I don’t get to run games as often as I’d like. I have a decent pool of players from different game groups, but a lot of them have inconsistent schedules so we can’t pick a day and time that works every week. I’m looking to start running a West Marches game over Discord as a way to remedy that.
I know West Marches can be a bit nebulous, specifically I am aiming for:
- A pool of ~10 players, where each session can be a different combination of players (max 4 players)
- Players schedule the sessions based on my availability
- Each session starts and ends in the home town
- Adventures don’t occur in the home town
I’m looking for any tools or resources that you’d recommend to help in a few areas:
- Discord server setup: Does anyone have suggestions (or better yet, a discord template) for useful channel setups that have worked for you? I’m thinking world/lore, scheduling, session recaps, downtime and a forum channel for a job board to list the available adventures. Any obvious ones that I’ve missed?
- Scheduling: I’ve used sesh.fyi a few times and I think it’ll work for what I need (and integrates with Discord), but if you have any other recommendations I’d love to hear them. Specifically I want to list my availability for the next fortnight or so and let people schedule sessions on those days.
- Shared map: I want to have a shared map that is available at any time (so not in a VTT needs me to sign in or keep running for people to view). Is Miro my best bet?
I’ll be running it using Cairn, using Kettlewright as a character keeper.
Any tips for player incentives since I’m using a level-less system (so no gold = XP)? I’m hoping the adventurers are fun enough on their own, but some people want extra reasons.
Finally, for those who have run a West Marches online before, any general advice you wish you’d received going in?