The West Marches But In The East This Time

Something being a "classic" can be tricky. A lot of the time we want it to be a shorthand for "venerably good"; The Godfather or Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure are both old movies that are fantastic in exactly the same way. Sometimes you get an insincere invocation, like "Classic Ragu". As though that ketchup-y nonsense has ever held the same respectable gravitas as Alex Winter in a midriff revealing t-shirt.

Pictured: Michael and Vito Corleone

It often comes down to taste-- Bill & Ted is a classic movie for some people, but among people I'm never going to invite to my house because they're garbage Bill & Ted isn't a good movie.

Among TTRPGs, there are similarly contentious classics-- is Tomb of Horrors actually good? Or is it the adventure module equivalent to slapping your friend's balls as a prank?

I suppose it comes down to context, which is a way to say something true without saying something helpful.

In any case, I had the urge to actually give a TTRPG classic a try in order to see whether I'd end up enjoying it (like Bill & Ted) or not (like the person I slapped in the balls because they didn't like Bill & Ted). The classic in this case was a West Marches.

For the unfamiliar, or those with tragically broken fingers that can't click the above link, a West Marches is a style of running games written about by Ben Robbins (author of Microscope and Kingdom) which placed a premium on player agency within a carefully curated sandbox. His (explicit) ambitions were pretty simple:

1. No regular schedule; the GM would outline their availability, players would schedule sessions
2. No regular party; players were free to and (by virtue of an irregular schedule) often had to mix it up between themselves.
3. No regular plot; adventure was something to be Found Out There, not prompted by a bunch of dwarves ruining your afternoon tea.

As is often the case, some people have mistaken the West Marches for its particulars-- losing the dark magical forest for the animated bloodthirsty trees. Robbins decided to support his three ambitions by crafting a fictional situation in which players were on a frontier, in a city which would never offer adventure but which geographically gave them access to plenty of adventure locations. Robbins also off-loaded things like mapping and chronicling on the players; they shared (or didn't share) information among themselves, identified new dungeons and regions for exploration etc.

All of those certainly work towards his three ambitions, they're the expression of his West Marches idea, but I'm not sure they're the idea itself.

In any case, my current schedule is such that a West Marches--and all that it implies for things like session prep--is very attractive.

Attractive like Michael Corleone

In the coming weeks I'm going to try and write about how I've been setting this up and running it, where I break from the "standard" West Marches template, and how it's working for me. Because I'm a handsome contrarian, I've called this campaign "The Promise of the Eastmark"*.

The first step was deciding what RPG system I'd use to run it.

The System

My initial idea to run a West Marches was actually after having read The One Ring 2e. Its system for overland journeys was more than a little intriguing, hitting as it does a medium ground between the granular ration-tracking of OD&D and a handwaving montage. Similarly, it systemizes a kind of social encounter that I've rarely seen systemized explicitly: the council before the king. It's a staple in a lot of fantasy literature. The moment the plucky band of heroes stands before some figure of authority in a formal context with a request, plea, or bargain.

Ultimately, despite the joy these subsystems sparked in me, I decided against using TOR 2e for two reasons:

1. Barrier of entry is higher. Systemically (it uses mechanical resolutions that are not widely proliferated and might therefore not be as intuitive) and literally (it is not free and costs money).
2. Barrier of integration is higher. My love for the subsystems is overwhelmed by the fact that it is a game not inherently designed for things which aren't Lord of the Rings. And further, it's got plenty of mechanical assumptions about the kind of campaign being played (limited group, conventionally generated plot).

My decision on system eventually had me land on Worlds Without Number. Its barrier of entry was lower because it is free and (much as it makes my mouth taste like ash to say) it resembles D&D. Anyone who has played any edition of D&D will be easier to on-board. And given D&D's cultural penetration, that is a lot more people than have played The One Ring.

The barrier of integration was also lower. Beyond the ability to draw on basically any D&D material published from AD&D or earlier, it's also a Sin Nomine product. Kevin Crawford is notorious for pumping out stuff specifically aimed at sandboxes-- he makes toolboxes filled to bursting with nubbins and gubbins that work for preparing, stocking, and running this mode of play.

In the next post I'm going to talk about how I'm structuring the players' mode of play, and probably a bit about homebrew/adaptations.

*Because east is the opposite of west, get it? Just a little joke, a little gag, a gaff, a little ribald japery for ya, some casual linguistic chicanery as you've come to expect from this blog.

P.S. For any reader afraid that I've forgotten about or abandoned chronicling my BattleTech RPG campaign, I haven't. Circumstances are just such that I've literally not been able to have a session for it in a month and a half.

Journeys in the Eastmark