D&D General Worldbuilding considerations for a West Marches sandbox

[DeviousQuail]

Except if the party's travelling for a month just to get to the adventure (and thus, perforce, another month to get back) either they're going to have to take pack-mule-loads of rations with them or there'll need to be villages and waypoints along the way where they can stock up.

Right. Different groups are going to want to handle that in their own ways. So it's probably a good idea to chat with your group about their expectations regarding travel and how in depth everyone wants that part of the game to be. Designing or redesigning certain aspects of the world based on what people actually want to play.

 

[Lanefan]

Right. Different groups are going to want to handle that in their own ways. So it's probably a good idea to chat with your group about their expectations regarding travel and how in depth everyone wants that part of the game to be. Designing or redesigning certain aspects of the world based on what people actually want to play.

Two things here.

First, it seems the OP intends there to be a lot of players in this game, along with a fair amount of player turnover, making any sort of consensus that much harder to achieve. If, as it seems might be the case, this DM has a large pool of potential players to draw from, saying "here it is and here's how it works, who wants to play?" is probably simplest; meaning decisions like this are the DM's to make.

Second, there's the question of which comes first: designing the world or selecting/inviting people to play in it. This can be an issue if, like me, you spend a year or more on setting design before dropping the puck. Most players IME aren't patient enough to wait that long, meaning inviting them in before designing the setting doesn't mean they'll still be around when it's done.

 

[DeviousQuail]

Two things here.

First, it seems the OP intends there to be a lot of players in this game, along with a fair amount of player turnover, making any sort of consensus that much harder to achieve. If, as it seems might be the case, this DM has a large pool of potential players to draw from, saying "here it is and here's how it works, who wants to play?" is probably simplest; meaning decisions like this are the DM's to make.

Second, there's the question of which comes first: designing the world or selecting/inviting people to play in it. This can be an issue if, like me, you spend a year or more on setting design before dropping the puck. Most players IME aren't patient enough to wait that long, meaning inviting them in before designing the setting doesn't mean they'll still be around when it's done.

I wasn't suggesting that nothing be designed before talking to the players, just that you can change aspects of the game to suit the players. There's also the option to leave an aspect of the game un-designed/under-designed and get input before beginning. Even if you're not able to get every potential player's input it's not a terrible idea to get some player input. Worst case scenario the DM just defaults to what they've already got in place.

As to traveling, you can choose any method you want for your world. Then decide how much table time is given to that part of the game while at the table. That was what I meant to come across when I said a DM could use handwavium regarding the time of the journey.

 

[Yora]

Here is the thoughts of the creator on the setting design of the original West Marches:

The game was set in a frontier region on the edge of civilization (the eponymous West Marches). There’s a convenient fortified town that marked the farthest outpost of civilization and law, but beyond that is sketchy wilderness. All the PCs are would-be adventurers based in this town. Adventuring is not a common or safe profession, so the player characters are the only ones interested in risking their lives in the wilderness in hopes of making a fortune (NPCs adventurers are few and far between). Between sorties into the wilds PCs rest up, trade info and plan their next foray in the cheery taproom of the Axe & Thistle.

The whole territory is (by necessity) very detailed. The landscape is broken up into a variety of regions (Frog Marshes, Cradle Wood, Pike Hollow, etc.) each with its own particular tone, ecology and hazards. There are dungeons, ruins, and caves all over the place, some big and many small. Some are known landmarks (everbody knows where the Sunken Fort is), some are rumored but their exact location is unknown (the Hall of Kings is said to be somewhere in Cradle Wood) and others are completely unknown and only discovered by exploring (search the spider-infested woods and you find the Spider Mound nest).

PCs get to explore anywhere they want, the only rule being that going back east is off-limits — there are no adventures in the civilized lands, just peaceful retirement.

The environment is dangerous. Very dangerous. That’s intentional, because as the great MUD Nexus teaches us, danger unites. PCs have to work together or they are going to get creamed. They also have to think and pick their battles — since they can go anywhere, there is nothing stopping them from strolling into areas that will wipe them out. If they just strap on their swords and charge everything they see they are going to be rolling up new characters. Players learn to observe their environment and adapt — when they find owlbear tracks in the woods they give the area a wide berth (at least until they gain a few levels). When they stumble into the lair of a terrifying hydra they retreat and round up a huge posse to hunt it down.

The PCs are weak but central: they are small fish in a dangerous world that they have to explore with caution, but because they are the only adventurers they never play second fiddle. Overshadowed by looming peaks and foreboding forests yes. Overshadowed by other characters, no.

Source

Being someone who tried something out to see how it works, he's not the final authority on the subject. But this was written in hindsight after running the campaign, which elevates it above regular speculation.

Other sections of the exploration make it very clear that there was a quite large wilderness parties had to pass through to reach dungeons, and that each region had its own wandering monster tables. Unfortunately, he doesn't really say anything on how wilderness travel was done.

Interestingly, contrary to common belief, he never actually does say that the party has to go back to the town every time they stop playing and that adventures can't be played over multiple different days. (Where does that assumption come from?) But very fortunately, someone asked about this in the comments just two months ago (where I could immediately find it), and the response was that this was something left entirely up to the players:

You lay out the consequences at the start (e.g. “if you’re in a game and don’t get back you can’t join another game”) which motivates the players to manage themselves. If they want to be free to join other groups, it’s their job to think about when to turn back during a play session.

As it relates to making the sandbox, this approach means you need to have both sites that are easily and quickly accessible, and sites that are further away in the wilderness. So players have the option to chose if they want to commit their characters to an adventure that will require the same group of players to get together several times, or if they want to keep the flexibility of having that character drop into a new short adventure any time they feel like. (Which should be established by the "expedition leader" when recruiting the party.)

My assumption is that players who want to have the maximum flexibility are probably also among those who play the least frequently, so having the dungeons close to the town be mostly low-level stuff shouldn't be too much of a problem. Having a kind of automatically refilling megadungeon easily reachable from the town could help with that. And of course, all of this becomes much less an issue when players can have multiple characters. Which was a fairly typical thing in the early D&D days, and I believe precisely because of this very issue. And this is where the "You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not being kept" meme comes from. The time records in question are probably notes on which characters left on adventures on which calendar days, and on what days they returned to be available for new adventures. Even if you don't track season, it can be important to know which dungeon was visited at what times by what parties, so one party can't "overtake" another party and reach certain treasures first by simply playing more often.

An interesting addition to all of this is the option for players to open up or establish new base camps deeper in the wilderness that can be used as alternative start and end points for adventures. That way characters of players who want short adventures can move their home base to more dangerous areas as they reach higher levels. That seems like the most practical approach to me. But of course, those forward base camps can also be portals connecting to the starting town, if that fits the style of the setting.

 

[Yora]

What are your thoughts on NPC factions?

The structure of irregular and frequently changing parties and players exploring all over the place as different groups end up together makes ongoing story arcs between adventures rather impractical. But at the same time, bandits not simply being "bandits", but part of a complex web various groups with distinctive territories and patterns of behavior can be as interesting to get familiar with as new unknown monsters. For all intents and purposes, having a goblin tribe in one area an a bugbear tribe in another area is the same thing as having different groups of bandits for example.

You can always create unlimited amounts of backstory that might never come up during play, but what would you consider an "efficient" degree of work to put into such groups? What are the pros and cons for different sizes of groups or the scopes of their territories?

Any thoughts on this subject?

 

[Lanefan]

What are your thoughts on NPC factions?

The structure of irregular and frequently changing parties and players exploring all over the place as different groups end up together makes ongoing story arcs between adventures rather impractical. But at the same time, bandits not simply being "bandits", but part of a complex web various groups with distinctive territories and patterns of behavior can be as interesting to get familiar with as new unknown monsters. For all intents and purposes, having a goblin tribe in one area an a bugbear tribe in another area is the same thing as having different groups of bandits for example.

You can always create unlimited amounts of backstory that might never come up during play, but what would you consider an "efficient" degree of work to put into such groups? What are the pros and cons for different sizes of groups or the scopes of their territories?

Any thoughts on this subject?

For the type of campaign you have in mind, honestly I probably wouldn't bother with these. The game you're proposing seems very oriented toward episode-of-the-week play, with little if any ongoing story continuity except in the broadest of strokes.

Keep in mind the players' attempts to figure out the workings of the NPC faction(s) will be hampered by not every player being present for every session, meaning it'll be a bit random each session as to who at the table knows what, and how much.

 

[squibbles]

Hey, so this thought is maybe tangential to your topic, but here goes:

I recently came across a cool idea in an OSR snowflake setting called the Planet Eris Gazetteer, which is that the planet goes through a 555 year orbit, 111 of which is a "winter" season, during which most intelligent species must flee underground to survive. I guess that's really just a more regularized version of the "winter is coming" many-year-seasons premise in Game of Thrones.

But just picture how perfectly that setup works with a West Marches sandbox game--At some repeated interval, most surface civilization has to be abandoned due to extreme weather conditions. The PCs and nearly everyone else live for decades in a state of secluded hibernation/shelter. The extreme weather has just ceased and the PCs are now in a position to explore and salvage all kinds of left behind goodies from the before time. They would have records of what existed prior to the extreme weather, but the lay of the land would have changed in the interim period and been filled in by all manner of hardy extreme weather adapted creatures.

k, so more on topic:

What are your thoughts on NPC factions?

The structure of irregular and frequently changing parties and players exploring all over the place as different groups end up together makes ongoing story arcs between adventures rather impractical. But at the same time, bandits not simply being "bandits", but part of a complex web various groups with distinctive territories and patterns of behavior can be as interesting to get familiar with as new unknown monsters. For all intents and purposes, having a goblin tribe in one area an a bugbear tribe in another area is the same thing as having different groups of bandits for example.

You can always create unlimited amounts of backstory that might never come up during play, but what would you consider an "efficient" degree of work to put into such groups? What are the pros and cons for different sizes of groups or the scopes of their territories?

Any thoughts on this subject?

You could make the NPC factions' goals, resources, and bases of operations an unknown that publicly unlocks in the same way that player knowledge of the map does. So if, say, one group of players discovers that the goblin tribe and bugbear tribe hate each-other and could be played against one another, they can record that info for the next group to use if it becomes pertinent. Similarly, if different groups of players discover that the same bandit organization is doing something odd in multiple dungeon complexes, sharing that info across groups could help you build a campaign-wide mystery.

 

[Yora]

Players exchanging stories of what they encountered and what they have seen is one of the most unique aspects of the West Marches structure, which you really don't get anywhere else. You get players acting on things they have been told, but it comes without the context of the GM feeding them the pieces that he has chosen to nudge them towards a desired path. The setting and its stories should be tailored with this structural context in mind to get the most out of it.

Storytelling in such an environment is possible, but with the players being spread out, any stories that come from the GM can't be centered around scenes that happen during play. But you can have stories in the marks that are left on the environment. Something that is done very interestingly in the Dark Souls games. There are almost no NPCs ever spelling out anything that happened, and any written down information is scattered in extremely tiny fragments. It's in noticing the connections between the fragments that a larger picture emerges.

For a West Marches campaign, this could be approached as adventures being expedition to collect data, but there also being a super-game (meta-game already being taken as a term) of the players analyzing, discussing, and inyerpreting the data that they all havr collected. This is an activity that all players can participate in between adventure play, regardless of scheduling.

Many rules system already have small mechanics or rules to go and consult a sage to do research in esoteric topics for a hefty fee. This could be a way for players to gain important pieces of information that they lack to make a clear connection between pieces of knowledge they have discovered. Rather than asking the GM to give them a hint, this can be one way in which they can spend their hard earned treasures in the game. Alternatively, they could do their own academic research as an activity that keeps a character skilled in these things occupied for several weeks. Which might be interesting for players with characters that are thus inclined and don't play particularly often.
Though I think it's important to keep such a thing as something that may potentially happen if players start feeling inclined to do so. Being something without real structure, it might very well be something that never takes off and the campaign should still be able to work regardless. But I still think it's worth considering how such efforts by players could be fed when creating the background information.

 

[aco175]

I had something similar to the OP describing the openness and episodic structure. I made a bunch of modules for the town of Leilon in FR since it fell into ruins with the change from 4e to 5e. I had a base in an old farm turned fort outside of town as a staging base for the PCs and NPCs of the campaign. Each week there was an adventure of 3-4 hours and it would finish with the PCs returning to the farm afterwards. I wanted the players to be able to play from a few PCs they would choose from each week and be able to try out classes and races from 5e.

In action it did not work as well. The players started to just play one PC each to level that one and then just kept the favorite PC. I think the concept would have worked better if I had more players that could come and go, but I ended with just the core 3 players.

 

[WinkyDinkus]

What are your thoughts on NPC factions?

The structure of irregular and frequently changing parties and players exploring all over the place as different groups end up together makes ongoing story arcs between adventures rather impractical. But at the same time, bandits not simply being "bandits", but part of a complex web various groups with distinctive territories and patterns of behavior can be as interesting to get familiar with as new unknown monsters. For all intents and purposes, having a goblin tribe in one area an a bugbear tribe in another area is the same thing as having different groups of bandits for example.

You can always create unlimited amounts of backstory that might never come up during play, but what would you consider an "efficient" degree of work to put into such groups? What are the pros and cons for different sizes of groups or the scopes of their territories?

Any thoughts on this subject?

We actually have a Orc faction now that roams through the wilderness as sellswords and hunters after being forced from their original home. The easiest way to do the faction was to place a couple dungeons and change the flavor to fit the orcs. It gives the players a reason to go there, and every time they meet the orcs and hear the stories of their old temples and manors it gives them just another reason to go out there and secure them.

So I feel like the most efficient way to flesh out a faction or grouping is to just nail down a general vibe you want them to have and just have places important to them that the players can influence/recover. It makes it so it's not out of place with normal adventuring but helps give one extra reason to motivate players to get out and explore.