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A West Marches campaign is one of the harder formats to run well, and it gets even harder the moment more than one Gamelord is involved. The thing that makes it work, a persistent shared world, is also the easiest thing to lose track of once several people are contributing to it independently.

Let's break down what the format actually is, and what it takes to run it well with multiple GMs without losing the thread.

What Is a West Marches Campaign?

The format was named and popularized by Ben Robbins back in 2007. The core idea is simple: instead of one fixed party meeting on a schedule, you open the table. Players sign up for whichever expedition is running that week. More than one Gamelord can run sessions into the same shared setting. No two groups need the same members, and no two groups need the same GM.

What makes it work is the world underneath all of it. Every session, whichever party ran it, happens in the same persistent place. What one group discovers, another group can walk into later. What one group provokes, another group might have to deal with. The setting is the throughline, not the roster.

The Problem With Running One Without the Right Tools

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Starting a technology company, and specifically a B2C SaaS company, has its fair share of challenges. I'm sure this comes as no surprise. The technology is one part of this, sure, but there's research, marketing, distribution, design, user experience, and the list grows as you continue to understand your product and place in the market. On any given day, where do you spend your time? The market will not wait for you to figure it out, so spend that time wisely.

What I'm saying is that it's difficult, and as a result, I find myself hanging out in online spaces with other entrepreneurs and founders. Over time, I've begun to notice a sort of hive-mind mentality when it comes to technology in greenfield projects: complexity is baked in from the start. Infinite scale, microservices, Kubernetes fleets, and a caching architecture that resembles a nachos supreme. All of it paid for out of the only budget a founder really has, which is attention.

We've deliberately chosen a different path. Come on the journey with me.

Off-Ramps to Scale

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Picture it. It’s your very first time hosting an online TTRPG game night for friends. You’re confused over how to run a game online, so you turn to the internet. Your first mistake. The advice you come across time and time again is to “just use a virtual tabletop.” So you download Foundry or log in to Roll20 and are met with a blank canvas. It’s at this moment that you realize you are no longer preparing for the best storytelling adventure the world has ever seen and will instead be learning new and complicated software for the rest of the night. The non-alcoholic seltzer in your hand will not be sufficient.

Somewhere between “I want to play TTRPGs online” and game night, VTTs have inserted themselves. Let’s do a rewind. How did we get here? And why are we wargaming in a story about talking squirrels?

History of the Grid

Roleplaying games have inherited the gridded battle map.

D&D grew directly out of miniatures wargaming. Gary Gygax's Chainmail was a medieval wargame smuggling a fantasy supplement in its back pages, and the earliest D&D sessions in Lake Geneva were played by people who painted miniatures and hauled around terrain tiles. The lineage goes back further still, to Kriegsspiel, the 19th-century Prussian training game where officers pushed blocks across contour maps while an umpire adjudicated outcomes. That umpire, a neutral human interpreting a messy situation and telling players what happens, is the direct ancestor of the Game Master (GM).

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