Building a 40-player D&D West Marches setting.
Or How I built the Mad Lands game.
It’s easy to get decision paralysis with the universe of internet data on sandbox gaming, West Marches, hex crawls, point crawls… YIKES! We have options! This series is about my decisions for prepping my 40+ player online sandbox/West Marches campaign. YMMV and I hope it’s useful.
First, what does the map look like? I made that about ME. How do I, as the GM, want to handle the map? A hex map seems the obvious, easiest option. You can, with software, overlay hexes onto an existing map and BANG! Done. Time for keying the hexes. But I went exploring. I read through The Alexandrian series on Hexcrawls. I fell down the rabbit hole of RPG game structure essays there. I looked at what the Welsh papers had to say on the matter. Hill Canton had point crawls. I’m rich and I can’t move!
What I want is the players to build on the starter map, I’m ok with variants of maps out there in the Mad Lands games, I think that could be interesting play. Right now, however, I need to know what the Mad Lands look like. I grab Mad Vandel’s map pack from Drivethru, print a few and make some rough sketches.
I’m in love with Kevin Crawford’s sandbox filling works. I picked An Echo Resounding to build the Mad Lands foundations. In An Echo Resounding (AER), you build out a region at the largest 300 miles on a side. Then you’re working with locations — defined as any place on the map that is interesting to PCs or has value to an NPC or faction. This is perfect! Locations have military, wealth and social values as well as traits, assets, and obstacles. I’ve decided, with the help of a muse, there’s only one city we care about in the Mad Lands. That one city, by the AER accounting, generates 4 towns, 5 ruins, 4 resource sites, and about 4 lairs or so to start. There are some rulings about how and when locations get placed. So the Mad Lands map starts to look like so:
Next up we assign names and traits, an example of each:
Westhold (T1), town
- Trading Hub (+2 wealth)
- Vigorous trade (+2 wealth)
- (Obstacle Pervasive Hunger/5)
- Westhold is the most frontier facing town in the region and the youngest of the four town. It’s also the wealthiest. It’s the trading focal point as goods move between the mountain fortress city of Adeva (C1) and the wild frontier. I decided to record the town’s obstacle, but since we know in West Marches games, the town is safe. This may not be used, but it’s there if I should need it, or things change.
The Giant’s prison (R1), ruins
- An ancient settlement, +2 wealth
- Relics, +2 social
- Angry Dead/7
- Named for the monolithic stone work and the faces carved on the towers out of the mountainside. It predates much of the recorded region history and is abandoned as told by explorers that ventured up into the prison and returned with wondrous relics and stories of murderous ghosts.
Good Fishing (A4), resource
- +2 wealth
- Monsters /5
Cursed Earth (L1), lair
- A patch of defiled land where plants grow strange and beasts are twisted.
- Assets: Spawns abominations.
An Echo Resounding doesn’t require detailing all the locations in one go. The stats a location has are used during domain turns which I’ll cover more of in a future post. It also doesn’t care about your map style. I initially thought I’d just go with hexes…but all that internet research has lead me to go with a node-based map, not unlike a point crawl — That’s a topic for another time!
Jahmal “Mad Jay” Brown is a polyhedral dice pool. He has written The Clockwinders for Fate, PRIME Supers for Cortex Prime and By Acer’s Light for Burning Wheel and Dungeon World. He is the host of the Diceology podcast and a GM-for-hire currently running 40+ player West Marches styled game at Into The Mad Lands. He likes games and stories about outsiders and underdogs. Jay games with his kids and loves his momma but she doesn’t game…yet.
