Critical Role has announced that the much-anticipated Campaign Four, starting on Oct. 2, 2025, will be its most ambitious ever, bringing together 13 players on three different gaming tables for a West Marches-style campaign led by Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan, taking over from Matt Mercer, who will finally be stepping in as a full-time player. However, fans who are not familiar with the intricacies of tabletop role-playing games may be wondering what, exactly, a “West Marches-style” campaign is.
West Marches is the name of a long-running game created by Ben Robbins, the game designer who also created Microscope and Kingdom. West Marches started with a similar premise to the iconic The Keep on the Borderlands D&D module: A fortified town is the last safe outpost at the edge of civilization, and beyond that extends a wilderness ripe with dangers and opportunities for adventurers. The players start from the town and explore the wilderness with no prompts, quests, or input from the Game Master, creating a true sandbox experience. At the end of every session, they go back to the town, waiting for the next expedition.
The premise of the West Marches game was that there was no regular time; every session was scheduled by players based on their availability. (This obviously won’t be applied to Critical Role’s campaign.) There was also no regular party. Robbins had a large pool of players (between 10 and 14), so the group at the table would vary depending on who was available on a specific day. According to Robbins, this setup helped deal with some of the recurring issues a TTRPG group faces: “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. A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too.”
Every regular TTRPG player knows that even the destructive might of the Tarrasque pales in comparison to the real ultimate monster: conflicting schedules. Still, that’s hardly a problem that the Critical Role crew has to deal with, so why are they choosing a West Marches style for Campaign Four? Because of everything else that this approach implies. In Robbins’ game, each player attended, on average, a third of the sessions. Information sharing was, thus, essential. Players not only shared tales of their daring exploits with each other, but every party left behind info about the locations they explored on a shared map carved on a large table in the taproom of the local inn. Together with the sandbox aspect, this meant that the world of West Marches grew organically as the players explored it. According to Robbins, this meant that, while there was no plot, “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.”
This aspect will be crucial for Critical Role’s Campaign Four, set in the brand-new world of Aramán, created by Mulligan. Every Game Master who has tried their hand at a homebrew campaign knows how challenging it is to create a world from scratch. Sure, it’s possible to fill hundreds of pages with lore, locations, history, and characters (Robbins also said that the West Marches territory had to be, by necessity, very detailed), but that doesn’t mean the world will feel alive to the players. However, having that world grow and take shape from their discoveries and their choices will create that kind of magical storytelling that Critical Role fans crave. As the players discover more about the world of Aramàn, so will the spectators at home.
Finally, a West Marches style will also allow for a high number of players in the campaign (13 have been confirmed in the announcement) without having to cram them all at the same table. They will be divided into three groups — the Soldiers, the Schemers, and the Seekers — and that’s the most intriguing aspect to me. If Mulligan and the others want to take full advantage of this setup, the groups won’t have separate adventures that will intersect periodically in special sessions. True to the West March style, each group’s actions and discoveries should have an impact on the other tables, creating the feeling of a world that is changing in real time. It will be interesting to see if they will work together and share information, and how — perhaps picking up the idea of the carved table map from the original West Marches.
There is a lot more to West Marches, which its creator described as “designed to be pretty much the diametric opposite of the normal weekly game.” If you want to learn more about Robbins’ game and how you can apply these ideas to your own, I suggest checking his blog, or the great explanation by Matthew Colville you can watch below. It was a revolutionary idea that influenced TTRPGs for decades, and it’s now being brought to the brightest stage in the industry.