The West Marches

Continuing from my megadungeon post, I wanted to talk about West Marches.

The West Marches

The West Marches is an old school game type, and one very similar to megadungeons in some ways.

Unlike the megadungeon, it is a hexcrawl. Hexcrawls warrant a post of their own, but I'll give you a quick overview.

Hexcrawls are named such because you're traveling across an overworld map divided into hexes:



Each hex represents a region, along with any points of interest inside. The hex has its own geography, which plays a role in how the PCs interact with it. A desert? You have to deal with the blinding hot sun and heat, sand for miles on end. A forest? You have to navigate through all of threes and whatever beasts may lurk within them. Some may be quicker to travel through than others, so the route matters. Usually it takes a day or so to move into each hex.

The game is about exploration, peeling back the layers of the unknown and plundering what treasure and glory you can from the savage wilderness. The travel adds a separate layer to the game: suddenly things like how much you can carry, what you can eat, the weather, the environment and so forth, matter.

A hexcrawl is the ultimate sandbox game because there is no plot, just whatever emerges from your exploration. You choose a point on the map and strive to reach it, or explore a region for the surprise of discovering hidden locations. Plot emerges based on the interactions you have. For instance, you might discover a hidden temple of snake cultists, who are harassing a different region to gain tribute to their evil god. By defeating them, you open up a new region, or change the complexion of the surrounding areas. A nearby town might become friendly after you solved their snake problem. Everything is connected.

The West Marches is a subset of a hexcrawl entirely situated around the starting point of a city that serves as the "home base." It is the one point of civilization in the wilderness, from which all PCs emerge, and it is designed around the same style of pick up and play, drop-and-go rotating player bases.

Every session can sport a different group of players adventuring out into different regions, and when the session is over, the PCs return to town and experience downtime activities. When the next group of PCs moves out in the next session, it's understood the other PCs are just in town.

This means that just like the megadungeon, different adventuring parties of PCs can affect the game world for the other players. If KT's party loots a temple, then that temple is already cleared out if Aekenon gets there.

A lot of the fun of West Marches is in the implicit setting hidden in the territory; at first, there is no information, but the more you explore, the more you uncover. Some players love to keep maps of their explorations too, since the GM often hides the true world map to maintain that fog of war.

This kind of game tends to be rather challenging and dangerous, as PCs come and go. It plays into all of D&D's original core strengths: exploration, the escalation of powering up from nothing, gaining experience, loot, and so forth. Aside from that, any special plot is what the PCs bring into it, and they're pretty much interchangeable.

Because any group of PCs can come and go, it makes scheduling easier, and often player centric. The GM just has to be on standby, and when a party of players agree together that they want to basically go on a raid together, they just tell the GM and then the GM sets something up.

Naturally, games like this involve parties with different levels of players, since they can form their own groups. There is no thought given to keeping everyone on the same power level or making sure everyone gets a magic item or has a narrative scene or anything like that. The game is all about the open ended agency of the players and weighing the balance of adventure against how hard they want to push themselves.

One of the fun things about a game like this is seeing your PC put a tangible change into the game world. Defeating certain enemies or clearing our regions or meeting certain goals can have effects on the world maps and the various cities, like a game of Civilization. Sometimes you might have timeskips after a certain act was completed, showcasing a new era where the previous PCs actions essentially led to a new map.

It's also the type of game that basically never ends, so some groups of players literally get decades of IRL play out of their hexmaps.

So as you can see, it is similar to megadungeons in that it contains factions, the free association of players, and open endedness, but the fact that it takes place over a sprawling world map means a much broader explorative experience rather drilling down into a dungeon.

Oh, and it's called The West Marches, because the first guy to do this made a game where the home city was on the east side of the map representing the edge of civilization, with the entire westward region being nothing but wilderness.

If you google "D&D west marches" you'll find tons of people playing such games.

Megadungeons

As promised to Aekenon, here's my MEGADUNGEON INFODUMP!

The megadungeon

You stand at the foot of the cave entrance. This is just going to be another standard dungeon, right? A goblin hideaway with an ogre thrown in for good measure at the end.

Wrong. This isn't your average dungeon. It's something completely different; a megadungeon. Allow me to take you on a journey into the mythic underworld, a subterranean world-in-a-world whose twisted laws reign supreme and reality recedes like a low tide.

Welcome to the idea of a dungeon as a world setting. A dungeon so large, so deep, filled with so much material to discover, that it can support an entire campaign.

A gargantuan sprawling enterprise that is large enough to house its own factions and even civilizations, that is alive and changes as you explore it. It offers the thrill of exploring the unknown, encountering mysterious alien entities, and hauling out ancient treasures forgotten to history.

Note that the megadungeon doesn't need to be an actual "dungeon": it could be a gigantic crashed spaceship, a tower, a giant tree, a valley, etc. The key is that whatever it is should be large enough to essentially be its own world, and that going inside is leaving behind the rules of the world beyond and crossing over into a sort of fae realm with its own alien logic.

An ancient world

This isn't a new concept, but one of the ways D&D used to be played originally. There's even a clue written in the third page of the Original D&D book, Men & Magic:

At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts.

When I first heard about this, I conjured up wild images of con games run with one GM at a table of 50 players, broken up into subdivisions complete with team captains and assistant GMs. After all, if I can run a table of 8-15 players by myself, then 20 or more isn't a stretch with some help.

And indeed, there were games that were handled this way. But that isn't what this passage is alluding to.

It says a campaign can handle 20+ players. But it doesn't say that they should all be handled at once. The modern assumption is to assume that it does, because in today's D&D landscape, a campaign and its players are inseparable from each other. If you have a campaign with four players, it is assumed that all four will be present.

However, this is a callback to a different time when players would rotate from game to game, and GM to GM, in a kind of "open table" format. The GM would run the setting, but the party that shows up each game night might be different from the last one.

In a game dependent on a heavy character narrative, this would be impossible. But it is a style of play that the megadungeon suits perfectly.

Imagine a game where there is a megadungeon, with a "dungeon town" outside of it to equip adventurers and serve as a resting spot. Whoever shows up for any one session can be said to be part of the expedition preparing to enter the megadungeon, and at the end of the session they return to town to rest. Any players who are not present could be said to be in town at the time pursuing other business. It's perfect! (It's possible to play a megadungeon with a conventional arrangement of one recurring group, of course, but what makes a megadungeon special is its ability to support this alternate playstyle.)

A megadungeon is the perfect setup for an open table game with a huge community of players. There is no long term commitment; no wrestling with schedules. Whoever can show up to play shows up. You can have recurring players, or first time ones; it doesn't matter. Rather than a continuity with the group, there is a continuity with the world.

This opens up the possibility for interesting interactions not only between a player group and the megadungeon, but between different player groups. A door that is smashed by Aekenon in one group will still be smashed when Lavarinth finds it in a second group. If Fallen releases a monster from its prison while he's down there, it'll be prowling around when Kameko arrives. When Milldawg defeats a boss, the consequences will be seen by those who follow. They'll all be playing in the same world.

It's a living world that changes between each foray into it. This is true of all RPGs, but especially of megadungeons, which will constantly be under the influence of the different players traveling through it and the NPCs living it.

Delve as deep as you dare

Such an open and exploratory game demands a different structure than is typical. Rather than awarding experience from reaching a plot milestone, or defeating monsters, the players earn experience by bringing gold back to town and spending it. This puts the focus on exploration: the goal is to delve as deep as you dare in the search of treasures, and because gold grants you experience, you're pushed to keep on exploring until you can find the next jackpot.

This enables a much freer mode of gameplay: rather than needing to defeat a monster to get experience, you can deal with them in any way you want. In fact, combat can often be a hindrance as it'll uselessly deplete resources, unless it serves some greater purpose. It may be more effective to negotiate with an Ogre to get some of its treasures than to simply slay it. Perhaps the Ogre would be happy to give you some of its gold hoard if you slay a group of orcs that have been pestering it across the river.

It also provides a self-balancing mechanism. Rather than the GM being forced to do the impossible feat of tailoring encounters to an ever-changing group of players who will have free range to engage an unpredictable set of enemies, it will be up to the players themselves to decide how much they want to tackle in their search for treasure. Does the party decide to settle for what it has, and head back up to town? Or do they decide to keep pushing ahead, injuries and all? The more danger you take on, the greater the potential rewards.

The fact that no experience is awarded until the party returns to towns and spends it facilitates the "in and out" nature of the sessions, as well as downtime activities. It gives gold an inherent value. It all fits!

Twisting, turning, through the never

Don't think that this means that this is just a boring old "hack and slash" dungeon crawl, though! On the contrary: you have a place big enough to be its own world-in-a-world, which means it's big enough to host a variety of landscapes and groups in it: an underground meadow, a subterranean sea, a volcanic lair, a mushroom forest, etc. When you combine it with the magical surrealness that suffuses the megadungeon, you have the recipe for an endless array of interesting locations.

And those locations will have creatures in them! Creatures that have moved in to live there; creatures that are adventuring in the area, just like you; creatures that have mysteriously always existed; creatures that crawled up from the foreboding darkness below. Often times they will be at odds with each other, giving the chance for politics and roleplaying.

Perhaps some bandits on the upper layer of the megadungeon are being troubled by a faction of dark elves below. If you help the bandits, they may help equip and supply you in the dungeon, but grow more dangerous to passerbys in the surface. If you help the dark elves, they may wipe out the bandits and begin to control the resources the bandits once did, increasing their influence in the megadungeon. And so forth.

These megadungeons are sometimes called "campaign-dungeons" because they are essentially locations where an entire campaign can play out, as opposed to an "adventure-dungeon" which is meant to be scoured once as part of a story and then left behind.

In the end, the megadungeon can provide a satisfying experience for those who invest the time in exploring its mystical depths, and easy way to join the fun for those who can't.

And I totally want to run something like that, one day...