West Marches Style: Bringing Us Together

Why? It's not part of the original material so it was thought up after the release of the PHB. That makes it unknown knowledge. I think a player could even spend down time (not sure how long) and develop the knowledge. They could then open a training school to teach the material. Heck they could even develop more UA stuff.

My thought behind making it "discoverable" was to allow for some morr collaborative play and also to allow this idea of yoyrs, Couch, to grow naturally. This would allow it to survive the thread curse a bit longer.

The idea behind the West Marches play style is the town or city everyone begins in is safe. Nothing is supposed to happen within the walls. Granted some like that stuff and heck it could get to that point, but I certainty don't want to have the city in disarray at the beginning of this endeavor.

Let's say this is the highest point of this city's life. It is at its most safest and the people inside have learned to get along. That is not to say something may change later in but for now, just to get things kicked off, we'll say it is utopian-esk.

I like the larger area surrounded by muntains with a small wooded area inside. It could be segragated with the town center being the hub for intra trading. The city needs to be free flow as well so any player can come in and have their idea fit. Let's all agree it is a well off, large city that is the only known bright point left in the world. The players that adventure are those people that are getting stir crazy and want to see what is out there or they are part of the teams that push back the monsters that creep closer to the city. What I see in my head is a lot like Attack in Titan, where the city is safe and the Scouts leave to keep the city safe.

I was suggesting the overpopulation as a motivation device to get people out, I didn't mean there should be conflict in the city, but I take your point. Other options for them to suddenly want to go outside would be a religious crusade or a new ruler with something to prove. None of this should make much difference to the adventurers, they would only really be playing in the tavern or the wilds, but I just like the world building side of things and feel a strong urge to figure out why these things are happening. :-)

Understood.

I love world building too! That's part of why West Marches appeals to me so much--the world is being built as we explore it. It's awesome.
I think rather than saying this is the highest point in the city's life, we should just say it has established itself nicely. If it was at its highest point, it would have already explored beyond it's borders. I think we should still have plenty of room for it to grow or it will feel as if the adventurer's actions can't really help the growth of the town at all. I also think that having a huge, walled, heavily-fortified city (Attack on Titans) from which the adventurers are sallying is a little too much. The whole point of West Marches is that the adventurers are truly on their own in the wilderness, but if they have a huge city to return to I think that the game will turn into the players trying to persuade the city to help them every time they come up against a big problem. And as much as we could just say "you're not allowed to do that," the logical side of me wants it to make sense. So here's what I propose:
Venatus is a large, unexplored continent on the other side of the world from Civis. Civis has been under the thumb of civilization for eons now and has thousands of years of history: empires, nations, republics, dictatorships rising and crumbling to give way to the new regime. Wars upon wars have been fought there. Finally, about 50 years before our game picks up, Venatus was discovered by Civisene geographers, who realized through a series of magics that there must be a continent on the other side of the globe from Civis. This was announced to the land and, about 30 years ago a conglomeration of people from various races, classes, cults and guilds joined together to attempt the harrowing journey across the sea to the unknown continent. After nearly 6 months at sea, the Pilgrims were caught in a huge storm and carried quickly across the sea and to the coast that was their goal. But alas, the storm did not lay them gently on the beach. Their ships were run aground by the crashing waves and, though they managed to get most of their equipment and supplies out of the vessels, the huge ships that had been necessary to make that journey were smashed to bits by the pounding surf. Disheartened but determined, the pilgrims fought their way inland until they came upon a small valley nestled among the foothills. Here they stood successfully against the goblins which had been pursuing them and, realizing the defensive potential of the place, they settled there, erecting wooden defenses to keep out the monsters which lurked without.
Over the past 30 years, the pilgrims have strengthened and established their little hamlet, fortifying the wooden palisade that surrounds the valley three times over and keeping constant vigil on the walls for when monsters come lurking. Life within the walls is happy and peaceful, but the wilderness outside the walls is beyond their power to attempt to tame. Only a small corps of hand-picked, specially trained warriors sally forth on occasion to push back the beasts and bring in timber and meat. The pilgrims have had occasional encounters with the natives of Venatus, some of them friendly and others savage. This has led to some natives living within the walls, and their knowledge of the land has been invaluable. There have also been one or two ships more form Civis, bringing much needed supplies as well as more settlers. Overall, life is flourishing, if not expanding. Until now.
This is sort of a rough draft if you will. The underlined portions are stuff I thought particularly negotiable. But I think the idea that the town's very existence is precarious will discourage the adventurers from searching for help there and will bring home very powerfully to them that, when they sally forth, they can hope for little more than a burial from the town if they get in over their heads.

Me on the other hand, if I run some games I'm going to run them like an MMO. Every meets in town then divides up into group and goes off to their separate dungeons with different themes. People love combat in D&D, so it would be a balls to the wall dungeon dive to level up and make enough money to buy potions and gear in town.

While in town you can RP to your hearts content. Find a Thieves guild to join, or a fighters guild. Or just chat up the bartender on the tavern.

I would also do an arena for duels PvP 1v1 all the way up to 5v5 for different perks and discounts in town.

@Couch, I always thought the West Marches was the whole world was untamed not just a small island undiscovered. With Civis helping out the newly founded land, not unlike the colonies of America, it doesn't give the sense of danger as much. It's like, "Oh well this didn't work out lets go home" feel from what you said. This type of play should be kill-or-be-killed kind of life. No safe haven to fall back on should the town not hold up.

I like to think of it as simple. The world has had to start over, brand new. Nothing is known you must discover everything. Isn't tjat exactly what world building while playing is and is that not wjat you want? If their is a civilization already established it removes that feeling. So half the world is know but half is not. I want the players to discover and create this world as a whole, from the ground up.

If they find an ruined town from centeries past, before "The Event", they can decide that they want to begin a new town there and start expanding civilization.

I feel my niggest concern is timeline while playing. If a group leaves and taked 2 days to journey but 1 month to actually play it through. Then another group is gone the same 2 days but only tkae one week to play.
Not sure how this sounds but,
What if every IRL day the GM's gather to figure out the date at that time, or maybe every IRL week, and then post it in the tavern or OOC sp the players know where they stand on projects they have going on. Building boats, enchanting weapons that stuff. This should keep everyone active and if you are not ypu are thought to be milling about your normal life.

Thought? Comments?

(1) Oh, the whole world is untamed alright. Venatus is a massive continent as I envisioned it. The second map you brought up seemed like a good option to me, or perhaps the third. The way I see it, Civis and Venatus are about the same size, or maybe Venatus is even bigger. The Civisenes have realized that there is an entire new world out there.
(2) Civis only sent the initial expedition. The point of me saying that a) it takes nearly a year to voyage from Civis to Venatus and b) their sea-worthy ships were destroyed and they don't have the equipment to build more was that they are effectively broken off from Civis. They have rare magical contact with the motherland (i.e. enough to let the Civisenes know they are alive and that's about it), but everyone on Venatus has resigned themselves to living their entire lives on Venatus without any hope of going back. Their descendants won't even until they get the equipment to build high-sea worthy ships, which won't be for several hundred years at this rate.
(3) If that's how it came across I gravely misrepresented what I meant to. As I said above, they are stranded on Venatus and have resigned themselves and generations to come to living on Venatus with little to no contact with Civis.
(4) I definitely think it is a kill-or-be-killed situation. If their stronghold falls, everyone there will die soon enough. There's no going back to Civis and there's no getting help from Civis (at least not on demand--Civis has managed to get two ships through the entire 30 years they've been settled there; apparently it's a very dangerous journey and it's a miracle the first expedition made it through alive). With the situation I've narrated, the adventurers are not simply venturing out for their own curiosity, wanderlust and benefit, they must venture out to explore the land and push back the wilderness before the town's inevitable fall before the forces the land is throwing against them daily.
(5) I guess I was thinking that having Civis would explain how they have any magic, any refined skills, etc at all. If the world had had an apocalyptic event and had to completely restart, all sorts of fine lore would have been lost. What I hoped to create with this scenario is a completely new world (practically--it may be only a continent, but it's massive) but also an explanation for why they still have (relatively) advanced magic, advanced craftsmanship, etc. Also if there had been an apocalyptic event, one would think the landscape would reflect it while in a new continent we can put literally whatever we want without any inhibition of "well, wouldn't those be extinct after...?" The concept of a settling party also explains the diversity of PCs we most likely will have, while if it were an apocalyptic sort of setting one would expect people of same race would have banded together and so we wouldn't be able to explain how we got literally one of everything in this little town in the middle of the wilderness. Short of an intentionally diverse party, that seems like too much of a coincidence for my realism OCD to live with.
Also, having Civis makes for all kinds of cool story possibilities. If we get far enough in the story that Venatus becomes relatively tamed, Civis will obviously want to come and help themselves to the natural wealth that is present in Venatus. But by this time the Venatusians have a sense of identity apart from their motherland (most of them will have been born in Venatus by the time this happens) and probably won't love the idea of some random people they are supposedly related to coming and taking over. So a war ensues. Maybe even the Venatusians eventually invade Civis and there's this massive world war between the brave new world and the old regime.
Thoughts? Comments? Critiques? Disagreements?

I think something like this would definitely have to happen and I trust your DM instincts! This is obviously a really rough sketch of what would need to happen, but I think something like that is a must. I'm all for it.

To your previous post about the apocalypse. Not all world ending events need to be detrimental to the landscape. It could have been a multitude of otherworldly portals that opened from across the planes and monsters poured in from them. They have no desire to burn or destroy the landscape. They want to live in it, thrive prosper. My intention was not a Mad Max situation but humaniods had to retreat to a secluded place and try and survive this new threat. Almost none made it and the few that did (every and all races of humanoids) banded together to fight and survive. This is a joining of forces as if an alien threat was to come crashing to Earth. All humans, no matter their origin, would gather to defeat the threat.

That is what I had floating around, only instead of defeating the threat they need to learn to live with it. Generations past and only vauge stories of the world before now exsist. That would also be how knowledge and skills would have been past down.

I guess I felt that a West Marches game had more of an exploration element to it than a rebuilding after the apocalypse element. I don't really care either way, but I feel that it'd be very hard to explain how the strict ideas of race and class and the training necessary to have disciplined classes such as fighters, monks, bards and wizards are still around if the entirety of the previous civilization(s) was eradicated by some event. What sort of even eradicates civilization so instantly that all that stuff is forgotten, but leaves the landscape and the beasts in prime condition? The activation of a Halo Ring, I suppose, but other than that I feel like it'd be very hard to explain. As for portals being opened from various worlds, maybe this is just me but I'd rather keep that sort of cosmic supernatural stuff out of it. Again that's just personal preference, but this feels like it should be a very down to earth sort of game and if we have portals dropping animals in, it very quickly would get to be where our adventurers are on a quest to save the world and stop the portals, rather than just exploring the world. That feels like we'd have an overarching plot to discover what caused the eradication of civilization and what is opening the portals. I think an overarching plot is something we don't want because it distracts from the central goal of world creation and simple exploration. With my New World theory (as I'll call it), there's no overarching plot but to explore and figure out how to survive, which is exactly what a West Marches game is supposed to be, at least as I understand it.

I can see that. Lets give one more option.

A mad wizard's experiment went horribly wrong and the city and everything in a 30-mile radius (1 standard, 60-mile hex) was teleported to an entirely different plane of existence, one that is remarkably similar but entirely unfamiliar. The city is safe, its walls intact, its food stores equipped. What lies beyond, however is a mystery waiting to be revealed by those brave enough to sally forth.

I can see there being an event where civilisation crumbles; all you need is for some kind of resource which they rely on to become depleted. If we specify that this resource recharges gradually, perhaps now there is enough in the world to start again. Perhaps the magic in the world is created by some kind of tree? Or they require particular crystals? Perhaps we don't specify exactly what it is, the adventurers can figure that out.

Whatever the case, our valley was remote enough, and less reliant on magic, that it didn't fall as far as the rest. They proudly call themselves the last bastion of civilisation, not even realising themselves how far they have fallen, because all they can compare themselves to is the beasts which roam outside the gates. Their greatest and wisest wizards are probably no better than level 3, so very quickly the PCs will overtake them by rediscovering lost secrets. Probably after the very first successful sortie bringing back lost knowledge they will be awed by what their ancestors had accomplished, prompting a kind of gold rush to discover more.

Sounds good as well. Like I said the reason for this world being unknown is...well, unknown. So any player can make up what their character thinks has happened.

I have to say, I like couchlord's take best. The original West marches game was clearly made to capture the feeling of European exploration in the new world. Also, I don't get how any connection to the old world is a problem. If you go back you admit defeat, and just left the game. Having that connection could be useful for expansion, mundane supplies, quests etc.

I definitely want to play... and I'm very tempted to GM. I'm a little wary of over committing though.

I'm wary of the apocalyptic setting for three reasons:
First, it feels like it's not terribly realistic. The idea that this one little town is all that's left of civilization and that it somehow isn't plagued by all the sort of social chaos that reigns in shows like The Walking Dead is just too much for my extended belief to cover.
Second, it adds an inevitable overarching plot, something we almost definitely don't want. If we don't specify an event, the players are going to be looking for what happened. That's just how its going to go. And Ben Robbins specifically said that there was no overarching plot in his game, because that isn't the point of a West Marches game. If we want to add a plot later we can, but I feel that to begin with we need to avoid one.
Third, post-apocalypse just doesn't seem to be the feel of a West Marches game. As Azira expressed better than I've been able to so far, a West Marches game is about exploration, and I feel that a settling party will be much more likely to do that than the survivors of an apocalyptic event.

However, I think I've come up with a sort of compromise. We use my New World Theory, but instead of Civis being thriving and in existence, the apocalypse occurred there and the entire continent sank beneath the waves. The settlers of Venatus are the only survivors of the catastrophe who have fled the destruction of their homeland and must now explore their new home.
There are a couple benefits to this idea. First, there is no homeland to go back to or request help from, so that's no longer a problem @Apex. We also have the apocalyptic problem if we ever want to add in that plot line, but it's not as pressing and we can choose to ignore it altogether if we so desire. Finally, we also get that push to explore the new land that a post apocalyptic game would, in my opinion, be lacking (because honestly--how do you explain that no one knows what's out there if the apocalypse happened less than a generation ago).
Sound reasonable?

The great thing about this type of game is that, so long as we always have at least one GM, they can come and go. As I said in my third point in my initial post (way back when lol), if a DM has to bow out it's no big deal, unless they're in the middle of running an adventure. And even if that does happen, another DM just picks up where they left off.
Of course there's no pressure to DM, but if you want to, do by all means because you can step down at nearly any time, and step back up when life normalizes again.

Sounds like a good compromise to me.

Yeah... I just watched the Matthew Colville video linked earlier...and I'm 100% in. From a logistics point of view, I'd like to recommend a shared OneNote notebook as a means of documentation/coordination. We can have overall setting info open to all, gm only sections, etc... and it has wiki functionality to link info together.