This week, I thought I’d share some quick lessons that I learned from running my first West Marches campaign (link for an overview of what that means). Most of these can apply to more than just West Marches, so feel free to use my advice for your own campaigns, whatever style they may be.
Lesson 1: You Still Need to Prep. Just because West Marches campaigns don’t have a set storyline doesn’t mean you don’t have to do any planning. Of course you should have some interesting plots and locations in mind for the PCs’ adventures. But beyond that, you should also develop a nice cache of supplemental resources to make your life easier. You may have made a random encounter table, but did you look for images/tokens/minis to represent them? Have you found some maps that can be used for generic encounters, such as a meeting in a forest? One of the things I realized from running my first West Marches campaign is that I didn’t prep nearly enough at the start. Combat encounters went very slowly when I needed to find/draw maps, tokens, and the like. A little bit of prep can make the difference between a fun and smooth campaign and a messy disaster. Save yourself a headache and make sure you put in the effort beforehand.
Lesson 2: Take the Hands-Off Approach Seriously. When I first started my West Marches campaign, one of the most difficult things for me was fighting the urge lay down the law and organize our session play-times and the like. One of the principles of a West Marches campaign is that it’s the players’ responsibility to let them GM know when they want to play and what their PCs’ plans are. You’re running a campaign that requires a lot of effort to manage. Don’t let the players dump scheduling concerns on you, too. For my own part, if my players didn’t give me 48-hours notice about when they wanted to play a session and what they wanted to do, I told them they were out of luck. Doodle can be a very handy tool for those situations. Doodle is a scheduling website that lets you organize events, and gives you options to select only certain day and time slot combinations. We used it to check which dates/times worked best for the group, and players would schedule our sessions around that. It made my life and those of my players much easier.
Lesson 3: Only Start with a Few Hexes. Despite all my effort researching and learning about West Marches campaigns, one thing I wasn’t sure about was what would be a good size map to start. I learned this the hard way when I made my Hex Map 12×12 6-mile hexes. I thought that was a realistic size for a region, but regardless of how realistic it was, I shouldn’t have started out that big. There’s just way too much room to cover and you’ll be stressed trying to come up with interesting encounters in most if not all of those hexes. Instead, I suggest starting with 3 1-day hexes, period. Have a few plots ready that will give them a strong incentive to travel back and forth between those hexes, and have the people and places in those hexes react to developments in the other. As plots develop and/or as you do more prep and feel more comfortable, you can start adding new hexes. Even if your players decide to trudge an unbeaten path right away, you at least can focus on developing one hex at a time instead of worrying about 4 hexes of travel per day.
Do you have thoughts or questions about the article or suggestions for future content? Leave a comment below or drop me a line at jtdimino@d20radio.com.
J.T. Dimino
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