What is a West Marches Campaign

The Tower of Ascension is at its core a West Marches style campaign and draws similarities to other campaigns of this type. What sets West March campaigns apart from traditional campaigns are the following criteria:

• There is no regular scheduled game time.
• There is no fixed party; players can drop in and out each session. With no fixed party there can be many more players in the game.
• The players determine the direction of the game.
• There is a greater emphasis on downtime activities and text based RP.
• The central hub of the campaign is a safe area and adventure must be sought by leaving the safety of civilization.

All the players reside within the same central safe-haven and whenever they wish to explore content outside the city, they coordinate with the Game Master and other players to schedule a one-shot adventure. This adventure plays out much like a normal session of D&D with players meeting on Discord and Roll20 for a live voice play session. At the end of this session, the player characters return home to the safe-haven; bringing with them any information and treasure that they had come across.

A Living World

The Tower of Ascension campaign exists as a living world. What this concept means is that the game world's calendar is synced up with our own real world calendar. One day in real life equates approximately to a day in game. This synchronous calendar isn't a hard set rule and is more of a guideline as there will be plenty of instances that break this setup. For example, a play session may occur over multiple days in-game, but only be played over a few hours. Or players may be engaged in a play-by-post roleplay conversation that takes place over multiple real life days, but only equates to a single conversation in the game world. While this synchronous calendar breaks down when looking at hours or even days, It is useful for observing the passing of weeks, months and seasons.
Another important aspect of a living world campaign is that no adventure occurs in a vacuum. If one party achieves a notable outcome on an adventure, the effects of that outcome ripple throughout the game world. Those events changed the world for every player in the game and other parties may observe these effects on their next adventure.

Campaign Structure

Given this campaign's west marches influences, it will be structured differently than a traditional campaign. As mentioned above, this campaign won't be played through regularly scheduled RPG game sessions with a set group of players. Instead the campaign will have 3 primary forms of play. These are excursions, downtime actions, and play-by-post roleplay.

Excursions

Excursions are live voice play sessions run by a game master for a party of 2 to 6 players. These will be played through Roll20 with group chat on Discord. These excursions don't occur on a regularly scheduled basis and are instead scheduled reactively based on the player character actions. When a player wishes to leave Verdigras to undertake a task or quest, they coordinate with a game master and schedule a session with other players. With multiple game masters, there should be one to three excursions run each week. Players can attend as many or as few of these excursions as their availability allows. There is no fixed party, and attendance to every session is not required.

Given the self containted and goal orientated nature of excursions, they can be more focused in their execution than a standard session of D&D. Because of this, excursions have a greater emphasis on adventure, combat, and exploration and less of a focus on roleplay and inter-character relationships. While this certainly isn't to say there is no roleplay in an excursion, there is generally less than some players may be used to. This also isn't the case for all excursions, as there may be a sessions centered around social or political encounters that possess a large amount of roleplay. Due to excursions having less inter-personal roleplay, players are encouraged to explore their character's thoughts and build bonds with other player characters through play-by-post roleplay on the Discord server.

Excursions are the best way to gain experience, gold and loot. They also completely replenish Stamina.

Downtime Actions

Each character within the campaign has a resource called Stamina which can be expended to perform downtime actions such as crafting, gathering, researching or working. These actions and any related rolls are preformed through Discord, and are not scheduled or planned with game masters. As long as a character has Stamina available, they can perform a downtime action at any time. They just need to make the required Discord posts and await moderator sign-off. Although not required, it is recommended that downtime be accompanied by a play-by-post role play when appropriate.

Downtime actions can award gold and items, but they never award experience.

Play-By-Post Roleplay

Given that each character is sharing the central hub of Verdigras with a dozen or more active players, one of the best activities to participate in between excursions is play-by-post (PBP) roleplay. For those unfamiliar with PBP roleplay, they are in-character conversations between characters in a text chat medium. Within play-by-post players narrate their character's actions and type out what their character says as a discord message. Once you get the hang of it, this can feel very similar to voiced roleplay conversations with a few pros and cons. The most notable pro, is that players can spend more time drafting their response, giving them time to understand their character's opinions and type a meaningful response. This generally makes play-by-post roleplay very impactful with only a few posts. Another pro to PBP roleplay is that it can occur asynchronously, with players taking time between posts. We all have busy lives, and players can reply to a roleplay conversation at their convenience. This can be a few minutes, a few hours or even a day or more between posts. Unfortunately this benefit is a also a detriment to this style of roleplay. As long delays between posts can mean that a play-by-post scene can take days to wrap and are much slower than a voiced conversation.

Play-by-post roleplay is an important part of this campaign as it is the best method to explore your character's thoughts, build bonds with other player characters and learn information about the world through conversations with NPCs. That last point is crucial, as NPC conversations can commonly lead to excursions or finding hidden information within the campaign.

A noteworthy play-by-post roleplay conversation can reward a character with some experience and Stamina.

More info about West March Campaigns can be found by watching the below video

New Player Guide