Background

At the beginning of 2017, while perusing the video stylings of Matt Colville, I stumbled across his video in which he discussed the “West Marches” style of D&D campaign. For those of you that are unfamiliar with this format I can most succinctly summarize it as a persistent one-shot setting in which episodic adventures take place as opposed to the scripted modules published by Wizards of the Coast and others. Players go forth and explore the region surrounding a safe starting area, most likely a town or city. The further they go from home, the more dangerous things get. The setting also continues to evolve as the different characters leave their mark on it. In addition to being a format that does not require regular attendance the biggest selling point for this style of campaign is that the direction the adventures take is largely decided upon by the players rather than by the DM. This is, in part, to reduce the complacency that often surrounds players that show up simply because it’s “D&D day” rather than becoming invested in their character’s narrative.

After researching the original West-Marches campaign (the name is derived from the original campaign setting) I began to consider how I could apply this concept to a game set in the Forgotten Realms. Around the same time, I finished playing through Storm King’s Thunder with a group and celebrated its conclusion by finally being able to read the book without risk of spoilers. I was immediately struck by how much of northwestern Faerûn was laid out in detail. The combination of the high resolution maps and the “sandbox” nature of the campaign made the book a logical starting point for creating the West Marches game I had in mind. After adding a number of user-created maps from the DMsGuild, commissioning several others from artists recruited from Reddit and the Cartographer’s Guild, taking an obscene amount of notes on the 5e Sword Coast Adventurers Guide and the 3.5e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, and spending a few weeks importing everything into Roll20 I arrived at the starting point for my campaign that I’ve oh-so-creatively dubbed The Sword Coast.

Objective

After having run 30+ adventures spread across different tiers of play and covering a wide swath of the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier, my players and I gathered to discuss the campaign’s direction going forward. I received a great deal of feedback and constructive criticism from them. Chief among their list of suggestions was  that we incorporate a second dungeon master. I was (and, to an extent, remain) wary of this for a variety of reasons.

While I’m hardly loathe to relinquish control over the campaign’s artistic direction I do recognize the inherent threat of two personalities occupying the same creative space. Additionally, while I’ve endeavored to keep my version of Faerûn as close to “canon” as possible I have drawn certain conclusions that a more studied Forgotten Realms devotee may take issue with. The most obvious examples of this would be that the events that resulted from (and the characters responsible for) resolving Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat, Out of the Abyss, Princes of the Apocalypse, and Storm King’s Thunder all remain in the campaign setting and will certainly differ from other groups’ resolution of the same material. I can see how these variations might prove to be an obstacle to another creative voice entering the story.

There are, however, significant advantages to bringing in another DM. I am limited to running adventures on the weekends by virtue of my work schedule and the difference in time zones between myself and the majority of my players. Incorporating another DM that happens to work a different set of hours than me would allow us to run more games per week. I would also welcome another voice in bringing different sorts of adventures to the campaign. Notably, I am absolute crap at making engaging puzzles. I also tend to incorporate a great deal of combat and political intrigue into my adventures, and another voice better versed in mystery and other forms of role-play would be a welcome addition.

It is important to note that I do not DM for pay. I have invested a great deal of my own time and money in creating this campaign because I derive a tremendous amount of satisfaction from it. I would not expect a co-DM to contribute anything financially (although sharing the cost of commissioning art would be delightful), but by the same token I would not be interested in making this game pay-to-play.

And so, we arrive at the conclusion. I am posting this for two reasons:

1. In the hopes that anyone that has experience with this style of play might comment on the viability of multiple DMs.
2. In the event that another, like-minded DM might be interested in taking this project on with me!

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

I, however, have seen two successes with multo-DMing.  The 1st DM ran the real campaign, and the 2nd DM basically swapped out with the first one to keep him from getting burned out.  The prime DM built the world and set the big quest goals for the players, while the 2nd DM oversaw their progress and occasionally provided smaller side jobs.

The one scheme of this sort I was DM'ing for, I was the secondary DM.  DM's lich NPC would demmand the players do X, Y, Z.  My NPC would then show up with the side quets of "while you're in that tomb grabbing that artifact anyway, can you bring me an etching of such-and-such's grave?"  We talked it all out in advance.  At first, the quests coincided like this, but slowly drifted apart until it they came to a climatic choice.

The prime DM's NPC demmanded the players kill a particular vampire npc.  My NPC asked that they not.  The choice the players made had profound impact on the campaign's world, because the Prime DM's NPC was a lich would basically was coercing the NPCs into doing he will, threatening to overrun their hometowns with his armies if they did not comply.  The NC I ran was another evil character who wanted to depose of the lich, and so acted subtly at first, using the players to gather what he needed in order to revolt.

When the players chose not to kill the vampire NPC, they chose for the revolt to succeed... and for a much worse villain to rise.

I can appreciate both perspectives. It's also been nagging at me lately that the prospect of joining an existing campaign, rather than collaboratively building one, would be less appealing. The workaround there is that I'm using existing lore to fuel my adventures, so anyone interested in the Realms would be able to integrate far more easily than if it were placed in a homebrew setting.

I don't think that incorporating your conclusions to events is that creatively constraining. As a DM I wouldn't chafe at having to work around a few things like that.

I do think though that if you're trying to run a West Marches style campaign it's going to be difficult basing that in the Forgotten Realms. My understanding is that one of the things that made the West Marches work so well is the frontier. There was no adventure in civilized lands only in the wild. That gave the DMs great amounts of creative freedom when designing their adventures with no continuity concerns except whether it not some area had already been explored.

I agree with BigKahuna that setting up a regular game more than once a week is asking for trouble. The West Marches had something like 30 players if I recall correctly. When the players wanted to play, they had to take the initiative to gather a group of players to tackle some dungeon. This ensures that everyone showing us ready to play and they get to determine if they want to play more than once a week.

I've never played in a West Marches styles campaign (but I did read about it) so take all of my opinions with a grain of salt.

Well that's good to hear.

The advantage that I saw with the setting already being established is that I generally have at least some material to draw on when writing adventures for them. I have yet to find myself constrained or stymied by what is or isn't canon, and if I can't find something from a previous edition's sourcebook or novel set in the Realms I find it easy to build on top of what's already there. A notable example of this would be when a player character expressed interest in making contact with a particular Uthgardt tribe. I pulled what sources I could that referenced them, used it as background, made up some NPCs, and improv'd the hell out of the rest.

It hasn't worked out (thankfully) to much more than once a week, but my player base is significantly smaller than some West Marches campaigns that I've heard of. At present, I have more than could comfortably be in the same session (7), but I would certainly be amenable to taking on more players with the additional capacity of a second DM.

Hi!

I'm playing in a West Marches homebrew campaign, and we have four DMs (with about 18 active players). The story is that we live in a town and the characters are explorers, so there is a lot of space for creativity. They adopted a system that seems to work for everyone - they brainstorm the general setting ideas together, and everything needs three "DM stamps" to get a pass, but all of them have their own storylines that they're responsible of. For example, we the players agree what we want to do / where we want to go on our next session (in 4-5 people groups), and then we get "assigned" a DM we can find a game date with. They have a separate DM channel on discord where they can talk through anything. The base of the world came from one DM and it still works out, so I think if you discuss with your co-DM what you want to do with the setting it wouldn't be a problem.

It would be much different with less players and less DMs of course, but I hope this helps!