Brainstorming a West Marches style game

A few days ago, I wrote a short post listing all the TTRPG adventures I’m planning on running. Most of those don’t need more spotlight right now. It’s just a matter of preparation and putting a date. But one concept could get really, really complicated and therefore deserve a bit more time out of my mind and onto this blog.

The West Marches game

For those of you who are unfamiliar with a West Marches style game, it’s a classic RPG game where there are more players than would be reasonable to have at the table in a session. So they don’t play at the same time. Groups are formed for a quest, a mission, some trouble, and then each character can go their separate way, meet again on another quest, or just end up sticking with another group for a while.

I’ve often seen it played using the “Adventurer’s Guild” trope. There is a main town with an Adventurer’s Guild that hires adventurers to do some odd jobs. Players pick the quest they’re interested in and join the session where it’s played, or just join when they are available if there is still room at the table.

I’ve also heard of West Marches games where multiple DM share the same world, sometimes playing at the same time. From what I’ve read, usually this style of game tries to wrap up the quest in a single session to liberate every player’s characters for another session where not everybody might be available. But some groups can get formed for multiple sessions for bigger quests.

While not a classic West Marches style game, Critical Role’s latest campaign DM’d by Brennan Lee Mulligan approaches this system. There are 12 or 13 players, separated into three tables: “The Soldiers”, “The Schemers”, and “The Seekers”. Unlike in classic West Marches fashion, the groups are mostly staying the same, but if the story allows it, characters could join another table for a short while, or a long period.

There are plenty of reasons that make me want to try this sort of game. The first one is that I can mix players more easily than before. I have friends with whom I play often, and others who are available or interested in a game only from time to time. This style of game would allow me to mix my different friend groups in fun ways.

The second interesting thing is that it gives me the possibility to DM very different styles of games in the same universe, and have players join the ones they want to play the most. Just like the Seekers, Soldiers, and Schemers tables of Critical Role. Some players want to fight a lot? Let them storm a place overrun with bandits or gangers. Some want to play politics? Let them climb up the ranks in a corporation or guild. Some are interested in the mysteries of the world? They can search for a legendary beast or uncover some corporation’s hidden agenda.

The third and final main reason is that with increasing the number of player characters in the same setting, I think it could lead to emergent behaviour that I would absolutely love to have at a table. I want one of my players’ characters to get in some trouble with a gang or an NPC, and then have to recruit a few other characters to help them get out of it. Someone could find some loot or treasure and have to share the information with others to help them fetch it, but who to trust? The potential is unlimited!

How to bring the game to the next level

This kind of game is different to plan than regular RPG sessions, but I could theoretically just start playing with a group and then see where it’s going. However, if there is one campaign where I want to go all-in, it’s this one.

I didn’t validate the game system yet. The main contender right now would be the Cyberpunk RED one, but heavily altered. The other option is the Wild Imaginary West. I didn’t run a single game in either of those systems, so I should start with this, but let’s start to brainstorm in a system-agnostic way what I could do to make those games memorable.

Note: If you play TTRPG with me, and don’t want any surprise ruined, you should not read this post further.

Digital

To help sell the idea that each player is only a small person in a living town/city, and that there are other characters that are also living their life and having adventures, I’d like to have a sort of recent news feed containing some info on the events that happened recently. It should be an in-universe feed, like a newspaper front page or digital news article or titles. The idea would not be to write everything that could happen in the town/city, but to give intel on situations that have been created/influenced/altered by other players.

To help create the stories I mentioned earlier where players could contact other players to recruit them or do something together, it could be as simple as a basic messaging app where they’d exchange in-character. I’ll have scheduling conflicts when trying to bring a set of specific characters to the table, but I can try to make it so that the less available players also play characters that are prone to being out of town for quite some time. I’m also wondering if players would really take some time out-of-game to talk together in-character and try to arrange jobs or discuss. As a DM, I could facilitate some of those events, maybe even playing a few of them in really short remote sessions if it helps. I’d also then need to have a way to see which characters want to interact together to plan a session with the correct players.

Both of these could be done with a simple Discord server, but that’s not next-level. If I go with the cyberpunk universe, this could be instead represented by a web or mobile app simulating a computer or a phone with different apps for news, contacts, and messaging. This fits especially well in the cyberpunk setting because the app becomes truly in-universe. Going the mobile app route would be great because a phone is less cumbersome at the table than a computer, and it would be simpler to leverage the notifications in-game. However, this complicates the distribution to every player and probably increases the dev time on my side. This also means that I have to design everything for a phone experience, which will be harder for me than a simple web app.

This in-universe hub could also become an integral part of my DM tools for this game. I could send notifications to players when they receive text messages or phone calls from an NPC during a game, play pre-recorded videos or audio messages… I need to be really careful with all of these tools. We’re still playing a tabletop RPG, not a video game, and the interactions between players and their storytelling still need to be the main focus of the game.

Even further in my mind, and totally not necessary at the beginning, but if we go the cyberpunk route, I have to look up AR glasses and see if I can cook up something great for netrunner characters.

I’m also wondering if I should not try to give my players only a digital character sheet, allowing me to get information on characters that are currently not on the table in a simple way.

Physical

I love physical props, I created plenty of notes, maps, and clues for a live murder mystery party. I also drew full maps for my Witcher and Warhammer games. This is something that I’d also like to have in this game, but I think this is one of the rare things that is not impacted by the fact that this is a West Marches style of game. Physical props are often just part of the session. The western setting may be more compatible with classic old messages on parchment paper than the cyberpunk universe, even if a hand-drawn map can always work.

I also really like the idea of a layered map for the Cyberpunk universe. Using tracing paper to add information on top of a map already placed. It could be metro lines, corporations’ influence, netrunning targets… This might be more of a wow effect than anything else, but this could also simply be used to annotate the main map without having to redraw it every time.

Still in the physical space, miniatures. For either system, having miniatures is always fun. It might be more work in the cyberpunk universe because gangers and futuristic minis are not in my collection, but the fantasy far west monsters are also something that could take quite a bit of time!

Creating a setup propice to this kind of game

In both systems, to make the game really interesting and feel connected, we need a setup. A situation where it’d make sense to have plenty of connected characters, and where shuffling them in various groups still makes sense.

For the Wild Imaginary West setting, I’m thinking that the main setup would be the creation of a new town in the west. I’d design a good core group of NPCs as the main settlers, and the characters could be other settlers, nomads, or hunters just trying to work in town. The fact that the town is just being created is a good excuse to let the characters’ actions shape how the town evolves. Someone found a gold mine? Now someone in town might need to create a trade route to acheminate it in a major hub. Are some characters siding with a specific faction? Maybe this faction builds headquarters in town. And in the Wild West, it’s common for someone to leave for a few weeks to visit another town, and everybody takes the jobs that are available.

For the Cyberpunk setting, it’s a little murky. I could influence character creation to make all of them either affiliated or just connected to a specific gang. I could let them be whoever and just connect them by making them live in the same mega-building at first. Or maybe, one way or another, they have ties with the same corporation. Contrary to the Wild West setting, I think that I have to setup some sort of mandatory connection in each character backstory, this might not be an issue. But it’s something to keep in mind.

Closing thoughts

And that’s it for my first brainstorming session about this game. We put down a few ideas. That’s progress. The next step is to run a few games in each setting, with temporary rules for Cyberpunk since I’m not a fan of the system. And while running those games, start working on the DM wiki that I’ll need to create consistent NPCs, characters, and a universe.

And you know what, I didn’t pick a setting yet. What if I ran both?