West Marches Campaign Framework
Overview
The West Marches was a campaign Ben Robbins ran for about two years, designed as the opposite of a conventional weekly game. Three structural rules governed it:
- No fixed schedule — games happened only when players organized one.
- No fixed party — each session pulled from a pool of 10–14 players.
- No fixed plot — the players decided where to go and what to do.
The setting was a frontier wilderness beyond the last safe town. All PCs were adventurers based in the Axe & Thistle tavern. Going east (back to civilization) was off-limits. Going west meant the wilderness — dangerous, largely unexplored, and entirely player-driven.
Setting Structure
The Danger Gradient. Every wilderness region was assigned an Encounter Level. EL rose with distance from town, but rarely jumped sharply — adjacent regions differed by 1–2 EL, matching the game logic that wandering monsters spill across borders. Terrain features (mountains, rivers) created natural exploration paths: head west through Wil Wood → Frog Marshes → Dwarven Caves → Notch Fells, each harder than the last; head north through the Moors → Cradle Wood → Ghost Wood → the Goblin's Teeth. Multiple paths meant a dead character's replacement could explore completely different areas.
Danger Pockets. Within a region, isolated pockets of high danger were either obviously located (players knew to avoid them) or deeply hidden (players only found them by searching deliberately). This kept the EL of a region consistent while still offering hard content. Dungeons embedded "treasure rooms" — sealed or well-guarded spots harder than the dungeon's nominal EL — to provide long-term goals that parties often failed to crack and kept planning to come back to.
NPC Adventurers. Almost none. PCs were the only people interested in risking their lives in the wilderness. This preserved their centrality — no one could find the Horned Tower before them.
Scheduling & Play Loop
Players emailed the group list to organize sessions: "I want to go to the ruined monastery Tuesday, need 2 more." Negotiation ensued. The GM had veto power only over clearly boring plans. All other decisions — who went, where, when — were the players'.
The GM had to be flexible and able to prep quickly. Player-organized sessions created hard prep deadlines: if they wanted to raid the Sunken Fort this weekend, the GM had to finish it.
Information Sharing
Game Summaries. Players wrote up session accounts and posted them to a mailing list. What started as brief notes became elaborate stories. They served two purposes: documenting discoveries for players who missed the session, and making absent players hungry to play again.
The Table Map. A shared physical map — graph paper in real life, a carved table in the fiction — where all PCs could add their explorations. The GM brought it to every session. Players added to it and could consult a scanned version between games. Accuracy was imperfect, but a common reference kept the game coherent and stoked competitive exploration.
The shared map whetted appetite: when players saw that another group had found something beyond Centaur Grove, they wanted to go there too.
Interconnected Details. The world had no plot but plenty of history. Deciphering runes in the dwarven mines might reveal a hidden fortress to the north. Connecting small clues led to large discoveries. Players who shared information got further.
Reuse & Prep Economy
Evolving Dungeons. Dungeon maps were a strong prep investment because parties returned. Clear the kobolds, come back a season later and molds have spread into mushroom warriors. Drive the pirates from the Sunken Fort and it becomes a lair for fishy devils from the sea — or just sits empty. Specific layouts were usable forever; only occupants changed.
Regional Encounter Tables. Each wilderness area had its own table sculpting its exact flavor — critters, terrain hazards, crossover odds from adjacent regions. Combining two results was standard (bear trapped in quicksand; a bear you run into while you're trapped in quicksand). Players never saw the tables but learned the land deeply, knowing which areas were dangerous near the full moon and which ones to leave alone.
Running Your Own West Marches
Ben Robbins' practical checklist for starting a West Marches:
| Principle | Guidance |
|---|---|
| Make town safe | Walls, strict law enforcement inside town, zero enforcement outside; sharp town/wild distinction |
| No NPC adventurers | Keeps players central; explains why the wilds haven't been explored already |
| Dangerous by design | Open dice in front of screen; don't fudge; let the world kill characters |
| Passive GM posture | The dire wolf is killing them, not you; appear neutral, let choices determine fate |
| Easy starter hook | Give new players a basic treasure map to get them out of town initially |
| Player-run logistics | Don't write summaries; don't clean up the map; train players to do it themselves |
| Scheduling on the list | Require all session planning to go through the public list; prevent splintering |
| Exploit competition | Players knowing others are out there finding treasure they could be getting drives energy |
| Fear the social monster | West Marches lives or dies on player pool confidence; manage inclusion actively |
Referee Implications
- Multiple exploration paths at multiple ELs let dead characters enter cleanly at a new low-EL path.
- Treasure room design gives long-lived incentives: groups "never came back" but always wanted to. Incomplete objectives keep the world feeling full.
- Regional encounter tables double as world-building tools — building them forces you to decide what a region is.
- Information scarcity and sharing are designed tensions: individual players see only a fraction of the game; the table map and session summaries create the shared world.
See Also
- ../references/hexcrawl-design-checklist.md
- ../references/pointcrawl-and-hexcrawl-exploration.md
- ../concepts/dynamic-sandbox-design.md
- ../concepts/landmark-hidden-secret.md
- ../references/travel-hazard-and-hex-procedures.md
Sources
- https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/
- https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/79/grand-experiments-west-marches-part-2-sharing-info/
- https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/80/grand-experiments-west-marches-part-3-recycling/
- https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/81/grand-experiments-west-marches-part-4-death-danger/
- https://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/94/west-marches-running-your-own/