a heavy Egyptian immigrant population you may find mummies and sphinxes, while in the areas where the Chinese have settled you might find asian dragons, hsien and terracotta soldiers.
I’m planning to run a table-top version of the game in this west-marches style of play, but intersperse it with monthly live-roleplaying sessions in which the intrigue of the setting can be more carefully developed.
So, why’d you stop? Did the players get tired of it, or were you looking for a new game to run? Did you end it with a big to-do or did it just fizzle out? Was it too hard to schedule games (although it doesn’t seem that’d be the problem in this setup)? Did the Social Monster eat the game?
I do have to say, Call of Cthulhu in this sort of game would be awesome, even if you just had a large background going on over a small region and the players all belonged to some sort of informal society determined to investigate the dark happenings in their communities.
Man . . . just seeing this discussion gives me *shivers.*
Chris has the dubious honor of being the only PC to be killed by the other PCs. And that was his _nice_ character. So unfair…
@ Starfish P
Do you think a WM campaign could work without a clear looting/treasure hunt goal?
Could it work with only a exploration goal?
Definitely. West Marches was about reward for taking action. It was much more about getting XP than treasure (which was fairly sparse). That system can work with any game that has a concrete reward like character advancement.
The secondary reward was exploration / knowledge. The first reward (leveling) was really just a first-stage booster to get people involved — once they were hooked they were drawn as much by exploration and competition as they were by mechanically leveling.
You’d also want to make sure there were consequences for making bad decisions. It doesn’t have to be death, but there should be a downside for making mistakes.
I ask because I am tempted of trying it with the Dreamlands of Call of Cthulhu.
I think that’s a fantastic idea. I’d love to hear how it goes.
I also think West Marches would work really well for a Traveller-style space exploration game. It’s just begging for someone to run it.
The players could go on expeditions into the dreamland and wake up at the end of each session, but I wonder what could keep them going there again and again.
Well, what’s their motivation? Are they amassing mystical knowledge to learn the secrets of the universe? Exploring for personal Enlightenment sounds fairly Dreamlands.
@ Michael Cribbin
What about EL variations in reverse? I could envision many situations where a level 7 party could be travelling through level 3 areas, whether it was because they got lost, didn’t know better or what region they were in, or were just extra cautious.
By the time they were high level they generally knew the territory and were pretty clear where the low-level areas were, so it would be unlikely to be accidental.
If they were passing through familiar low-level areas to reach harder areas they were usually going fast not exploring, so they had fewer chances for encounters. When they did have easy encounters in old territory it gave them a nice sense of how far they had come power-wise (“remember back when these frogs chased us out of the marsh? Good times, good times… –zap–“). The fights were quite short, and critters tended to flee if they were getting slaughtered (like always).
(as an aside, it’s a common GM mistake to think players want every fight to be hard — sometimes it’s quite nice to have an easy win to show where you stand in the food chain)
Did you ever have a high level player go “slumming” and join a low level party making a very unsual dynamic?
Players talked about it a lot but rarely did it. One reason was that in D&D 3e XP was based on the level of creature relative to the level of the characters — bringing high level people meant the same critters were worth less, but you were just as likely to die if the creature attacked you not them (as proven through experimentation).
Sometimes the lower level characters were hot to bring the extra firepower (“Let’s bring Brag, the half-orc barbarian!”) but then cooler minds would prevail and they’d realize they’d get less XP and they’d be playing second fiddle. Same with the high level characters — while they were busy slumming other high levels were off exploring new territory.
Remember real world play time was always limited plus the in-game calendar was rigid — if you are out in the wilderness when another party is forming up, obviously you aren’t allowed to join.
Did you ever have unusual party makeups (ie 3 clerics, a wizard, and a sorceror) because they were the ones that got together that day?
Always. The groups were never predictable. Players intelligently tried to cover their bases but their options were limited. I suspect some characters took levels in cleric just to have some healing available — which sounds dumb, but since the game was strictly serious it led to very interesting “discovering your religion” roleplaying. Good stuff.
Did you scale the encounters the party faced based on how many players were showing up?
Never — that’s the whole idea.
What was the highest level obtained?
Two hit 7th, and neither of those players was on their first character. A bunch of other folks hit 6th.
@ Restless
One thing I see, though, is that in a smaller group you might have problems if someone can’t play at all until their character returns to town.
My gut instinct is that having multiple characters dilutes the immediacy of exploration and survival — part of the game is picking and choosing where to go, not being able to be in two places at once. If people can only form a small party because most of the other adventurers are still out of town, it _forces them_ to rethink where they can safely explore.
Were the people you were playing with your regular playing group, or did some join just for the West Marches games? Did you have regular drop-ins where somebody brought someone along to try the game out?
It started with people I’d played with before or who hadn’t played but wanted to try, but once it got rolling existing players were bringing in new recruits all the time (friends of friends, or someone they knew who they thought would be fun). I never recruited anyone after that. There were several people who popped in, played a few games, but never joined in full-time.
Taking the small group problem along with the entourage approach causes a second problem: what if a player can play several sessions with various characters and has a problem with metagame information? Something else I would love to avoid, apart from the talk on the mailing list.
Even if a player has good intentions it’s hard to keep straight one characters experiences from another, which again is why I’d be against multiple simultaneous characters.
It’s also an issue when characters die and come in with a new character, but that’s usually easier because they are chronological (everything with the old character was in the past and easier to compartmentalize).
Also, how many players were there when you played? Did you ever do any one-on-one games? Did you ever have a dozen or more folks around the table? What was your average?
The average was 4.1 players (plus GM of course) and the highest was 9, which was a mess because the players were very disorganized. There were only a handful of solo games, and those were for special occasions.
If there weren’t NPC adventurers, then did the players not pick up henchmen? Were hirelings available to be shield-bearers and men-at-arms and treasure-haulers, or was it PCs only?
Basically no. The idea is that the wilderness is very dangerous. No amount of money can ensure your survival, so most townsfolk would not take that risk.
Did you normally play this at your home, or another location, or was it a traveling roadshow?
Lots of different venues.
Have you heard about anyone running a game like this online only? (Play by chat/IM/Skype/virtual desktop)
I’ve heard plans, but no results.
Do you think a WM campaign could work without a clear looting/treasure hunt goal?
Could it work with only a exploration goal?
I ask because I am tempted of trying it with the Dreamlands of Call of Cthulhu.
The players could go on expeditions into the dreamland and wake up at the end of each session, but I wonder what could keep them going there again and again.
I am late to the party, but wanted to throw out some thoughts and questions.
I’ve been contemplating a good ol’ fashioned Basic Fantasy RPG sandbox game reminiscent of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy myself, but the whole DM procrastination issue has been pushing it back and back for about a year now. I’ve really disappointed a handful of people who really wanted to be playing rather than talking about playing, and this has really lit a fire in my mind and under my posterior to get back to it.
I love how this setup solves the scheduling problems. One thing I see, though, is that in a smaller group you might have problems if someone can’t play at all until their character returns to town. How about using the entourage approach with a group like this? I can see one potential issue with it; players can basically “ditch” a set of characters in a dungeon and never bring them back in favor of other characters. I’d hate to institute a real-time (or game-time) limit where after that limit their characters just die in the dungeon for whatever reason.
As I said, I have a handful of people who would like to play (I could probably count exactly two at this point, thanks to my procrastination) but obviously I would need more. Were the people you were playing with your regular playing group, or did some join just for the West Marches games? Did you have regular drop-ins where somebody brought someone along to try the game out?
How did you recruit players? I think that this would be great for recruiting, though. People who want to try the game out can come and sit in on a couple sessions and get hooked. Even better, they can have an opportunity to play with a couple of different groups.
Taking the small group problem along with the entourage approach causes a second problem: what if a player can play several sessions with various characters and has a problem with metagame information? Something else I would love to avoid, apart from the talk on the mailing list.
Also, how many players were there when you played? Did you ever do any one-on-one games? Did you ever have a dozen or more folks around the table? What was your average?
If there weren’t NPC adventurers, then did the players not pick up henchmen? Were hirelings available to be shield-bearers and men-at-arms and treasure-haulers, or was it PCs only?
Did you normally play this at your home, or another location, or was it a traveling roadshow?
Have you heard about anyone running a game like this online only? (Play by chat/IM/Skype/virtual desktop)
Really fun to read all this stuff. A few questions:
What about EL variations in reverse? I could envision many situations where a level 7 party could be travelling through level 3 areas, whether it was because they got lost, didn’t know better or what region they were in, or were just extra cautious. Did you force them to play out really easy and unbalanced encounters? Or did you handwave the encounters and hint that they should go to harder frontiers?
Did you ever have a high level player go “slumming” and join a low level party making a very unsual dynamic? For example a level 9 rogue joining a level 5 fighter, wizard, and cleric because the higher level player felt like showing off or just happened to be free on the night the lower level people were playing. (or the lowbies convinced a more powerful friend to help)
Did you ever have unusual party makeups (ie 3 clerics, a wizard, and a sorceror) because they were the ones that got together that day?
Did you scale the encounters the party faced based on how many players were showing up? For example if Monday 7 players were showing up and heading for an EL 4 area, and Tuesday 2 players headed to the same area, did both groups find 4 CR 4 monsters or did the Monday group find 6-8 monsters and the Tuesday group find 2 or 3 monsters?
What was the highest level obtained?
@ Benjamin
“How did you deal with level gaps among PCs? I have players that would whine endlessly if they were lower level because of not being able to play as much as others.”
It might not be a fit for your group. You can nerf things and just have everyone level equally (present and not present) but that waters down the rewards & risks for making your own decisions. If the party that risks danger gets wiped out, the player who didn’t show up doesn’t lose his character does he?
The deeper issue is that it mistakes something unimportant (leveling) with what is really important (getting to play). If you offered a player more experience points for not playing, hopefully they wouldn’t think it was a good deal.
If they are complaining about their quality of play being reduced because they are weaker than the other characters they are with, they should be mustering with characters near their level. In West Marches there were enough players there is almost always someone near your level, so if you were 2nd you found other 2nd lvl players, you didn’t go out with 7th lvl characters and weep about how powerless you were.
But I think all of this is beside the point. No matter what you do, if some people can play when others cannot there is a danger of serious jealousy. Some people cannot handle others having fun without them. See the “fear the social monster” point. It’s a big one.
I’d love to read some of those game summaries. Are they online for public consumption anywhere?
How did you deal with level gaps among PCs? I have players that would whine endlessly if they were lower level because of not being able to play as much as others. I know this since I have been running a game with a similar style of scheduling for a while — only I DM 98% on the fly, so when the players in the bowling ally decide to game, they call me up and we play that night. Some players are cool with it (one was 2nd level in a 15th level party once), but others would give me a headache.
Man . . . just seeing this discussion gives me *shivers.*
I was one of the West Marches players way back when . . . and I’ve spent many an hour since the game closed up shop reminiscing about the brutality and awesomeness of the place.
One point that Ben made in his post that I think is really worth reinforcing is how transparent and fair everything felt in that game. If you got killed (and we *all* got killed at least once) it wasn’t because “the DM was against you” it was because that damn goblin with a scythe rolled a critical . . . or because you stumbled into an area way above your level and didn’t know enough to get out.
I can’t think of a single time in the couple of years we played that game that Ben really “bent” the rules (either for or against us.) It was absolutely brutal at times, but when we *did* accomplish something (like getting away from the Fenris cult or raiding Zurak Zill) we all felt absolute elation and accomplishment.
West Marches was the first “long form” DnD game that I ever played in, and it really colored my perceptions of what a game like this is *supposed* to be.
(I gotta go re read some game summaries. sheesh.)
Sounds very much like it had a “Wilderlands of High Fantasy” vibe to it. I am envious!
I’ve definitely got some things I’ll be viking for my own campaign. Many thanks.
I can see, for example, using that approach to wilderness regions to a city environment. Not just to describe “the foreign quarter”, as I have been doing, but different neighborhoods. Individual streets and alleys, even. A large urban area would probably be just as “ecologically distinct” as a large wilderness. Now that my home campaign is moving ever closer to my own version of the city of Greyhawk, I think it will be well worth my time to set up the city in a way similar to how you set up the wilderness of the West Marches.
Awesome, inspiring stuff.
> And of course some players were more interested in figuring out the history then others.
It’s worth pointing out that the history of the place was as much a part of the ecology as the physical environment. That is, history is not to be confused with “plot” or “quests” as that was not what West Marches was about. As interesting as exploring a new place on the map to see what’s there was to discover how it came to be that way or how the current inhabitants came to live in a place clearly built by someone else or the great moment of learning about the cosmology when we discovered ancient depictions of the god myths while desperately trying to find a back door to escape hordes of goblins.
“The region transitions were pretty much as discrete as they are in real life. That is, sometimes it’s pretty clear and (relatively) sudden: “You step out of the tree-line into the high mountains” and other times it’s a gradual transition: “as you go further north in the forest, towards the mountains, the ground begins sloping up and gets hillier”.”
Yep, on paper they were quite distinct (just a line on a map) but in describing it I always tried to make it feel geographically real. That’s just me going the extra mile, right before I announce the party is lost and is (literally) going to have to go the extra mile.
“Was there an in-game explanation for why civilization retreated, or was that just a mystery left unstated?”
Yep there was, but the players didn’t even know to ask those questions when the game started. The less you tell the players at the beginning (and the more they find out during play) the better. Knowledge becomes an achievement and a reward for player-initiated action instead of a lecture dropped on you from the heavens.
Also keep in mind that there is more than one “civilization” — the Duke’s kingdom left ruins after they pulled back, the forbidden Fenris cult left different ruins when they lurked in these parts, the completely unrelated dwarven colonists left ruins centuries before that, and the ancient human warrior-kings left ruins and barrow mounds even before that.
Different civilizations only impacted certain parts of the wilderness, some very small and for very short periods of time — the dwarves only had a few hidden colonies, they never controlled the lands around them, and the Fenris cult was all about creating bolt-holes and secret temples to hide from their enemies.
“As for the “where did the ancient ruins come from” that was part of the interesting history that we were trying to uncover as we explored.”
Victory!
The region transitions were pretty much as discrete as they are in real life. That is, sometimes it’s pretty clear and (relatively) sudden: “You step out of the tree-line into the high mountains” and other times it’s a gradual transition: “as you go further north in the forest, towards the mountains, the ground begins sloping up and gets hillier”. For the gradual transitions, I’m betting that Ben either called that 3 regions (forest, hilly forest, hills) or simply combined the encounter tables (probably with weighting for roughly where you are, e.g. closer to the forest is still mostly forest encounters).
But from the player perspective, the important thing is that there was never a point of transition, no sign (or GM) saying “welcome to the Spider Swamp”. It was much more like actual exploring. And remember that we often did not know the names for an area or if we did it was more hearsay and guesswork. So usually it was more like:
GM: The trees start thinning out as you go west and the ground is getting wetter until you are having to carefully pick your way around mudholes and puddles.
Players: Ahh I bet we’re getting into that Spider Swamp that old man mentioned
Player: I’ll write that down on our map
GM: And then maybe a bit less than mile later it turns into a swamp beach as it hits the bay.
Player: Crap, that must not have been the Spider Swamp then since I think he said it was bigger and further north-east of the bay (where I thought we were). Guys, we’re lost!
As for the “where did the ancient ruins come from” that was part of the interesting history that we were trying to uncover as we explored. And, in my opinion, one of the cooler aspects of the game. While there was a lot of ancient mysterious ruins that required a lot of investigation to figure out there was also history that was not really secret or hidden, just that you wouldn’t know to ask about something before finding something (ruins, etc). We came across an old ruined monastery , found nasty scary stuff we couldn’t handle just yet, and went home. Back home the PC cleric went and talked to the head priest and got the story about how it was overrun some time ago (80years or so??). So the cleric then decides that he’s going to try and get back the stuff that was left there.
Or the simple case of the empty plinth we found out in the moors near the foothills that we found out (with a little research after returning to town) was where the statue of the “Red Duke” used to stand in memorial of the great battle where he drove the goblins back and basically making this area safe(-er). But that was a long time ago and obviously things have declined a lot (the statute is gone).
And of course some players were more interested in figuring out the history then others.
Thanks much for the info; it’s very helpful. One thing eludes me still, though; how clear was it to the PCs when they transitioned from one region to another? Could you go, for example, from the Centaur Wood to the Spider-Haunted Forest and not realize you’d done so? Or were the regions geographically discrete (i.e., once you hit a patch of hills it was all the same region until you entered a different terrain type)?
Another point; obviously the western marches weren’t an unexplored, never-before-inhabited wilderness. Otherwise there would be no ancient ruins. Was there an in-game explanation for why civilization retreated, or was that just a mystery left unstated?
cr0m said:
“So far the players have *mowed* through the bad guys, even the big scary demon..”
That sucks. You want danger. It makes player choice meaningful.
“The lack of crunchy gear and meticulously detailed treasure tables is probably also going to be a hassle–my free time for prep is limited”
Cheat — use tables from another game system to generate item concepts (“an ivory buckle in the shape of coiled snake”) and then assign monetary values that work inside Savage Worlds. There have to be about a zillion random treasure table supplements built since D&D was born — since you’re just using descriptions it doesn’t matter how old the tables are.
You could even just steal the treasure system from D&D 4e wholesale — the only thing you would have to tweak and/or ignore would be magic items.
“On that subject, be warned that West Marches play has a lot of prep up front. But even two sessions in, I can already see how these maps and wandering monster charts are going to be useful for a long, long time.”
Absolutely right.
Yep, Frost has the right of it. Size varied region to region. Centaur Grove was very small, Sacred Lakes was very large. It just depended on aesthetics and geographical logic.
The size and shape of your regions will directly determine game variety. If parties move through large blocky regions, they will have the same type of encounters for a while. If you have twisty / narrow / or intertwined regions, parties can easily move from one region to another, so more different encounter types in a shorter period.
Hexes are cool, but they create the illusion that if you’ve been in the hex you’ve seen everything in the hex. If you use them you should keep them very small (half mile hexes are better than 5 mile hexes).
I didn’t use hex maps, just free movement and distances. It kept things organic and made it easy to get lost / disoriented, which was good. To track movement I just got distances and bearings from the party (“we’ll march southwest for 2 miles”), checked to see if they were going the way they thought (wilderness lore) and then drew the vector on the map to see where they actually were.
(Frost also has the dubious honor of having both the first and last PCs to die in West Marches. Go figure.)
The regions were based on the terrain (as far as I could tell from the player side of the table) I don’t think there were any hexes or anything like that. That is “the Centaur woods” had its own encounter tables separate from “Pike Hollow”. And as for the size, I think that was whatever the appropriate size was, the mountains had a much bigger region then Pike Hollow, etc.
As for the player knowledge, a lot of the names for things came from the townsfolk and history (nobody really remembers why it’s called “Pike Hollow”, but if you dig around you might be able to find out why). Sometimes those names were clues as to what was there and sometimes not (no wizard around “Wizard’s creek” but there are Centaurs in the “Centaur woods”).
Again there were rumors and talk around the town giving you clues about the area. And if you were smart you’d do a bit of research before hand to figure out more about the area you were planning on heading to. But in the end its exploration so you really don’t know what’s there. This is one of the things I really loved about the game was that it felt much more like actually exploring an area and finding things out. (See the discussion of the “Table Map” in one of the previous West Marches posts).
I’m loving the ideas of the “regions”, each with its own encounter tables, ecology, and “feel”.
I’m wondering though just how large each of these regions is? Were they hex based (i.e., each hex is a different region), or “one days travel” or variable? Obviously some of them were already known to the players, but when the PCs hit a new region, did you say “now you are entering the spider-infested woods”, or did you let the PCs figure out they were in a new region? If so, did they get to know the “official” name at some point?
I’m hoping to use the concept in my own GH sandbox game…
So far so good. My players love Savage Worlds for character creation. I love it because monsters and NPCs are very, very easy to prep. And since I’m doing a sort of “lost world/fantasy” thing, there are a ton of pulp monsters already made for me. The new system has opened up a big can of mystery, since nobody knows if the giant frogs slithering out of the swamp are fodder until they’re proved fodder, and the massive, slimy demon that carried off the retainer last night might just be unkillable without the right weapon… and what is that weapon?
On the not so good side, despite mega-support and encouragement from the SW forums, I haven’t figured out how to rate encounters. So far the players have *mowed* through the bad guys, even the big scary demon. The lack of crunchy gear and meticulously detailed treasure tables is probably also going to be a hassle–my free time for prep is limited.
On that subject, be warned that West Marches play has a lot of prep up front. But even two sessions in, I can already see how these maps and wandering monster charts are going to be useful for a long, long time.
“Two sessions into our SW version of West Marches…”
And in case it wasn’t clear SW = Savage Worlds, not Star Wars (though now that I think of it a Star Wars West Marches could be pretty cool…)
I’ve heard of several West Marches starting up but this is the first I know of that definitely isn’t D&D. Rock on cr0m! I really curious to hear how it goes in a less crunchy system, so keep us posted.
Two sessions into our SW version of West Marches. The good news is that everyone is loving the whole WM setup. The bad news is that SW doesn’t have Challenge Ratings, Treasure Tables and other well-developed GM tools for setting up your difficulty spread.
But so far it’s wicked fun!
Thanks for this writeup. This is awesome.
“I think a WM game will work fantastically for the first 10 levels, but the flavor of the Paragon and Epic levels might make things a bit harder.”
You’re right, the concept really works best for low level, but you could scale it up. If you just say “it’s a forest, but now it’s EL 25” that’s kind of like the old “blue goblins look just like green goblins but are 10th lvl” shtick. Not good. It also doesn’t take into account high level powers like teleporting or leveling mountain ranges with one pinky.
But what if your West Marches is one of the planes of the Abyss with one safe bastion of good? Or a whole other planet? Go map that.
“How did you get a game like this started? I don’t so much mean handing out a treasure map, but rather how did you organize the first sessions?”
I should claim West Marches sprang from my head fully formed like Athena, but I’d be lying. It actually evolved after a few more traditional sessions kept running into the usual scheduling loggerheads.
I think you’re on the right track — tell the players very clearly what you have in mind (heck, make them read these posts). Definitely expect a little ramp up time as players get used to it. Some will embrace it right away and run with it, some won’t. Some may reject it entirely.
” how do you get players back to town effectively?”
Groups almost _never_ finished a dungeon in one sortie. There was a lot of exploring, getting in trouble, then “running into the swamp like little sissy girls” (to use a popular West Marches phrase). Retreat and regroup was essential.
If necessary groups could “camp out” and not return to town at the end of a session, but this imposes a serious scheduling commitment: those players can’t do anything else until they get that same group of people together and finish that adventure. They are effectively frozen in place. The desire to have their scheduling freedom motivated the players to get back to town more than any rule on my part.
“In case it wasn’t clear I’m one of the West Marches players”
See? No truth to that rumor about all the West Marches players going irretrievably mad. At least a few are alive and well and adjusting quite nicely to normal society.
_What laws are being enforced? No PvP? No magic?_
It’s not really so much about exactly what laws are being enforced in town, and honestly I’m not sure I could tell you exactly what the town laws were in West Marches; but there were guardsmen and they enforced the law inside the town walls. I think it’s more about the demarcation between “the town” and “the wild”. In town you are (generally) safe; in the wild you are not. And even more importantly stressing the idea that “Adventure lies out there”. The goal is for the players to get outta town to adventure.
(In case it wasn’t clear I’m one of the West Marches players)
Draconian law enforcement inside town, coupled with zero enforcement in the wilds outside town, also helps.
What laws are being enforced? No PvP? No magic?
We’ve got our own Basic D&D version of this going along – http://redbox.wikidot.com/ – but right now we’re just 4-5 players, though if we keep going maybe it will grow. If any readers are in New York City, give us a holler on the site’s forum…
I plan to try out a West Marches-like game when D&D 4th Edition is released. I have noticed a few problems that maybe someone (Ben) can help me sort out though.
1. With 4th edition, you have three “tiers” of gaming. I think a WM game will work fantastically for the first 10 levels, but the flavor of the Paragon and Epic levels might make things a bit harder. With players likely to be jaunting around the planes and with powers that often read “once per day, when you die…” it seems like it might be harder to motivate players with purely dungeon based adventures. What sorts of ways might some of you address this? Grandiose dungeons such as lairs of dead gods, or maybe something totally different?
2. How did you get a game like this started? I don’t so much mean handing out a treasure map, but rather how did you organize the first sessions? I plan on just generally feeling people out and then letting them know how the game will work and leaving the rest up to the players but part of me thinks there needs to be some additional push in the beginning.
3. I know Ben discussed it briefly, but how do you get players back to town effectively? Did you design most of the dungeons to be fairly small ordeals, allowing plenty of time to get back, or were players specifically requested to head home near the end of a session progress be damned? I’m wondering if adventures will feel rushed if every session tries to end back at town.
Overall I’m really excited by the ideas in West Marches and I really hope I can get a game off the ground. We’ll see in a few months if my own game ever gets out of the conceptual stages. If it does I’ll be back to post a link!
“I’m going back and forth between 3.5e D&D and Savage Worlds. On the one hand, D&D is all about loot and I have about a billion resources for it. On the other, Savage Worlds is way, way faster to prep. Help!”
I’ve only played a little Savage Worlds but I’ve been playing a lot of Agon recently — very similar to your vaporators in most respects.
Crunchy rewards and detailed character progression is very useful for motivating players in this kind of game, and D&D has that in spades. I think you’ll lose a little player motivation with a less granular system (aka your players may be less rabid), but that could turn out to be a good thing. Just make sure your heroes aren’t going to “max out” too easily — you don’t want players having no where to go once they have d12’s where they want them.
There’s also the lethality question. The specter of death was a critical part of West Marches. You need serious consequences for player choices to have meaning. A victory is hollow without risk.
I am absolutely curious to hear how it works.
“I’ll try toning up the law (or possibly the organized crime in lawless areas) inside towns in the future, but do you have any other ideas about breaking the wilderness motif?”
I can think of easy ways to turn settled areas back into wilderness pretty fast. Say you have towns and villages scattered in the frontier area. A major war erupts far away on the eastern borders of the kingdom (outside the game region, literally the opposite side from this frontier), and the monarch pulls most of the local troops to go fight. He doesn’t have the manpower to patrol/defend this region and still defend his eastern borders. A minimal force is left in the main town (the game homebase), enough to keep it safe (maybe) but not reach beyond it.
Some settlers stick it out, but after the first town gets overrun by hungry manticores people clear out and fall back to the safe regions. The civilized border retreats and you’ve got wilds once again, with the intriguing addition of recent abandoned homes and towns (which monsters rapidly creep into of course). This could all happen in a matter of weeks.
You could even take it a step farther and say that one of the heroes’ prime activities is finding refugees lost in the wilds (or refusing to leave) and escorting them back to safety. The lost settlers are the hidden treasure.
Great post! Any thoughts about what to look for in a system for a sandbox game? I’m going back and forth between 3.5e D&D and Savage Worlds. On the one hand, D&D is all about loot and I have about a billion resources for it. On the other, Savage Worlds is way, way faster to prep. Help!
My own game seemed to drift toward the West Marches model before I even came across this site as players graduated, changed jobs, etc. The West Marches articles were really a godsend for me, as corralling a group of three regulars and six or seven occasional players was an exercise in hair-pulling. There’s only one thing that I’m really having to tweak in my game, though, and it’s that the setting (based on books, our last DM was lazy) is irrevocably colonized and enforcing “the adventure is in the wilderness, not the town” is sometimes difficult. Rather than toss our old game, I’ve been limiting the amount of information that might keep the party/parties in town and focusing less on what goes on there; the brawler getting into a barfight because he has nothing to do while everyone else shops is no longer an actual get-the-minis-and-roll-for-damage battle, etc. I’ll try toning up the law (or possibly the organized crime in lawless areas) inside towns in the future, but do you have any other ideas about breaking the wilderness motif?
Thanks and keep up the good work,
~Joe
I’m glad to hear that other people are doing this too. I started up a WM-esque campaign because of the nature of the group I just met.
About 20 of us got together using Meetup.com and I was actually a bit surprised with the turnout. Well, I’m one of the two people that volunteered to run a game for the group and I figured that a Western Marshes-style game would work best, especially considering that the number of players was going to vary from session to session.
I ran my first session last week and even with 12 players it turned out pretty well.
You can check out my basic setup at: http://www.jadettman.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Games.WeirdTales