What is West Marches, and Why?

There are a thousand ways to play any RPG - but Aria of Stars is choosing a game type that isn't common these days - the West Marches style of campaign. This is a game that's focused on survival, adaptability, and the mystery of the unknown, with themes of exploration, danger, and a sort of pulp sensibility. This is the deep jungle exploration of Kipling, the two-fisted space adventure of 50's pulp novels, Indiana Jones and The Jewel of the NIle, The Rundown and The Thing!. This is a world where we work together to tell your story in a dangerous and unpredictable land.

(DM's Note: This section is sourced liberally and paraprhased from Izirion's Enchiridon of the West Marches which acts as a resource to guide and offer advice for this kind of playstyle. I found it enlightening, and wanted to share it with you.)

On the Problematic Problem underlying 5e:

West Marches campaigns engage with a lot of the systems that don't see a great deal of emphasis - survival systems, food, encumbrance and more. But, in a game of this style, we also engage with some of the colonialist underpinnings that were built in the first iterations of the game. Quoting a better writer than me:

"Consider, for a moment, the basic act of an adventure. You, the adventurer, travel far from home, break into a fortified location, kill or drive out its inhabitants, and then take everything of value they own. Afterwards, you return home, rich and wealthy, and are lauded as heroes. You see how this might be an issue?

It’s only compounded by the fact that the game’s reward systems inherently push you towards this sort of behavior: by default, the most prominent means to advance your characters are through combat, where you must defeat creatures, typically by killing them. Now, granted, it’s one thing to fight off dragons, beasts, and demons. They are more or less universally villainous, and the players can usually observe them being greedy, heartless, murderous monsters. However, it’s entirely another when the villains are people.

Consider drow, duergar, orcs, goblins: the standing mythology that the game is built on presents them as fully sentient, and often organized into fully-fledged societies. Whether or not your specific style of managing the game as a GM explores the marginalization of these societies in thought-provoking play, the mechanics and language that comprise the fiber of the game itself presents them as villains. Reading the rules as they are laid down, the game generalizes villainy and evil to entire groups of people, and that their murder and conquest is most always justified.

This is racist.

A good GM can solve a lot of this, yes. They can remove racial stat modifiers, they can build a complex and nuanced world with myriad people, and they can emphasize empathy, compassion, and community building. The challenge is that the rules, as written, will be fighting that GM at practically every turn along the way. It’s impossible not to acknowledge the damaging, dehumanizing elements of the game as it is currently written. The game is one that analogs existing racist attitudes in real life; though this isn’t a problem in itself, by the nature of its construction it rewards those that take these exploitative and colonialist behaviors to the extreme.

All that said, the game is extremely fun. It brings a great deal of imagination, creativity, and joy to thousands—if not millions—of people. You can and should continue to enjoy the game, even with all of its flaws. But you must acknowledge those flaws.

In the West Marches, you will travel to a distant, uncharted land in search of fame, glory, and riches. Even if the Marches are solely inhabited by the most despicable of all creatures, foul devils and shambling undead and otherworldly aberrations, characters in the West Marches are not inherently heroic. True heroism comes from reforming and advancing the existing systems of society to make significant changes that benefit everyone, including the marginalized and oppressed. Slaying dragons and looting tombs is fun, but don’t make the mistake of allowing the spirit of adventure to dull your sensibilities to the deeper questions that prod endemically at the seams of the game.

- Dom Liotti and Sam Sorensen

You're going to travel to this distant, unknown land in search of fame, glory, riches, and knowledge - and like Sam and Dom point out, you're going to meet new people, new civiliations, great ancient evils, dastardly villains, and more. The story you tell will be yours -and this difficult question is one that can and will come up often in our explorations, and is likely to be a key theme in the Reach. As Explorers.. who will you be?

Why Play in a West Marches Game?

Lots of reasons.

Flexibility:

Since parties aren't expected to be static and are taken from a larger player roster, not everyone has to play at the same time. No cancelling sessions because someone isn't there, no guilt for not being able to play every time, and less coordination is needed to find play.

Narrative:

There is something deeply compelling about the old days of D&D, stories that just aren't the same as the ones that are told today. The things you do will absolutely impact the world - NPC, faction, and Player alike. There's magic in being the first to an ancient dungeon - and magic in coming across the remnants of an encounter and realizing it was your fellow players that caused that devastation. The West Marches style of game lets the dice and mechanics tie to and help tell your story. There's no preset plot, no rails hiding anywhere: you decide your own story, wholly. That kind of freedom is like nothing else.

The Game as it is Fully Meant to Be:

I often preach that there's something missing to me in the modern take on D&D, but again Dom and Sam say it better than I could:

The West Marches are, in many ways, a more complete fulfillment of the promise of the game. Many spells, abilities, and features that seem weak or lacking in Fifth Edition blossom in the Marches. When you must carry all of your gear on your back, for example, Strength is vitally important. Likewise, even the most basic of cantrips, say, mending, become indispensable: when your rope snaps thirty miles from town, being able to ensure that it holds secure can become tantamount to survival. In a lot of ways, the West Marches harken back to the older days of the game, and embrace its vision more wholeheartedly. This is not to besmirch more modern attitudes found in Fifth Edition, just that there perhaps might be something lost in the more bombastic, spectacular games of today. If you yearn for ancient tombs and bloodthirsty beasts, for sweeping mountains and haunted woods, for true risk and breathtaking danger—the Marches are the place for you

This is a place where your intuition and resourcefulness will be tested, where you can rely wholly only on what's on your back and what you know how to do - and those companions you brought with you, where every decision has a risk and a reward. To me? I love narrative games, and play in more than one! But this is the part of D&D that I've always loved, and want to offer to you.

Game Flow, the Player Roster, and Missions:

It's true that, unlike in a usual game, the Reach has no set party. There's a collection of players instead - the Player Pool - you're a part of that. Each of you has one or more characters, and they all go on a sort of master character roster. Each mission that goes out the door will have a party - this is a mission party.

I fully expect this game to hit ten, fifteen, even twenty players over time - as I mentioned in the ad you probably saw, the reach is open to everyone.

The Player Pool:

Let's go back to Dom and Sam:

The player pool is, like all tables, a social group. People gather together to play a game, yes, but at the end of the day, the game is a social function. More so than an ordinary game, a West Marches game has intricate, complex social dynamics. At a regular table, there is a scheduled meeting time with a standard group of people. It might take a few sessions, but there is a reliable social structure to fall back on, and thus most every player will find their particular social niche. This is not necessarily the case in a West Marches game. Players will be at different levels of experience with the game, different levels of familiarity with players, and different levels of power as characters.

This is what we're using our discord for - to let everyone stay in touch, talk about what happened and what you're planning, and to ensure that we bond together outside of the game as we take on the Reach. Participation in the wiki and the Discord isn't an absolute requirement.. I guess.. but that's how we make the experience as amazing as it can be.

The Character Roster:

The character roster is the group of player characters that serve as the main adventurers in your West Marches game. Where the player pool is the group of players, the character roster is the group of characters. When players schedule sessions, they draw from the character roster (just as they draw from the player pool).

Ordinary parties of adventurers are united bands of heroes, bound together by common cause. A character roster can and often does share a similar unity, but this isn’t always the case. Everyone in the roster is an adventurer, yes, and they all do traverse out into the wilds of the Marches, yes, but their reasons for doing so vary wildly.

Some adventurers in the roster are treasure-seekers and fortune-finders, out for gold and riches; some are questing individuals, looking to achieve some lofty aim or goal; and some others are refugees or outcasts, come to the Marches with nowhere else to go. This disunity, while it can cause contentions, is usually an asset. It drives characters and missions in different directions, sparks unusual tensions, and pushes good interpersonal drama. The West Marches are a strange and varied place, and so it fits that its explorers would be equally strange and varied.

Thanks Dom and Sam - couldn't have said it better myself. Didn't even try.

Mission Parties:

So as you come together around objectives and missions, you'll start forming parties to take on those missions. A mission party can be as small as you like, but probably should be at least three characters - I'm focusing on smaller group content for this run, and so will indicate a soft upper limit of five or six at most. I'd like to see enough people to make success work, but not so many our table gets bogged down during the adventure itself, especially given our limited timeframes.

How you make your groups is wholly up to you as players - maybe you're a group of adventurers that came over on the boat together or are family, maybe you're choosing from the more mercenary perspective of who's best for the mission you envision. Most commonly? It'll be whoever can play at the same time you can for the next outing; let's be honest, we're all busy people, and that can certainly be a challenge.

A house rule I'm hoping everyone will stick to is that after an adventure or two with one common party, you'll reformulate your party to include others on the missions you're going on, hopefully meeting everyone and giving everybody some table time. While I do plan on running at least one potential game slot a week for every five players (to the limits of my availability, which is variable) it's up to you all to ensure everyone gets a chance to brave the wilds.

Once a mission party is formed? It's like any other party - you've got classes, roles, personalities and motivations, and are going to have to work together to succeed. For the record, I recommend sorting out how you're going to divide treasure before you sit down with me - that solves all sorts of potential issues.

Game Scheduling:

Once you've gotten your mission party together? We talk through when we can synch up schedules - and we go!

The Edge of the World

The Reach is ... alone. It's away from everything your characters have ever known, off of every map, and just about everyone who's ventured past the walls of Landfall has never returned. Monsters, beasts, and ancient ruins from the time before the Scourge are there to discover - and what of the survivors, if there were any? Who can say what civilization clings to the wilderness?

But this is where the adventure is, this is where your fortunes lie. Are you in?