After watching the first episode of Critical Role Campaign 4, it’s clear to me that the “West Marches-style” moniker used to describe this latest endeavor of the multimedia franchise was a little inaccurate. The new Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in the world of Aramán created by Brennan Lee Mulligan promises to be an epic and entertaining tale, but the first episode makes it evident that this will not be a West Marches campaign.
Campaign 4 features an extended cast of 13 players, and they will take turns at the gaming table by splitting up into three rotating groups. Having rotating players is the premise of a West Marches campaign, and the reason why game designer Ben Robbins created this play style. The actual gameplay and execution, however, are a far cry from what Critical Role will deliver in this latest campaign. But don’t worry, if you are intrigued by West Marches and want to know why it could be a good idea to run a similar campaign at your table, I’ve got you covered.
West Marches was originally the setting of a campaign run by Ben Robbins (who also created the games Microscope and Kingdom). As a way to offset the most common issue arising at a gaming table, the varying and unreliable availability of players, Robbins came up with the idea of not having a fixed group. As he could draw from a large pool of players, he let them schedule the sessions freely. Once enough players agreed on a date, the game would run ad hoc.
Having a rotating “cast” is great for players: It doesn’t matter if you can play once a week or once a month, you will always have a spot at the table. For a DM, however, it requires a very specific mindset in constructing the campaign. West Marches is, at its heart, a sandbox campaign where players explore the world without being tied up by an overall plot. At the end of each session, they go back to town to rest and plan their next foray. This is a necessary requirement to let DMs run a game with rotating players and ad hoc scheduling. Imagine crafting a big, sweeping narrative, ripe with villains, factions, and plot milestones to get through, but without knowing who the protagonists will be at any given time.
I’m sure every DM has had a session end on a massive cliffhanger involving a specific character, only to find out that the player in question could not attend the following session. It’s like if Frodo had to slip out of Mount Doom for a bit before tossing the Ring in it. West Marches avoids that by essentially getting rid of the plot. However, that doesn’t mean a West Marches-style campaign has no story. According to Robbins: “There was history and interconnected details. Tidbits found in one place could shed light elsewhere. Instead of just being an interesting detail, these clues lead to concrete discoveries.”
Initially, I thought something similar would happen with Critical Role Campaign 4, with the lore of the world emerging organically and slowly through players’ actions in each episode, but I couldn’t be more wrong. Episode 1 is heavily charged with pre-existing lore, and there is a strong, overwhelming plot that drives the characters. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but West Marches offers a pretty different experience from many D&D campaigns, one that is worth trying at least once.
For my first, extended homebrew D&D campaign, I started from a premise similar to the classic The Keep on the Borderlands D&D module (which in turn inspired Robbins’ original West Marches). After an intro, the players found themselves in a frontier town, a classic “last outpost of civilization” setting. From there, they get the chance to explore the surrounding wilderness, either prompted by quests gathered in town or by their own curiosity. This style of play is heavily location-based, so if you’re going to try it, make sure to stock up your wilderness with interesting places to explore. The last thing you want to happen is your players saying “Today we want to check out the mysterious ruins in the Swamp of the Dead,” and having nothing prepared.
Personally, I like having a strong plot in my campaigns, so I also disseminated several hooks for an overall narrative, both in town and in the wilderness. I think that pure sandboxing and purposeless dungeon crawling can grow tiresome after a while, but Robbins raised an important point in this regard when he explained the genesis of West Marches: “My motivation in setting things up this way was to overcome player apathy and mindless ‘plot following’ by putting the players in charge of both scheduling and what they did in-game.”
The lesson here is that regardless of the style of campaign you’re playing, it’s important to find a balance between your role as a DM in steering the narrative and players’ agency. Whether you’re designing a complex death maze for a classic dungeon crawl or you’re shaping the fate of the world in a Critical Role-style campaign, always consider what your players may want to do. You set up the table, but they decide what to eat.
This could be the best time ever to start a West Marches-style campaign. D&D’s latest starter set, Heroes of the Borderlands, is a return to the Keep on the Borderlands, offering the perfect setup to pull new players into this style. The following add-on (inspired by Polygon’s review, nonetheless!) suggests how to better connect the different quests in the set, but you can also run this as the core of a sandbox campaign and expand it as it goes.
In fact, the coolest element of the original West Marches is the interaction between the rotating players. The town tavern had a map of the surrounding areas carved into a table, where adventuring parties added information and sketched new areas as they discovered them. This not only meant that players could help each other even while not being at the table at the same time, but also that the world of West Marches grew organically as the players explored it. If you’re a DM who is trying to build a homebrew campaign or world for the first time, West Marches could be just what you need.