West Marches Style: Bringing Us Together

I didn't get that far before I knew I wanted in, ha. Glad to see it.

Haha fair enough. Posts that long are intimidating.

So... how do we get this rolling? I honestly don't even particularly want to be a DM, I just want it to happen.

I like the tabletop/library idea, seems like an interesting way of handling it. So long as there is a central home for what the map is, I don't care overmuch how it gets maintained. :)

This is basically an MMO through PbP and D&D. Not a horrible idea but I think it would be very difficult to pull off.

I'm always down to DM. I have found that having the control is where I like to be.

That's great, since you're also amazing at it.

Is there a reason why you think it would be harder to pull of than any other West Marches style game that's happened? I'm honestly curious, not being snarky. xD

I honestly would need to do some research on West Marshes style of plat. Not sure what that is, but as someone who is from the putside looking in the project sounds overwhleming. I will say this though, the more I think of it the more I want to do it.

I would think, hope, assume some would try to open their own shop or even towns to run. We could make this a whole world played by the entirety of this site.
You could make a character that tells stories about the other character you have played as. How meta is that.

Building the world from scratch is nice but like Drama said you could get some conflicting stories. I will post a few full worlds amd maybe vote on them or we could go back to building the world as we go.

These are 3 worlds I threw together.

That's the beauty of a West March style campaign, you don't design a world. You start with a frontier town in the middle of hostile wilderness, and you go out and explore and build the areas around that one town. A lot of people think West March campaigns are Hexcrawls because of this. They are very similar, but while the Hexcrawl has already listed ahead of time everything there is to explore around the settlement the players are in, in a West March campaign, the players are the ones building the surrounding areas. If you want a desert 5 miles south of town, and nobody else has mapped that area already, well guess what, there's a desert 5 miles south of town...

Wuh? This sounds more like Dungeon World than West Marches. Here is a series of blog posts by Ben Robins (creator of Microscope) and his West Marches campaign. I'm not sure, but Ben Robins was the first I heard of West Marches, so he is the origin of it in my mind. Ben Robins on West Marches

Oh, ok. I like that. Thank you for the quick reference.

Well, either way I feel the planet should be called "Venatus".

So if we've got this sort of rolling should we create a game? Get people joining?

Interested. I could possibly GM as well. I'm a player in a game similar to this on another site that has 20 players. We reached 5000 posts in under a month.

Dang, sounds awesome!

I am happy to GM as well, tho I can't say I am all that great of a story teller. I mostly steal and retell stories I love.

I will try and experiment with different options for mapping tonight and co.e up with some workflow recommendations.

Wd also need to have a quorum on the world setting. I for one really enjoy gritty, low magic settings.

For those interested in DMing, here are the resources we have compiled so far:
Matt Colville on West Marches
Ben Robbins on West Marches
Adam Koebel & Steven Lumpkin on West Marches
I've watched Matt Colville's video and read Ben Robbins' thoughts on West Marches and both are helpful sources when it comes to getting an idea of how the game will run. Matt basically takes what Ben wrote and says it again, in video form, with his own additions and such. Both are worth your time I'd say, but one or the other will probably do you fine as well. As for Koebel and Lumpkin, I haven't watched them and so can't speak on them.

I second the gritty low magic world. How interested are we with the variant of the healing proccess?