What we have is a super interesting campaign book - a combination of wilderness adventure guide and a 'school of play'. If the many, many schools of D&D are cars this book is 'how to drive the Australian Outback, beyond where there is no hope of roadside recovery'. Throughout the book everything is directing your heroes towards adventure. Safe alternatives are stripped away; these are for NPCs back in town. This is a book about making sure your adventurers must risk true hazards if they want to progress.
Own copy, cover art by Matt Cowdery
From the get go this is reflected in the multi-colour advice boxes - blue for 'what are we talking about', green for 'you could do this', red for 'this is how this should play'. The specific framework of the West Marches with its own tropes of town/wild, player-lead scheduling and map-as-record are thoroughly explained here. All these rules exist in the core books but this is the guide to why to set all the dials a specific way for a specific experience. For a quick, non-exhaustive summary the West Marches style is one where a large roster of players drops-in, drops-out for any given session and the focus of play is on ventures into a forbidding wilderness.
So what have we got in here?
The book contains:
13 pages of front matter & intro to what is the West Marches style
14 pages on Survival & Travel
30 pages on Worldbuilding
13 pages on Narrative - lore, mechanics and emergent narrative
Then appendices with:
5 pages on player options
10 pages with worked examples of worldbuilding
13 pages creating an example faction
3 pages on magic items
3 pages on crafting materials
2 pages on converting all this to OSR
1 pages summarising conditions
15 pages collecting all the tables from the book in one place
The Survival and Travel section is harsh - ramping up the wilderness danger and providing a detailed toolkit to make surviving in the environment an achievement before ever crossing swords with anything. This builds out the 3 pages on wilderness travel & survival in the 5e DMG and given that travel and exploration is such a large part of the game this makes sense. I was struck by how badly wrong things will go if a party is ill prepared; here is one of the major stylstic points that make West Marches style what it is - travel is not hand-waved. Survival in the wilderness is no sure thing.
In the Worldbuilding section there is more build out of what makes West Marches different. Across the town, regions, factions and dungeons sections we see the balances tilted towards 'what drives the adventurers out into the wilderness'. Safe options are stripped out with crafting, milk-runs and low-risk options are removed from the players menu of options. You can get things from craftworkers but you have to go risk your neck for treasure out there in the wilds to do so. As mentioned above this trims down the base rules so that adventurers have to adventure, there is no other option to advance. The West Marches are a place to seek glory or perish.
Another aspect of constantly holding the players at risk is that factions must be villainous - the players will find no allies. The factions map onto the 'fronts' model of running groups - identifying their aims and objectives in just enough detail to know what they are likely to do without spending lots of time crunching stats. The section addressing factions gives a very useful example of how to use the forces-driven school of play and reflects what this book does well - going into detail on how to work the specific levers that make the West Marches style what it is. Dungeons are lynchpins of activity and beyond the classic location and its inhabitants we get a strong nudge to be aware of what happens when it is left alone over time. A partially cleared out dungeon may restock itself or something else may move in.
In the last main section - Mechanics & Narrative - we get the direction to let the player actions spin the tale of the campaign, to allow the narrative to emerge from what they do and not to have any over-arching plot. Personally I like this a lot, it fits to my core style whatever campaign I am running. Set up some villains with goals, sure, but try to script out a plot? In my experience, down that path lies a high chance of woe. I like how this section walks through the aspects of this.
The section on handling of lore is full of good ideas - making lore game focused, ensuring that 'lore serves the story' and leaving things vague until they are crystallised through play. Given the wide-open sandbox that is the West Marches, this is critical stuff - there is no way to write all the lore for a whole world when players will probably visit only a fraction. I think that this is also a great way to run games in a way that saves DM heartache in general. The sidebar on timelines is another gem with great real world comparisons to anchor it. The part on Emergent Narrative was interesting - I think perhaps overly complicated by bringing in terms like "indexical story-telling" right next to 'show, don't tell'. I had to read indexical storytelling a few times to figure out that it was just talking about 'if there is a thing about, it may leave tracks and traces for players to find' and 'whoever once occupied this place, may have left things behind'.
After this we suddenly get 'Tolkien Syndrome' with appendices making up the back half of the book.
Appendix 1 - Player options and mods and setup for playing in real time. Some of this is critical such as advice on modifying class abilities like the rangers 'Natural Explorer' which might otherwise negate some of the tension in exploration. The fix is to make it so the ranger can unerringly retrace their steps, not that they have mystical GPS. As a ranger player myself I think this is a great tweak to not completely nerf things but still leave exploration in a place you have never been a tricky thing. Some of the other parts of this like the real-time play are very niche; the subset of players who have schedules flexible enough to sustain being on call for a TTRPG session strikes me as not large. In any case, good to have for those who can use it.
Appendix 2 & 3 - Region building, faction creation and dungeon design - all old school dungeon and encounter workup methods - great worked examples including how to use a spark list. Good guidance on 'this much XP in the nearby encounter pool, no more' to drive courage and exploration. Again, the players have just enough room to progress, never to catch their balance or feel they have a handle on things. Appendix 3 builds out a faction: a coven to demo boss monster building together with their minions, services offered, enchantments at hand and all the ways they could be encountered.
Appendix 4 & 5 - Magic devices & Crafting materials - contains 20 items well suited to the West Marches and 23 innately powerful minerals and materials that can be sought or found as treasure and brought back to the towns craftsfolk to work with. I love these non-standard valuables; things that are treasure in a different form than just fistfuls of coin.
Appendix 6 - OSR corner - conversion notes to step from 5e to OSR with recommendations on what systems could be used. I think there is an element missing here in that throughoutt this book the DM is directed to carefully balance of end-dungeon monsters and the XP in the local XP pool and so on, while to my mind true OSR play puts all sorts of encounters in the parties way and leaves them to figure out which ones they should run away from.
Appendix 7 & 8 - Conditions & Tables collects descriptions of conditions with all the tables from throughout the book (a great idea) plus a name generator (always useful) and generic lore creator which is novel.
Throughout the book we have gorgeous art and small text. Bless the eyesight of all who read this - the text is half again as small as the PHB, I measured 3 lines in the Enchiridion to 2 in the PHB. I had to choose a time I felt I had my strength to hack through all this. If there is another edition, punch up the text size, please.
Overall a robust tool-kit on how to run West Marches and a solid guide to using the forces-driven school of play in D&D. Lots of great advice on encounter design and world building and a good users-manual for executing this particular type of campaign. I am glad I backed this on Kickstarter, the team turned out a good product that I am happy to have on my shelf.
There were two points that rubbed me the wrong way that I feel hold it back from being great. First is the text size, second is the voice.
1. I mentioned the text size above - this is just making life hard for people.
2. Throughout the book the message could be streamlined. There are lots of small elements that tell you why a common practice is something you should not do in a West Marches game - which assumes I play a certain way and that I do not want to change. I would suggest that if someone is holding this guide to how to play the West Marches style then they are already open to hearing how to do it so skip the part about how other ways of doing things are bad and get to the meat. Just say what a West Marches DM ought to do and how that gets you the effect you want.
I would suggest if they bumped up the text size and assumed that the people who picked up the book were already open to the ideas they were presenting, a second edition could be truly great but this is already well worth picking up as the best coherent guide to how to run this type of game.
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