Are you having trouble scheduling sessions for your Dungeons & Dragons games? Are your players not feeling too invested in what’s going on in the story? Are you tired of being the forever DM? Then maybe a West Marches campaign is exactly what you and your group need.
The idea here is that the group explores an unknown region, using rumors, contracts, or similar to guide them in their exploration. Each rumor or contract works as a mission, where it will ideally be solved (or failed) in a single session, with a rotating cast of characters and players behind them. How do you make this work, then?
Get A Big Group
Don’t Worry, You Won’t Run To All Of Them At Once
The key thing here from the DM’s perspective is that your group will change often. The players decide which rumors they want to go after and decide among themselves who wants to tag along, so once they decide who’s going, you guys schedule the session.
Because of that, this concept even works better with a larger group, and players can have multiple characters. If you’re always running these games to the same people, then you can just create an ongoing narrative and story, which is good, but not what West Marches is about. If you run your games for four or five people at once, having eight to ten players is already a nice number, but you can have more.
Create A Campaign Focused On Exploration
Let’s See What’s Out There
The main structure of a West Marches campaign is to have a city or base that is safe and doesn’t have ongoing missions inside it, and the characters are all from there. This is where they listen to rumors, receive contracts, and decide their party formation.
Thus, your worldbuilding needs to encourage that idea. Maybe a city that was just built on a new, unknown continent, or maybe this city is the only location that survived an apocalyptic event. All the information the players have about the outside is a mystery, and it’s their job to find out what’s happening outside, place by place.
Create Hooks And Scenarios
But Only Develop The Ones People Choose
We’ve mentioned rumors or contracts a few times now, so let’s dive deeper. The idea is that these stories will work as plot hooks; the blacksmith heard tales of a dragon up north, while the priest saw an abandoned church east of the city with strange apparitions – stuff like that.
Your players, before any session, will tell you which stories they’re interested in investigating. Once the mission is decided, you start developing a story, session, and dungeon for it, with all the challenges it’ll provide.
If your group is big enough, you can have other players provide rumors, and when a rumor they made is chosen, they’ll be the DM for that session instead of you. With rotating DMs, everyone gets to be a player.
Create A Place For Conversations
And Let The Players Take The Helm
As you may have noticed from previous entries, the players have a lot of input. The DM pitches the adventures, sure, but they pick them, and they also decide who will participate. Thus, your group needs to have a place for conversations outside of game nights, as these things need to be decided before the game.
A Discord group, or a similar app for phone conversations, makes things a lot easier. You throw your pitches there and see who bites. Just make sure all players participate every now and then; you’re bound to have players who’ll be more active and want to be in every session, so ensure everyone gets to play.
If your players enjoy roleplaying, consider a group chat where people only talk in-character, for downtime moments at the group’s base.
Have Fun With Difficulty
Let Them Fail, Too
Sometimes, when a campaign is too story-driven, some DMs may feel the need to balance things extremely well or hold themselves a bit. Losing a protagonist has big repercussions for a narrative, after all. But here, the characters are a bit more expendable.
The missions here don’t need to be properly balanced for the party; if things are too tough, they can flee and try again when they’re stronger. They can strategize, or even risk it. Losing a character in this type of story only means you’ll need to prepare another guild member or similar, so it’s okay for the DM to be deadly.
Let Each Player Make Multiple Characters
Make Some, Too, For When Someone Else DMs
Speaking of characters, it’s also okay if the same player has a few characters to choose from. Because not every mission will have the full squad, people’s levels will be all over the place, with one character being level one and the other seven, for example.
Thus, if someone who doesn’t play as often shows up with a lower-level character, other players can use weaker characters whose level fits them. Alternatively, different characters allow for better strategies; if someone has already picked a spellcaster, for instance, then you can choose a martial.
Be Careful With Time
Ideally, The Story Ends In The Same Session It Begins
Because your games are scheduled based on whoever is available, you don’t know if the people from session one will be the same people from session 2. That means it’s hard to end a session on a cliffhanger, as the next group might be completely different, and you’ll need the same players to continue the cliffhanger.
So, if your group plays for three hours per session, for example, it’s important to prepare a challenge that can be accomplished in this amount of time. Whether it’s random encounters on the way and the objective itself is easy, a dungeon that is mostly exploring and avoiding traps, or a big, epic fight, it needs to fit the time you have at your disposal.
Make Things Disconnected
Anthologies Thrive Here
Writing an ongoing story here is a bit different from regular D&D sessions. Because you don’t know which characters will appear in each session, it’s hard to give them a fixed storyline. Each location will have its own thing going on, and that’s okay.
Still, depending on how elaborate the characters’ backstories are, feel free to make plot hooks that are related to their backstories. Just make it clear, so that the player who wrote the backstory knows that the rumor is related to them, and they don’t miss content made for them.
Give Consequences To Their Stories
Even Anthologies Can Have Some Ongoing Narrative
Imagine one of the hooks you made is that a village was dominated by Kobolds, and your players cleared the area. Who takes this village now? You can give the location a happy ending and create a new settlement, or other evil groups can settle there.
Alternatively, if they fail or any Kobolds survive, they can return, stronger than before, in another mission. Just because these stories are somewhat separate, that doesn’t mean one can’t be a sequel to another.
Ensure Information And Resources Are Shared
Sharing Is Caring
Exploration is a big part of this campaign, but the explorers change from time to time. In other words, anytime a group finds an interesting location, it’s worth sharing it with the rest. Especially if they failed to complete the location, and another group is interested in going there.
Giving these locations side objectives that a group may fail at completing encourages other visits from different characters. The same applies to items; if a party finds an interesting magical item that doesn’t really fit any of them, they can share it at the base and see if any other player is interested in it.
- Original Release Date
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1974
- Player Count
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2+
- Age Recommendation
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12+ (though younger can play and enjoy)
- Length per Game
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From 60 minutes to hours on end.
- Franchise Name
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Dungeons & Dragons
- Publishing Co
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Wizards of the Coast