Reflections on an 8-month, in-person West Marches campaign
I’d always wanted to run a West Marches-style campaign and I finally managed to pull it off last year. It was super fun and I learned a lot of lessons that I thought I’d share with others who are thinking about it.
tl;dr: A West Marches (open table) game was the most bang-for-the-buck campaign format I’ve ever run, but it came at the cost of complex adventures and deep character development.
The Basics
- I started with a group of 15 players. It was a mix of seasoned players (my core group) plus a lot of folks with only limited RPG experience that I recruited for this campaign. From that initial group, 11 stuck it out to the end of the campaign.
- It was technically an open table, not a West Marches campaign, since I scheduled sessions whenever I was available to GM and then players signed up for them in a shared spreadsheet. I usually got around 4 sign-ups per session. All sessions were played in-person with a rotating host.
- We played a total of 31 sessions over an 8-month period. We could have kept going, but I had initially pitched it as a 6-month experiment and I wanted to move onto some other campaign ideas. If we were planning to continue, I would probably have recruited a couple more people to replace the ones that dropped off.
- We used Forbidden Lands as our core system in a homebrew world. The PCs were based out of a frontier fortress in a valley that had been lost to time and recently rediscovered. Gameplay revolved around exploring the valley and discovering ancient ruins. There was a lot of faction play involving ancient forces and rival exploration companies.
The Good
- There are a lot of people I want to play RPGs with, and this format actually made it possible to play with most of them at the same time!
- Casual players loved the flexible commitment. People would play a few games in a row then take a month off and it was never a problem.
- As someone who’s mostly played online in the past, committing to fully in-person for this campaign was well worth it. The level of engagement at the table is just so much higher.
- It was shockingly low-prep. After the up-front work of making a map, faction agendas and random encounter tables, the game basically ran itself. I did have to restock my list of adventure sites every few weeks, but because of the episodic nature of the campaign, those sites were generally really basic (~5 rooms max) so that they could be completed in a single session.
- Forbidden Lands was a perfect system for this kind of campaign. The exploration/survival mechanics are unmatched and the horizontal progression system meant no PC got much stronger than the others, even when there were big XP differences. Using a level-based system would’ve made prep and balance much more difficult.
- I gave all the players a blank hex map at the start of the campaign. To my surprise, most of them really enjoyed discovering/drawing the map as they went and swapping notes with players who had explored other parts of the world. It’s the kind of tactile experience that works better in person than virtually.
- Our final session was an epilogue party where everyone got together to send off their characters and debrief on the campaign. Having a dozen of my players in the same room together to reflect on their adventures was a really special experience that wouldn’t have been possible in another format.
The Bad
- The lack of firm expectations for attendance meant that on a few occasions not enough players signed up for a session and I had to cancel it. Not a big deal, but it was disappointing when I was excited to play.
- Because of constantly changing group dynamics, opportunities for character roleplay/development were pretty disjointed. As GM, I couldn’t really personalize the world to the PCs because I couldn’t count on them being there for any given session. That became frustrating for my more veteran roleplayers who wanted to explore individual character relationships/motivations. Ultimately, some people had a hard time getting as invested in this campaign as they would in a more traditional setup.
- Similarly, there just weren’t a lot of opportunities for characters to engage deeply with the world and NPCs. Even though cool lore and dynamic factions emerged through play, sessions had to be pretty focused on hex/dungeon-crawling and/or short-term goals otherwise we’d run out of time.
- Every session, with some exceptions, had to start and end in the main base. Getting the pacing right was a constant source of GM stress, and I occasionally had to force unsatisfying conclusions to sessions when the party was in the middle of a dungeon/combat.
- Forbidden Lands is not a super crunchy system, but it was still too complicated for some of my new players. There were also a lot of mechanics I was excited about (like the stronghold and crafting rules) that my players rarely engaged with. FbL is still one of my favourite systems, but a more stripped-down system like Cairn probably would’ve worked just fine in this case.
Conclusion
This was the most bang-for-the-buck campaign I’ve ever run. I got to regularly play with a dozen friends in a cool homebrew world and it was actually lower-prep than most traditional campaigns I’ve run. Unfortunately, part of the reason it was so easy to run is that it just wasn’t very complex. There was a lot of fun beer-and-pretzels play, but we missed out on the deeper roleplay that I and many of my players value.
I’m genuinely torn on whether to stick with an open table for my next major campaign or to return to a more traditional game with a consistent group. I miss the rapport and focus of a single group, but I would hate to lose so many great players.
This post was originally shared on Reddit, where I did an AMA about the campaign. Check the original thread out for more discussion.