DMing a West Marches campaign
Practical information

Background

For the past years time i’ve been DMing a so called West Marches adventure situated in D&D 5e with 21 people and multiple DMs. This is a part guide and part story time and hopefully a valuable tool for you if you are ever considering putting effort into playing a campaign with a huge amount of people.

Getting 21 people together and doing something great with multiple storylines and DMs is a feat in itself and it’s still something that we consider a work in progress but we have learned a bunch of things that easily can smooth a bunch of things for you, if you consider herding cats like this.

A bit of background is that I got an IT and project management background and i love systems, especially if they can work for me. A lot of this will be with some technical understanding, but i will try to make it as accessible as possible. 

I spent a lot of time up front tailor making everything for the campaign and have a lot of customized city building, weapon crafting and all around community building to make it work with several groups, while still keeping some kind of cohesion with the main story.

I think i’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain for you that have never run a West Marches campaign before, what the whole thing is about and then you can judge if its for yourself.

I’ve gathered a list here of the current amount of guides so you can easily navigate through the whole thing. I also made a list of different systems and guides at the bottom, so you can easily pump out content for your campaign.

Let’s dive into it.