Lessons Learned Running West Marches

Long-time WaHNtHaC... readers will remember that from 2018 to 2022, I ran a West Marches campaign. The other day, some folks in the TTRPG Finder: Korea Edition group chat (KakaoTalk...it's like What'sApp for Koreans) were talking about West Marches, asking if anyone was currently running one. I of course mentioned that I had run one, but I don't have the time to start it up again. 

It did get me thinking about the campaign I did run, though. I've been going over what I did right, what I did wrong, what I did different than Mr. Robbins' original WM campaign that worked, and how I might do it again if I were to do it again. I'm sure a lot of this is in the various posts I made about the campaign over the years. I should probably read over those posts myself. I'm sure they'll jog a few memories. 

Well, I'll get what I'm thinking down now, and maybe edit in some insights if I find time to re-read those old posts. These are in no particular order, just as they come to mind. 

Change: I'm not a bachelor in my 20s working a McJob. I've got a wife, kids, and a sometimes demanding job. The original WM campaign happened when a group of players got together, picked a time that worked for them and the DM, and made it happen. Not so for my game. It happened on my schedule.  That meant bi-weekly in-person games (usually every other Sunday), and occasionally (regularly during the pandemic) online games using Roll20. This meant that the player planning aspect of the original game was lost, and I tended to have a stable core of players that attended most sessions, but it still worked out OK in the end. 

Mistake: Starting the campaign with 5E. Not that there's anything wrong with 5E per se (yeah, some people will argue that point), but I wasn't an expert on all the spells, monsters, etc. I picked it because it was the current edition and I knew I could get players for that. But in the end, all the feats, spells, class abilities, monster abilities, and whatnot that I couldn't recall from memory slowed down the game and made it a pain in the ass to prep for. 

Correction: Switching to Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins (basically BECMI with my house rules) made it something I was much more familiar with, easier to prep, and easier to run at the table. Yeah, I lost a few players, but gained a few players as well. And I enjoyed it a whole lot more that way. 

Lesson: Next time, start with a system I know well. With random encounter tables being a big part of the game, and a rotating cast of players/characters, I need to know the system much better. Yesterday, I was even considering using BECMI/RC (minus the weapon mastery rules) to make it even simpler for players to drop in, roll up a PC, and game.

Change: Ben Robbins would provide the players with the AC and hit points of creatures they were fighting. I didn't do that. Even with 5E rules, which are a bit more tactical, I kept those secret. And the game worked just fine. 

Mistake: Working inside out. Obviously, I started preparing content for stuff close to the starting town (mine is called Silverwood), and prepping areas further out as we went along. I'd try to stay at least a session's worth of play ahead of the players. The problem is, not knowing exactly what was further out made it hard to include clues to things farther on in the Marches. I was often dropping rumors when the PCs went back to town, rather than letting them discover clues within the locations they were exploring. 

Lesson: Work outside in, at least on the big picture. THEN work inside out to flesh things out. If I do this again, I'll create a map and note the dungeons and special locations throughout it FIRST. All I really need to know is their location and a general idea of what they're about. Then I can plant seeds in areas closer to home that lead the PCs to explore further. 

My abandoned plan for a East Marches (using TS&R Jade) was started this way. I've got a map with dungeons and special locations scattered all through it, all named and with a bit of description. Of course, I used some of them in my current campaign, so if I did restart that project, my current players might be bored going over dungeons they've already pillaged. 

Change: Safe Havens. Rather than enforce a return to Silverwood at the end of every session, I had certain areas that could be found (or converted) into safe havens, where a session could end outside of town.  The next session, different PCs might be in the party, but we didn't worry about "continuity errors" like that. It allowed the players more confidence to explore, knowing they would only have to retreat a short distance to the closest safe haven at the end of a session, rather than save time to get all the way back to town. 

Lesson: I dropped a lot of TSR modules in my West Marches. Quasqueton (B1), the Caves of Chaos (B2), the Moathouse (T1), Castle Ravenloft (I6), White Plume Mountain (S2), the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (G1), Xak Tsaroth (DL1), and plans to use more (like placing the Tomb of Horrors somewhere!). I wouldn't say it was a mistake using these module dungeons. We had some great sessions exploring them. But at the same time, having these generally large dungeons meant multiple sessions would be spent on them. And the PCs didn't always want to get to a safe haven to continue their explorations. So I broke the rule of always ending a session in Silverwood or a safe haven several times. 

If I were doing this again, I'd skip the modules. Sure, they allowed me to get a lot of content in one hex, and the players did have fun exploring them. But smaller dungeons specific to the campaign are better and easier to implement.  

Improvement: In addition to XP for creatures slain and XP for treasure (at least after switching to TS&R), I included XP for exploration. Every new hex explored, every hex crossed (explored or otherwise), and each dungeon or special location found were all worth XP. And the XP awards scaled up the farther out the PCs went. What I could have done better, and will strive to do better if I run this gain, is telegraph these awards more. Often, I'd just tally all the XP for a session at the end and award it, rather than let the players know how much was from each of the three sources. I think if they'd known how much pure exploration gained them, they might have pressed deeper into the "white space" on the map. 

Moving in a New Direction

My plans to run a play-by-post Gamma World game are on hold right now, as is my live D&D West Marches game. I've been running the West Marches for about 4 years now, and I have enjoyed it, but just need a bit of a break. Also, I'm seeing now, as the PCs inch closer to Name Level, some of the cracks in the system. 

The original West Marches was for 3E, an edition that supposed the adventure life cycle to be: explore dungeons, fight monsters, and collect treasures until you reach 20th level, then go on EPIC!!! adventures across the multiverse or something (never got the Epic Level Handbook, never even got close to those levels in my games). So the system had explore/fight/loot baked in to the design from level 1 through 20. 

BECMI, and AD&D, the two published editions I crib the most from for my home game, both have a different expectation. Explore dungeons, fight monsters, loot treasures at low levels. Mix dungeon exploration with wilderness exploration at medium levels. Become a ruler at high levels and get involved with political stuff. Go on planar adventures and epic quests at very high levels. 

I'm getting close to the point in the campaign where in a normal game, players would be planning on where to set up their baronies and whatnot, dealing with the local power structures to make alliances, stuff like that. But West Marches gaming is premised on just continuing to explore the wilderness, and the players in my campaign have only explored about half of my map, maybe a bit less than half. And the feeling that the deeper campaign (which Tao of D&D, and recently BX Blackrazor often post about) isn't really a West Marches thing. 

So I'm going to retool my ideas for an East Marches module to release to the public to go along with Treasures, Serpents, and Ruins: Jade (yeah, I'm renaming that as well, and given enough time, it might end up just as Jade). Instead, I'll keep the ideas for adventure sites but instead of scattering them around an unexplored wilderness, they'll be scattered around a map with various political factions and established towns and cities. 

Most of the Asian fantasy media that inspires me requires civilization. I think there is room for an Asian fantasy wilderness exploration game (Journey to the West/The Monkey King being one example), but not one that's expected to last from levels 1 through 12+. 

When I was in Japan, I would often watch a jidai-geki called Abarenbo Shogun. In it, Shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune would disguise himself as a low ranking samurai and wander around Edo (Tokyo) looking for trouble. 

Two other shows, Mito Komon and Sanbiki ga Kiru (Three for the Kill), were about the hero(s) wandering from town to town, solving problems of the week in each location. A lot like American shows of the 80s like Knight Rider or The A-Team. 

Chinese novels like Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh are all about political power struggles. 

I want competing feudal warlords. Scheming Civil and Military bureaucrats. Peasant rebellions and tongs/yakuza gangs and marital arts societies. And some strange unexplored lands as well. 

So, time to make a new map, pull ideas from previous campaigns and a few new ones I've had over the years, and also the ideas for dungeons and other points of interest I developed for East Marches, and work them into a new campaign that has potential not just for typical D&D murder-hoboing done Asian style, but also all that other good stuff mentioned above.

 I think the potential for richer gaming will be there. 

Until then, I've got another Star Wars d6 adventure to prep based on the events of the previous session.

Simplification

All's quiet on the blogging front. Or it has been anyway. 

It's got nothing to do with the fact that Prince of Nothing took issue with my previous post critiquing his anti-artpunk manifesto. More of that series will be coming sooner or later. 

I've been working on work stuff, plus I gave my TSR-East Marches rules a thorough simplification. I had everything all sorted the way I wanted it. The four big classes with three subclasses each, two martial arts classes (with and without spellcasting) for wuxia types, plus four demi-human race-as-class classes. I had even called the draft "TSR East Marches Character Rules - Final" with art and everything in place so I could distribute it (which means I still could...)

But something about it was bugging me. It was just too bulky, and I knew without playtesting that one of the demi-human classes and the with spells martial arts class were wonky. 

So, I thought about the essential archetypes of Asian fantasy and fiction. And I thought about the classes of D&D. If an archetype could be done just through styling a Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User or Thief that way (many can!) I don't need a class for that. And the ones that didn't quite fit (or didn't fit at all) needed their own class.

I also went back to separate race and class. Funny, but that's actually simpler than trying to balance the demi-human classes since only ONE of them was a Fighter analogue. Also, the races have more broad archetypes that they could easily fulfill. 

Oh, and I found out about a type of Korean monster I'd not heard of before, the Yeongno. It comes from local (Gyeongsang-Namdo, Busan and surrounding areas) traditional masked dance/ceremonies. Depending on region, they can be a goblin-like humanoid similar to dokkaebi (but less djinni-like), a lion-creature, or a dragon-like creature. Obviously, I am using the humanoid depiction, and replaced the dokkaebi race with the yeongno (pronounced like the English words 'young no').

Humanoid-type Yeongno. Punish corrupt rich people.

Lion-type Yeongno. They like to eat rich people. Reminds me of Snuffleupagas.

My rules now look like this: 

Races: Human, Koropokuru (dwarves), Shenmin (spirit folk), Vanara (monkey-folk), Yeongno (oni/goblinoids)

Classes: Cleric, Fighter, Kensei, Magic-User, Sohei, Thief, Xia, Yakuza

As I mentioned, most of the classes can cover quite a few archeytpes, and some overlap. Any of them could be a wandering hero of Wulin type (Dragon Gate Inn, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, etc.), for example. That's basically just an adventurer. Each class description includes a short list of possible takes on the class. For example, a Fighter could be a samurai/ronin, hwarang, wandering do-gooder, military official, mercenary, and so on. 

Kensei, as you would guess, are weapon masters. They share Fighter and Xia abilities. This version actually came out closer to the 1E AD&D version than I had originally designed them.

Sohei are warrior-monks, and share Fighter and Cleric abilities. Also fairly similar to 1E OA, but I give them spells from level 2 (old school Cleric style).

Xia are martial artists, and are pretty much just a different version of the AD&D Monk/BECMI Mystic. Unarmed fighting, mystical self-improvement, snatching pebbles from palms, etc.

Yakuza are a bit different from in 1E OA. They are more social, and get a "call in a favor" ability, plus a limited selection of thief skills and magical tattoos.

All classes go to 15th level. Demi-humans get a small number of classes (all can be a Fighter), and level limits between 6 and 10. 

After I had the new class & race setup done, I edited the spell lists a bit, and slapped it all together. I still need to add art, but the whole thing is now 40 pages including cover (useful charts and tables on back of cover page) and 2-page character sheet at the end. It had been 48 pages in the previous version. 

I'm happy with this. Simple, slim, fewer choices to confound new players. 

Now I need to make a few revisions to the TSR-East Marches Bestiary & Treasury to match the new class/race setup. Once that's done, I'll finally be ready to start designing the adventure locations of the East Marches module I'd like to produce.

12 Years of Blogging

Another blog anniversary passed. Why I decided to start this blog on 9/11 I still don't know. I know it wasn't a conscious decision to do so. And obviously, I'm a couple days late posting this this year. 

Well, real life is a big downer. And it's really not covid life. Or not much. I've pretty much gotten used to teaching via Zoom, gaming via Roll20 and Google Meet (formerly Hangouts), mask wearing, occasional upticks in cases that make us hesitate to visit restaurants, all that. I've gotten my first shot of Pfizer, and will get the second soon. Korea's vaccination rates are chugging along, with about 1,000,000 shots given (first and second doses) on a good day. About 2/3 of the population have had at least one shot. 

The downer is pretty personal. My father-in-law's lung cancer has finally caught up with him. He went six years from diagnosis to today, but his condition is deteriorating. And my wife is pretty busy helping her mother take care of him (he doesn't want hospice care, long story). So our family is under extra pressure right now. But we're managing. 

I'm still gaming, and tinkering with my rules. I'm also starting to develop the locations for East Marches, something that a year ago I thought I'd never get around to doing. But here we are. I'm firmly on the way back to race-as-class for my house rules, with the TSR-East Marches rules (better name than simple TSR-East) using that paradigm. I bet I'll be modifying my more "standard" TSR rules to suit that as well. I've pretty much decided I don't like the plethora of dual-class classes that I made, and most aren't getting any play anyway. I still want to give TSR-East Marches another simplification pass, but pretty much I think it's good to go. And with the PC options, spells, monsters, and treasure stuff done, I'm able to work on East Marches the (mega)module. 

My West Marches campaign and Star Wars campaign are still ongoing. We just had a pretty good session of West Marches this past weekend. The party managed to take out Onyx/Khisanth, the dragon of Xak Tsaroth, with a potion of luck and an arrow of teleportation (and a failed save on the arrow). The treasure was looted, and the dragon, if they ever encounter it again, is gonna be pissed! 

I made an adventure for Star Wars that I thought would be cool and different (and fast) but it's taken two sessions and at least one more. But I'm going to try and get that done this upcoming holiday week (Chuseok, lunar thanksgiving) so we can move back to more traditional bounty hunter/criminal underworld shenanigans with occasional Imperial incursions. The one good thing I did with this kinda boring adventure is set the PCs up to potentially be in conflict with the Pyke species. And that's most likely to be the case at the end of this thing. So that's something fun to work with. 

As for blogging, I've actually got quite a few topics I'd like to discuss, but honestly it's hard to find the time. Several are reactions or reflections based on other bloggers' recent(ish) works, but the more I put them off, the longer it's been since the original posts, the more I think I should just forget them. Still, I expect at least one or two of them to eventually find their way into pixels. 

Anyway, hoping the end of the year picks up. I've got Dune, The Eternals, and Spider-Man to look forward to in the theater, The Book of Boba Fett on TV, and plenty of gaming.

What to Include

 It's been a while since I've posted. Partly because I'm working on my next academic paper. Partly because there just hasn't been much gaming related stuff to write about. West Marches continues (with another casualty last session, and nearly a few more -- 5th level is still not invulnerable!). Star Wars is still on the back burner. I'm still futzing around with East Marches when I have some spare time. 

And that's where I get my topic today. For East Marches, I have a hex map with 120 keyed locations. The map is 22 by 34 hexes, so there are a total of 748 hexes. That means only 16% of the map will have something detailed in it. I hadn't planned it that way. When I was creating the map, I just started plopping down icons for caves, settlements, ruins, strongholds, holy sites, and special locations fairly randomly. That ended up being about one keyed location for every six hexes. And that leaves plenty of empty space for DMs who would want to add their own locations to the mix. 

Anyway, I've given a title to all 120 locations, and have some ideas and notes for a quarter of them so far, but the notes are still pretty general. And I'm thinking now is the time to map and stock these locations. Most will probably be of the "one page" or "5-room dungeon" type write-ups, with a few bigger locations here and there.

So, that brings me to the title of this blog post. What to include in each keyed location?

Obviously, some will be fairly traditional dungeons. They'll need a map, encounter area entries, monster stats, treasures, traps, hazards. 

Others are places that could be dungeons, or could be resources, like settlements. They need NPCs, lists of resources that PCs can access there, and of course stats for the residents and treasures, in case the PCs go murder-hobo on them. 

Finally, some are just odd locations. They may or may not need maps. They may or may not contain monsters, traps, or treasures. They're the grab bag of encounter areas. 

A few things I need to remember to include in each keyed area's description are: 

• environmental features to make the area distinct
• motivations for monsters and NPCs
• interesting cartography for dungeons
• contingency plans for the inhabitants
• connections to other locations on the map
  

The last one is, I think, the most important. For a wilderness crawl, there should be plenty of clues leading from one interesting area to another. This is something I've often failed at in my current West Marches game. My players have been really good about pushing the borders, wanting to fill in the white spaces on the map. To up my game, though, I should prepare more links and clues between locations. It will give the area more of a lived in feeling, and will provide hooks for future adventures.

Yes, this post is mainly just me getting this written down so I can refer back to it later. But it's also a benchmark I can use to judge if the adventure is good enough or not, once I get it written.

Redundancy

 I started work on East Marches again over the weekend. I did a bit of editing to the map (fixing a few errors in numbering, recoloring to make it easier on the eyes on screen but still looking good printed). I also went through and organized the type and terrain of each encounter area on the map. I had used symbols for each type of encounter, and colors for terrain -- but I also have a classic B&W map with the symbols used by BX/BECMI maps too. In my notes, I jotted down each along with the number for the encounter. 

Now, I remembered having gone through and brainstormed ideas for what to put in the encounters for the first difficulty band (up to 6 hexes from the home base). They included a name, ideas for monsters, types of treasures, and connections. But I couldn't find it anywhere. I figured it must have been thrown out. So last night, I jotted down some ideas for the first two zones, very basic ones. 

Today at work I found a pocket notebook in my office, and looking inside, there it was. I'd actually made notes for the same areas in the first two zones many months ago. 

So, now I've got two sets of ideas for each encounter in these first two zones. One set is more detailed, but looking over them, I will probably save some for later zones. Also, there are some similarities among the two lists, although not always at the same locations. 

So, now I get to go through both and evaluate which ones to keep, which to move to further areas out, and which I can drop. I think this is going to be sort of fun. 

I'm also going to try and keep the module as system agnostic as possible, so that I can run it with TSR-East, Chanbara, Flying Swordsmen (maybe)
, AD&D OA, Ruins & Ronin, or what have you.

Next Year's Project

My West Marches game is going well. I plan to continue it. And I've hinted a few times before about an "East Marches" game. I'm going to try and get this out sometime next year.

I've got the map. I've got an outline structure for writing up the campaign in a way that should be intelligible to anyone other than me (my West Marches notes are pretty sparse, because I only need enough written down to jog my memory of what the encounter, mysterious location, or lair is supposed to be about).

Of course, the map has 748 hexes (with six basic terrain types), and I've got 120 "locations" (in five types) marked on it. And there are eight zones of progressing difficulty.

So to make this happen, I need to have four to six wandering monster tables for each difficulty zone (one for each terrain type in that zone). I need to detail 120 locations that can be discovered/visited. I need to come up with hooks and rumors that will drive exploration. I need more monsters.

I plan to make this fairly generic "old school" but primarily for Chanbara. So I'll use Chanbara monsters, and Flying Swordsmen monsters (that aren't already in Chanbara), and probably 1E OA monsters that aren't in either of those games. And some monsters from BX/BECMI (lots of normal and giant animals, giant insects, and general monsters that might as well be in an Asian fantasy setting as a European one). I'll probably need to include  full stats for the monsters for DM convenience.

Oh yeah, and I'll need to write up the "home base" including several Lieges for Chanbara (or just as patron NPCs for other system games). 

So this will be a pretty big book, actually. I figure the difficulty zones should allow for some overlap, and take characters up to at least "name level" if not higher.