I recently ran the final session of my long-running D&D 5e campaign, a West Marches–style campaign centered around the frontier town of Phandalin on the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms. Using the “Dragon of Icespire Peak” adventure from the Essentials Kit as a foundation and mixing in elements from the associated DLCs, “Lost Mines of Phandelver,” Tales from the Yawning Portal, Neverwinter Campaign Setting, and more, I was able to turn this map by Mike Schley into a living sandbox. Starting in December 2021 and wrapping up in August 2024, I ran 69 sessions and 34 discrete adventures total for 18 characters across 15 players. The PCs started at level 3 and worked their way up to level 9 by the end, slaying multiple dragons and defeating the ghost of a dreaded dracolich.
I’m really proud of being able to maintain and finish a campaign that lasted almost three years. Typically, my interest in any given campaign begins to wane at the tenth session or thereabouts, by which time I start getting the itch to run a different game. For this campaign, a couple of factors made a big difference in helping me continue to run adventures without burning out. What follows is something of a campaign post-mortem of lessons learned from my experience running the game. Perhaps you’ll find some of these reflections useful in your own campaigns, especially if you’re considering using the West Marches structure for your next game.
Prepping for a West Marches Campaign
As the pandemic began to wane in late 2021, and as more of my friends got fully vaxxed, I was craving in-person play after having to shift all of my roleplaying games to be online for over a year. I don’t recall why I wanted to start with the Essentials Kit, but I’d been kicking around the idea of a sandbox-style game for a while, and the adventures being put out by Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons & Dragons had reached a critical mass of content where I could consider stringing the Sword Coast–based adventures together in a non-linear fashion. Before play began, I prepped a few different things: a recruiting flyer to find players with, a player’s guide that would explain the campaign rules and structure, and a Discord server that would become the “free company HQ” for the game.
Recruiting Flyer
I started with the CATS Method: A Story Game Opening Ritual as a baseline, which encourages the GM and players to get on the same page regarding the game’s concept, aim, tone, and subject matter. After figuring out the answers to these topics for this campaign, I developed a much more elaborate “Sellswords Wanted” poster with which to recruit players in local geek spaces, such as Discord servers and subreddits. (I didn’t end up posting the flyer in game stores, but could have.)
The poster included the link to the Google form where players could apply to join the campaign. The form included a couple of questions specifically aimed at gauging whether the player had read and understood the CATS elements. For example:
- Why do you want to play in a 5th edition D&D campaign with an old-school feel?
- Why do you want to play in a West Marches–inspired campaign?
- What questions or comments do you have for the DM?
If there’s one question I would add to this application in the future, it would be a question about a player’s experience level with RPGs in general and the game’s system in specific, as well as their general playstyle and what some of their favorite games have looked like in the past.
Player’s Guide
Using GMBinder.com, I created a detailed player’s guide that more or less repeated the points on the recruiting flyer, but which also included a more detailed code of conduct, restrictions around certain playstyles (such as evil PCs), instructions for how and when to use the Discord server, how to create and level up a character, how to handle buying and trading gear between players, what downtime activity options were available, and how to participate in the magic item auction. Finally, it also included a brief gazetteer appendix with a brief overview of the town of Phandalin and the surrounding environs, as well as a list of active characters.
Although not every player familiarized themselves with the guide’s contents in advance, it saved me a lot of time when they posed a frequently asked question and I could answer “check out page 5 of the player’s guide.” I based a lot of the guide’s contents on the early D&D Adventurer’s League guides from the Tyranny of Dragons and Elemental Evil storylines, but in hindsight I realize that the guides on the Pathfinder Society wiki would have also been good sources of inspiration. The Phandelver Free Company Player’s Guide included a fair amount of material copy/pasted from those AL guides and official sources for my players’ ease of reference, so it’s not something I’m able to share publicly, but I’ll definitely be creating player’s guides again for future games.
Discord Server
Finally, I put together a Discord server with a combination of out-of-character (OOC) and in-character (IC) channels that would let me handle the administrative functions, give players some spaces to roleplay between sessions, and host the video chat for online game sessions when people fell ill or were otherwise able to play but not in person. (Check out the full server structure here.) We used a few bots, including Avrae for D&D Beyond integration and dice rolls, and sesh to post session slots and handle RSVPs. For a while, I also used Message Scheduler to prepare auction-related reminders in advance, but eventually I did not find the bot added enough to justify the monthly cost.
What Went Well
There are a few elements of the campaign that worked out so well that I plan to keep them the same for future campaigns. These included the basic structure itself, how I used published modules, and D&D Beyond.
The West Marches Campaign Structure
This type of campaign structure, originally codified by Ben Robbins, ended up fitting really well with my DMing style and life in general. Since we generally all had busy social calendars and other games we were playing in, it was much easier for me (and my large pool of players) to have a flexible schedule and open table approach. I was able to schedule sessions when it made sense for me that month, and folks could sign up to play at the times that worked for them but had the freedom to miss a few weeks or even months if needed. We were almost always able to field at least three players out of the fifteen players who participated, but sometimes even that was a struggle.
As opposed to presenting a purely open sandbox a la very traditional West Marches games, using the conceit of a job board for a mercenary company allowed me to offer adventures that included quests as well as exploration-focused expeditions. Because I was running different adventures every few sessions, and I wasn’t focused on one single overarching story, I was able to entertain whatever fancy struck me that month (typically informed by whatever media I was consuming), and omit the kinds of modules that struck me as too boring or needlessly complex.
Using Published Modules as a Skeleton
As a busy creative whose day job doesn’t always leave me with enough energy or creative juice left to write my own modules, being able to get past the blank page using a published module or adventure was a lifesaver for me. If I was really burned out that week, I could run the module as written, but most of the time I remixed, rewrote, or creatively embellished the modules enough that they were only loosely based on the original. Most often, I’d raid published modules for parts, using maps or monsters or individual rooms, and then putting things back together with my own spin. I found this kind of prep satisfying, but also quick enough that I could reliably prepare an adventure or two per month, spending only a night or two per week prepping the game.
I also have to point to the Sword Coast map itself as a published resource—I was able to save a lot of time during campaign prep by not having to generate a hex map or figure out the placement of different towns, cities, dungeons, etc. By using an established setting, such as the Forgotten Realms, I was able to save time by rely on others’ worldbuilding. I also got more player buy-in thanks to players’ past experience with the setting, whether it was with the original Drizzt Do’Urden novels or classic video games such as Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate. When Baldur’s Gate 3 came out a year ago and most of my players picked up a copy to play, the shared experience of visiting that portion of the Realms helped them be more invested in the North as well.
Using a Master Character Database and Digital Rules Compendium
I asked all my players to use D&D Beyond to create characters, which helped ensure they were building their PCs correctly, that they could reference the rules for magic items that were being doled out, and that they could still play even if they had forgotten their character sheet (so long as they had their phone, tablet, or laptop). For some players, using D&D Beyond to handle the math and spells makes the game much more accessible, as well. As a DM, I found it extremely helpful to be able to reference character sheets between sessions to prep for a given module, and to help answer questions they had about their characters. I was able to afford the subscription cost of the Master tier to enable content sharing, and I’ve spent several years building up my library of sourcebooks and adventures to share, but the utility of D&D Beyond is probably much less to a budget-conscious DM who hasn’t invested in the platform. If the next campaign I run doesn’t have as robust of digital tools available for the system, I can see myself spending a lot of time trying to compensate for that loss.
What Didn’t Go So Well
A few other elements of the campaign proved to be a continual challenge for me, including portraying NPCs, balancing combat encounters for a given party, and taking notes during gameplay to shape future adventures. These are areas of potential growth for me as a dungeon master, although there were some elements of the campaign that probably exacerbated these things.
Portraying NPCs
I’m no “theater kid”: I have always been a writer, not an actor, and so portraying different NPCs with different voices and improvising dialogue on the spot is never easy for me. I was able to get around this somewhat by running a game with an emphasis on exploration and combat, but I think there were times when some of my NPCs (and by extension, the story) fell flat because I wasn’t able to bring them to life. I think I can do more to prep NPCs, such as give them defining character traits and “catchphrases” to help me roleplay them in the moment, and to be better about portraying them consistently across multiple appearances. Finally, sometimes I can get stuck in the rut of having NPCs and monsters fight to the death instead of considering what a given NPC should do in light of their motivations. Part of this is a weakness on D&D’s part, as motives, flaws, and other character and personality traits are not baked into a given stat block, whereas other game systems bake that information in by default.
Balancing Combat
I’d warned players that I’d let the dice fall where they may, and perhaps because of that (or because of the amount of magic items awarded or the playstyles of the players themselves), there were definitely some power-gamer tendencies that cropped up, and I had to throw out even the revised Encounter Building rules from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything in order to challenge my players. By the end of the campaign, I more or less ignored CRs or monster quantities and simply resolved to adjust the encounter on the fly as needed. It was very much art, and very little science. I’d love it if D&D 5.5 addressed this somewhat, but given the number of variables involved between DM and player skill, I sympathize with the game designer’s plight. (I know encounter balancing is also a difficult and burdensome for GMs in games I’ve designed as well, especially Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying. I don’t have a good solve for this.)
Another shortcoming of mine included remembering critical elements of a given combat encounter, especially lynchpin monster abilities around which the entire set piece was based. For example, even if I’d designed an encounter around the dragonborn gladiator having an amulet with an anti-magic field, it was more likely than not that I’d forget to take that anti-magic field into account until the second or third turn of combat. This meant choosing between rewinding the combat, which was painful for the players as well as me, or else delaying the effect of the ability to the point where it no longer had the intended effect. I need to figure out a better way to prep combat that includes a list of “commonly forgotten abilities” at the very top.
Note-Taking for Sessions
At the start of the campaign, I was pretty diligent about keeping a campaign calendar that tracked major story developments (such as deaths, alliances, and elections) and movements on the part of the PCs and villains on a day-by-day basis. However, by the end of the campaign, I discovered that I’d been bad about taking notes shortly after a given session, with the result that I couldn’t incorporate consequences into future sessions because I couldn’t remember what had happened previously. I did not feel great about asking players to fill in the gaps in my memory, as it showed a bit of laziness on my part, but also because they were just as liable to forget what had happened after a good amount of time passed.
On the one hand, if neither I nor the players could remember, probably what happened wasn’t that important anyway, but on the other hand, a lot of the storytelling of the campaign hinged on calling back to previous events and paying off something that had been foreshadowed or set up previously. I need to find a better way to do rapid logging during the session itself, or else be better about recording what happened in a timely fashion.
What Can Be Improved
As I look ahead to my next campaign, I’d want to solve for some of the following challenges before starting. Specifically, I want to streamline how I award experience points, find ways to automate administrative bookkeeping, and devise means to encourage roleplaying and player engagement between sessions.
Streamlining Experience Points
I didn’t want to use milestone XP because I wanted PCs to be able to level up at different rates, but I didn’t find it a good use of my time to calculate XP granularly based on the monsters overcome, questlines advanced, secrets earned, etc. I think it would be simpler to instead award player characters 1 “point” of XP per session played, and to change the amount of XP needed to level up to be equal to the character’s current level plus one. For example, advancing from level 3 to 4 would cost 4 XP, which would take four sessions to earn. I might also try to offer different awards than XP for things like completing quests, discovering secrets, making allies or enemies. I really liked the way that past Heroes of Rokugan living campaigns awarded advantages and disadvantages based on the modules characters completed. Perhaps the new edition of D&D will increase the levers available to me to offer different kinds of character progression beyond simply having them advance in level.
Automating Bookkeeping
I ended up having to spend a lot of time in Google spreadsheets doing upkeep between sessions to track things like XP awarded, the gold earned and spent by PCs, renown and reputation points, and the magic item auction system that allowed players to bid on the different magic items that were earned. This is not how I want to spend my Saturday mornings going forward. I’d like to try creating a Notion site or coding a simple database that would keep track of these things in one place. It would be more work up front, but hopefully I could devise a means to delegate more of this responsibility to players while also including a way for me to validate their XP, gold, items, etc. beyond manually tracking such things in spreadsheets.
Encouraging Roleplaying and Character Development
Because of the job-based campaign structure—and because I never knew which PCs were going to show up to a given session—there ended up being scant few opportunities for players to have their backstories matter to the story, or to give them opportunities to grow as characters beyond just in terms of power level. The in-character sections of the Discord also were used less than I’d hoped, which caused some of the narrative links between adventures to break down because players were not freely sharing information among each other.
I wonder if there isn’t a way to do more character-focused roleplaying and storytelling in the Discord, or maybe on some sort of basic forums that’s integrated into the campaign website. Likely this involves offering incentives to players, such as bonus XP, items, boons, or other character progression awards. Perhaps I could also tap some of the players to become “story leads” for a given faction or storyline, and award them for giving players story hooks and scenes to play out, and for portraying NPCs as needed.
I come from a background of play-by-post and MMO-adjacent roleplaying where players are used to collaborating with each other, without a GM, to come up with conflicts and premises that they can play out as their characters across multiple scenes, so perhaps this is serving my interests rather than the tabletop RPG players I recruited for this campaign. If I want to see this kind of thing in the future, I might need to screen for players who have the time and inclination to be active between sessions.
Wrapping Up
All told, the Phandelver Free Company game was probably my most successful RPG campaign I’ve run to date, both in terms of how long it lasted and the quality of the session themselves. I know I’ll look back fondly on these years, and I appreciate the time and dedication put in by all my players.
Featured Image Credit: Lance Reis on Unsplash
