Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Grand Experiments: West Marches” from 2007 by Ben Robbins.
Next week we’ll discuss “Carlo’s code” from 2008 by Jeff Rients. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
Ah the post that makes every Forever Referee’s Eyes Twinkle! Just imagine: A world where the Players coordinate Scheduling and approach each session with a clear Goal in mind 
I remember following these posts when they came out and being very intrigued, especially because this was applied to a 3rd Edition Campaign. Nowadays, I do see the term West Marches often conflated with other styles of Play quite often (Sandbox, Open Table, etc.) but this is mostly just terminology drift. The real defining feature for me that makes it West Marches are those Scheduling Aspects, the Shared Map, and coordination of Goals/Motivations by the Players which is communicated to the Referee to assist with Prep.
I definitely enjoy Sandbox Play, and occasionally operate with an Open Table. These days though, having a more set Schedule for Playing is usually more convenient and consistent than trying to coordinate Sessions on the fly, but that was very much how it worked for awhile: If I was free, and at least 3 Players wanted to Play, we’d get something together 
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I have a vested interest in this so I might as well say something about it!
I actually found out about sandboxes and open tables through West Marches, so it was an eye opening idea for me. Suddenly a lot of ideas that I saw floating around the OSR made a lot more sense to me, and some styles of play that I had previously not given much attention became more interesting to me altogether (heavy resource management, more explicit time tracking, megadungeons, etc.).
Besides that, as someone in communication studies, I really think there’s a lot of opportunities in the format that haven’t been explored yet. Actual Play is a big one (although I guess that Critical Role is kind of going there, and it will probably inspire a lot of people), but also as a community building experience that doesn’t require a lot of commitment from players but can still offer that sense of a third shared space.
Maybe most people already have their set play group, or don’t get the opportunity to play or even think about that many players, so it makes sense that you don’t see this talked about enough, but I really think there’s a great potential here for any kind of community worker.
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Preach it! There’s a really interesting technical aspect to the West Marches that I think a lot of people gloss over or don’t even realize is there (usually because they never actually read Ben’s description of his game), but to me the things that make Ben’s game in particular really fascinating are the things that explicitly differentiate it from a “generic” sandbox and/or open-table game: in particular it’s that procedural stuff that goes into framing each individual session, and how that might affect the look-and-feel of the whole campaign.
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The West Marches is such an iconic piece of early OSR design (or proto OSR even?) and it still presents a really solid set of advice around a wonderful core design. It’s so central to OSR ideas at this point that I suspect the general concepts are likely to feel obvious to a lot of people now, twenty years later … but one thing that is a bit less repeated from West Marches are the ideas of how to run the table. What I like to call “the Material Conditions of Play”
Robbins goes into a lot of detail about how he is managing his players and his table, how it not only connects to his expectations about the game but how player availability and scheduling shape the nature of the game he’s running. I think this is an underappreciated and under examined innovation of the OSR. While in 2006 when West Marches was being written, Robbins didn’t have access to online play, and neither did the entire early, “forum OSR” … but West Marches is still an adaption to the reality of play as an adult with adult responsibilities. Playing games regularly in person is hard, and harder still to get the same friend group for long hours every week or two. To some degree the West Marches style is an adaption of 1970’s campaigns like Arneson’s “First Fantasy Campaign”, though I think the emphasis is very different - exploration rather then a Braunstien style war game. I don’t know though how different, but West marches still represents an innovation - especially in the face of the 90’s style (and still popular) narrative driven campaign where the same players are usually needed for each session.
To me, having missed the RPGs of the 90’s and 00’s the content of West Marches seems fairly natural, but the acknowledgment of the material conditions Robbins is playing under and the use of design to adapt to them is innovative, and very much something the OSR was at the forefront of with online play five years later.
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I find it fascinating how Ben states in one of the follow up posts that West Marches would not have been possible without the design ethos of 3rd Edition. Players no longer needed the GM to decide what was and wasn’t possible, thus empowering the GM to stay neutral and the players to let the core rules be their permission to pursue any course of action.
As someone who associates West Marches with the OSR sphere, I find it really interesting that Ben clearly states that 3rd Edition was the first system that allowed him to pursue this mode of play.
I think it comes down to trust. With West Marches scheduling and planning, the player pool will have a large mix of individuals. Some new, some old. So even if a GM were consistent with rulings, a new player may not be aware of how the GM likes to adjudicate. With 3E, that didn’t matter as much since they could trust in the system and understand (even master) the rules themselves.
I actually can completely understand this perspective. The Knights of the Last Call channel hosts a Northern Reaches West Marches style game with a player pool and GM pool that runs on PF2E. Any new player/GM who joins has access to the same core rules which cover most actions you might take in the game. So even between GMs there isn’t a concern for what you can get away with so long as it’s allowed within the rules.
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I’ve always been really fascinated by this comment from Ben; I don’t think he’s ever elaborated (publicly, at least) more than this, so I can only guess at the nitty-gritty of how he was handling all this, but I can also imagine ways to setup a game where it would be true.
One thing about “crunchy”/heavily procedural systems that I don’t see a lot of people acknowledge is that the “RAW approach” does in fact end up giving the players a lot of agency in “setting up the dominoes”, so to speak, with only minimal GM intervention and nudging. Historically I think there’s been a lot of pushback against that sort of thing (it’s metagaming! the GM should always be allowed to change things to make what she wants happen!) because it was usually positioned against a playstyle that put heavy focus on the GM delivering very specific content for a very specific reason; letting the players stick their hands in everything disrupts that, but in a more open-ended game you absolutely do want the players to have some framework to take the initiative without passing everything through the GM all the time.
So, I like to imagine that what Ben did was take some of the aspects of 3E and its “play culture” that people rail against the loudest, and made lots of hay out of simply letting the players go to town with them. Actually working with the game’s procedures rather than against them (and realizing in the first place what sort of gameplay options you even have available when you do that).
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Great way to put it, and exactly what I was trying and failing to point at. Cataphracts is a recent case that made me think about this too, a play-by-post wargame with heavy fog of war since messages may take days to arrive (like an RPG version of Neptune’s Pride or something).
Also, This Discord Has Ghosts in It. I think these ideas of “how to run a table”, and the aesthetic possibilities therein, are kind of underexamined, but I really appreciate the original West Marches post for being the first time I actually thought about how much about table structure for games is just mostly assumed.
(thank you everyone for engaging with the blog club. My health is being pretty terrible at the moment (long term stuff, nothing acute) so I’m happy to keep making these posts but I don’t have much energy for contributing beyond that).
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I remember reading the original West Marches blog post after I was already in a 3LBB open table group. It was weird reading it because everything but the scheduling is how this GM ran their open table sandbox.
To this day, I’m not sure if I can run WM due to the scheduling. It seems pointless to tell the players “you can schedule anytime you want… as long as it’s after 7 on a weeknight, and only every other weekend”. That might have lead to a calcification in who showed up.
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I had a similar misgiving before running my own WM campaign. I wrote a bit about scheduling here:
Maybe it’ll help.
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Thanks! It looks like you went with a set day and time. I’m probably going to end up doing that because I almost always have the same times free.
Good stuff to think about. I never would’ve given a thought to pointcrawls in a WM-style game.
One aspect of Ben Robbins’ original West Marches campaign that is often forgotten is that it ran from 2001 to 2003. This is meaningful: it predated the OSR (named in 2008) and corresponds with the period of D&D nostalgia characterized by Hackmaster (2001) and the card game Munchkin (2001). Actually, Robbins says his campaign started at the beginning of 2001, so it started before the release even of those nostalgia- and kitsch-marketed games. Besides Hackmaster, the retroclones didn’t get going until somewhat later, with Castles & Crusades in 2004 and OSRIC in 2006 (both pre-OSR old-school games).
The most important bit is what @SullyTames pointed out: Robbins states clearly that this was a campaign that adopted D&D 3e, which was brand new then. You may know (or recall) that 3e was pitched in ads as a return to an old style, which meant going back to D&D after more than a decade of gamers playing mostly other games, from Rifts to Warhammer to Ars Magica to Vampire to anything but D&D. The point of using 3e was that everybody would have the same rules with no additions. 3e was already pitched as a return to origins, even though they didn’t use the term old-school.
The only thing about the West Marches campaign that seems really “Old School” (in the sense of the gaming movement that bears that name), besides letting the players choose where to wander and what to do, is the idea of reviving wandering monster tables. Even in his blog entry of October 2007, he has to defend using wandering monsters: “No seriously. Think about it:…” Because not many people actually used wandering monsters in 2001. They were not found in the great majority of RPGs at the time, and even old-time gamers skipped that stuff when they ran AD&D.
What Robbins’ West Marches blog posts explain was not an effort to be “old-school,” or retro, but how to make a long-term campaign with the newest form of D&D rules without requiring lots of DM prep, both in getting to the table and in running at the table.
All this is to say that the original West Marches game was not “old-school.” Instead, the “Old-School” game movement coopted West Marches as “OSR” even though it was all about how to run 3e before the OSR was even a twinkle in a grognard’s eye. The OSR was a period of innovation rediscovering old tools, justifying them with new rationales, and blending them with new ideas. The West Marches posts were used for that.
It’s a really great series of blog posts and I wish Robbins got credit every time somebody promoted a game as “West Marches-style.”
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