West Marches

What are the West Marches?

A West Marches-style roleplaying game is an open-ended, player-driven, flexibly-scheduled, exploration-and-adventure-focussed style of gameplay, that starts and ends at a safe hub in an otherwise unforgiving wilderness.

This essentially makes this kind of campaign the ultimate sandbox gaming experience. The game is centered around a frontier or unexplored wilderness, and the players are encouraged to explore it on their own terms. The game world is vast and largely uncharted, filled with unknown dangers and mysteries. Players take a more active role in determining the direction of the game. They decide where to go, what to explore, and how to approach challenges. The GM facilitates the world and its inhabitants but doesn't necessarily plan a linear story. Rather, it focuses on more serialized adventures and personalized development. This also provides an opportunity for much larger player agency and collective storytelling, since we are all exploring the world simultaneously.

With this emphasis on player agency, it allows for the player group composition to be more fluid. Different players can join sessions based on their availability, leading to a rotating cast of characters. This allows for a larger pool of potential players. In my case, I want to start out with a player pool of up to 12 players, catering to table sizes of ideally 3 to 5 concurrent PCs. Unlike traditional campaigns with a fixed group meeting at regular intervals, West Marches games often have a more flexible scheduling approach. Players decide when they want to play, and the session is organized around the availability of those interested.

The wilderness is filled with unknown threats, and characters must be cautious in their exploration. The focus is often on survival, resource management, and dealing with the unexpected. To offset the inherent dangers of venturing into this uncharted country, a West Marches-style campaign usually features a central hub or home base where characters return between adventures. This serves as a safe haven, a place to resupply, share information, and plan future expeditions. In this case, that is The Holdfast. No danger can befall PCs while they are at their home base, and usually, sessions will both start and end back at this home base. Over time, PCs may want to instead start to build their own Strongholds out in the wilderness to provide several safe hubs to journey between and play their adventures accordingly.

Did you know?

The name "West Marches" comes from the campaign that game designer Ben Robbins ran for his players. It harkens back to the earliest days of original Dungeons & Dragons, where co-creator Gary Gygax would often run for as many as 100 players. Of course, not simultaneously, but they all lived and breathed in the same otherworld. Robbins combined this concept with open-world exploration, player-driven narratives, and more flexible scheduling. Since then, many GMs have adopted and adapted the West Marches style to suit their own campaigns, contributing to its lasting influence on TTRPGs. You too are now part of that legacy!