D&D 5E West Marches: Handling Return to Town

I'm intending to try and run a West Marches style campaign for my next game. The wilderness map is coming together, I've got a bunch of interesting areas/locations with their own character/danger level, and I'm reasonably confident that I understand the mechanics of running it. There's one element that I could use some suggestions/input on, however: getting back to town. As with all West Marches campaigns, the idea will be that each session is a 1-shot, and characters have to get back to the town by the end of the session unless there's a clear commitment from everyone for a follow-up session within the next week.

As far as getting out of the dungeon itself is concerned, I'm intending to steal this from the Alexandrian - which I think does the job well. The problem is the wilderness journey back to town. Alexander is vague about this and says that, if need be, he'd do this by PbEm between sessions. I'm pretty sure that's not going to work for my group and it's not really the vibe I'm going for anyway.

I intend for the wilderness to be frightening and dangerous, with non-trivial encounters for the unwary. Handing waving the return to town would seem to undermine this atmosphere; on the other hand, however, I'm worried that having to do 2 wilderness journeys in a session is going to eat far too much time out of what may often be relatively short sessions - I can see it ending up as a rushed, anti-climactic end to a game - if it even happens at all.

At higher levels I think this stuff will sort itself out automatically - teleportation (either by spell or some sort of artifact/portal network), mounts, etc will probably render return journeys a non-event; but again, I'm reluctant to trivialise travel in the wilderness right from the beginning of the game by e.g. providing an auto-teleport back to town.

What do people think? Should I just suck it up and gloss over the return journey in the name of better pacing? Alternatively, if I do require players to account for how they get back to town, what should I do if they get out of the dungeon but run out of session time to do the wilderness journey? I guess I could have an "Escaping the Wilderness" table, but that seems pretty harsh on top of the dungeon version. Or I could do what I've seen suggested elsewhere and impose a GP / mile / level "tax" on an automated return - but it's not exactly an exciting mechanic and if it's enough to hurt I think that's just going to feel like a slap in the face for the players after they've managed to escape the dungeon....

I guess it sorta depends on what you're aiming for. Having the travel back encounters can be anti-climatic, but on the other hand can be more realistic. Plus it can make it more cohesive segway into something else. Plus usually there's a long rest involved after getting outside again.

nswanson27 said:

I guess it sorta depends on what you're aiming for. Having the travel back encounters can be anti-climatic, but on the other hand can be more realistic. Plus it can make it more cohesive segway into something else. Plus usually there's a long rest involved after getting outside again.

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Realism isn't, of itself, a concern for me, except insofar as it contributes to the atmosphere of fear in the wilderness. But I also want to pace the game right. Those two things are pulling somewhat in opposite directions and I'm not sure how to resolve the conflict.

So my last campaign was basically a "West Marches" style in that there was a player pool and each session was its own expedition, often with different characters each week. Now, in my campaign there was just a single adventure location, a "mega-dungeon" at the center of a cursed forest. So each session basically followed this process:

1. Town Tasks (like downtime, kinda)
2. Wilderness Trek to Dungeon
3. Delve the Dungeon
4. Short Rests (optional)
5. Wilderness Trek to Town
6. End of Session Discussion

The fiction surrounding the dungeon was that it existed both in the real world and in another world called "The Shade." Once a week, for about 24 hours, the dungeon would reappear in the real world and be open for delving. So, effectively, each session was dungeon run with a time limit of, at most, 24 hours. Depending on travel time, which could vary, you'd have a certain amount of hours to delve and rest (short rests were 8 hours, long rests were one week). Regardless, at 11 pm in real time, I would sound the Thrice-Damned Horn which heralded the return of the dungeon to The Shade. Any PC trapped in the dungeon when it returned was rendered insane and became an NPC. So basically once the horn sounded, you need to wrap up what you're doing and get out.

Since the session was slated to end at midnight at the latest, this meant I had 1 hour of real time, more or less, to get them out of the dungeon, trek back to town, and resolve the end of session discussion. Which was plenty, even with a random encounter on the way back.

So the moral of the story is that it's perfectly doable if you plan for it and make sure that you have a cutoff in real time to make sure each session is self-contained. It may require some contrivances and player buy-in to make it happen, but with some work it can be made both cool and effective.
[MENTION=6801813]Valmarius[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6801219]Lanliss[/MENTION] both played in that game, so they might have some other insights.

I've always run travelling through the wilderness just like any other scenario - it's just a big wide open dungeon. Frequently with mini-dungeons. If I can come up with interesting, logical encounters I do so, if I can't I gloss over it.

But there's no reason you can't add to the story during a wilderness encounter. Who or what lives in the forest? Why is it so scary? Let's say you've decided that there are goblins in the forest that use giant spiders as mounts. There are any number of possibilities there from "the PCs are the hunted" to "rescue the princess".

Let's say the group hears screams for help and discover a nymph being dragged away by our goblins of the eight legs. Do they rush to her rescue? Go after her sister that was taken moments before the group arrive? If they don't rescue the nymph does she come back as some kind of aberrant drider seeking vengeance on those that could have saved her? If they save her she gives them some type of reward, which could be a trinket or a promise of aid in the future.

Then there's pacing. Personally I use the alternate rules where a short rest is overnight while a long rest is several days to a week in a relatively safe location, so I can just string together some "signature" events and be done. If you don't want to do that you can have a couple of encounters and then say something along the lines of "you haven't had a long rest because of the constant misery and rain, not to mention the nightly raids".

That last part is something I also want to address. You don't have to detail out every encounter. Sometimes you just say "you had a few minor skirmishes, but no significant resources were used". So you can have some intro encounters to various regions. One area is dominated by the goblins of the eight legs, but they don't dare cross over to the dead lands where zombies walk the earth.

You can use a lot of this to hint at future enemies and locations. Strange statues of hideous beasts in the forest? Maybe it's really a medusa they'll have to fight later. Giant sized footprints that are days old? Someone else to encounter someday. Throw in a bunch of little mysteries and pay attention to what captures their attention and build on it later.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Don't get caught up in a slog-fest, only play out significant (or initial) encounters, feel free to throw in exploration and interaction encounters.

Good luck!

iserith said:

Since the session was slated to end at midnight at the latest, this meant I had 1 hour of real time, more or less, to get them out of the dungeon, trek back to town, and resolve the end of session discussion. Which was plenty, even with a random encounter on the way back.

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Did the players ever make it out of the dungeon, but run out of game time to complete the return home? If so, who did you handle that?

Obreon said:

Did the players ever make it out of the dungeon, but run out of game time to complete the return home? If so, who did you handle that?

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I don't think so. We would do 7 pm to 11 pm at which point the horn would sound. Then we have that last hour to wrap up. An hour is plenty of time to resolve one random encounter plus end of session discussion. Sometimes they'd even fish for a random encounter if they were close to leveling (go slow pace, track to find trouble, etc.).

Obreon said:

Did the players ever make it out of the dungeon, but run out of game time to complete the return home? If so, who did you handle that?

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No PCs ever got stuck in the Delve. But we did leave obstacles behind us so that a rival adventuring party would be trapped...

I think the core idea of the Thrice-Damned Horn, and the dungeon's return to the shade, is what made it work so well. There was a built-in, narrative reason for us to be forced back to town at the end of session. If I was setting up a similar campaign I would look to create a wilderness-wide threat that makes the realm much more dangerous or inaccessible.

Some suggestions:
Megadungeon (the Delve) -> plane shifts back into the shade
Wilderness exploration -> a cursed fog either inhabited by monsters or causing madness, visible on the horizon
-> roving army of gnolls/orcs/goblins that could descend at any time, war-horns can be heard minutes before they appear
Ruined city crawl -> high tides that flood the city

Some of these suggestions are probably better suited to a town-and-a-dungeon game than a West Marches-style hexcrawl. Our solution back in the day was "keep playing until the PCs get back to town." I assume that isn't a viable solution.

One thing that departs from the West Marches model somewhat but works well and plays up the expedition element is to allow PCs with some resources to establish base camps further out in the wilds. It can be a money sink to establish and defend, and it will lack resources compared to the town so the town can never fully be replaced. Basically, it does the job of a base camp -- allowing the explorers to push deeper into the wilds -- while also filling the town's specific role as a rendezvous/rallying point for expeditions with different characters.

I'd go with an "escaping the wilderness" table and just make it more generous than the "escaping the dungeon" one.

In theory it is much easier to retrace your steps than to explore new territory. So if the players are venturing into Kingsbarrow Forest for the very first time, they might need to make a bunch of Survival checks to not get lost, and they might hit a bunch of encounters (heck, they might not even make it to the dungeon during the session!). But once they've been there a time or two, they can probably make their way back out without too much trouble -- a low chance of a meaningful encounter, a moderate change of a quick-but-flavorful encounter, and a good chance of "you beat feet, and nothing interesting happens."