Dungeon Crawling, To The West

27 May, 2025

I recently offered to run a weekly DCC game in a Discord server that I’m part of, and I’ve started to think about how that might go. I’ve been playing in and running weekly megadungeon games for the past few years and the temptation is to simply do that again (I do love a megadungeon), but I’ve also been feeling the call of wilderness exploration. This post is just my initial thoughts as I start to put this game together.

These drop-in sessions are really a mutated form of the famous West Marches game that Ben Robbins ran back in the era of 3rd edition D&D, which he’s blogged about on and offer over the years. My first exposure to the format was in Luke Gearing’s ongoing Snackrifice Wednesday session (currently on hiatus, but I’m running A Dungeon Game in the slot to keep the momentum for when he picks the game back up again). The key difference between this and the West Marches is that it’s not an ad-hoc game, but instead an open slot at the same time every week. Luke turns up at 12pm on Wednesday afternoon for an hour, and if you want to go on an adventure you meet him there. All of the same hallmarks of West Marches play are present - we share maps and rumours, we have players who write up session reports and produce art, we have stories of old adventures that are regularly recounted to new players, etc. The nature of having a set time every week does mean that what tends to happen is we get the same regulars in every session with new people dropping in and out, but I think that’s a nice feature and goes some way towards mitigating the “social monster” problem that Ben has blogged about.

I’ve spent a long time digging through Ben’s blog and the comments to figure out how to make this game work. The most fascinating past of the whole thing, to me, is that he wasn’t using a hex map but was instead just using a normal map, and drawing lines on it to figure out where his players were based on what they told him about how they travelled. This seems like it leads to a lot more work in the prep phase of building this thing - it’s much easier to slap down a hex and say “forest” than it is to chart actual terrain within that forest - but it also seems like it would be really satisfying in play. I’ve often observed that the abstraction of hex crawl procedures means you don’t actually feel like you’re doing the exploration you claim to be doing, and this approach seems like it fixes that.

Part of my prep for this is in figuring out how to make it fit within the DCC framework. Here are some considerations off the top of my head:

The first session needs to be a funnel, because if you aren’t running a funnel at least once why are you playing DCC? This works quite nicely with the advice to give players an explicit goal for session 1, though. A central conceit of West Marches-style play is that the PCs are the only adventurers in the world. So at the beginning of session 1, there are no adventurers in the world - just this mob that goes to solve some problem and kicks off the campaign.
DCC has a ton of pre-existing modules that can be dropped onto a map, though they tend to be a little more “narrative”/plot-heavy and might not work for the style of game I’m planning to run. I’m also aiming for hour-long sessions, which doesn’t lend itself to modules. They’re a resource that I can potentially tap into, though.
The “quest for it” philosophy of DCC does seem to lend itself well to this style of player-driven play
Being largely based on 3e, DCC does have granular rules for overland travel that will be very helpful in this game. These rules and speeds can be helpful when I come to design my map, too. I know that characters can comfortably march 24 miles in a day over a period of 8 hours without having to “force march”. If I want most points of interest to initially be within a day or two of the home base, then this helps decide how far apart things will be on my map.

I’m wondering if it’s worth picking up the Points Of Light setting book for DCC as a starting point, but I’m also going to jot down some stray ideas that may or may not end up in the thing:

Players need to be able to see that there are choices to be made from minute one, session one. If the gates of town open and all they see is endless forest, that’s not a choice. If instead there are dark forests ahead, sprawling coastal beaches to the west, and floating chunks of rock above the mountains to the east, that’s giving choice.
Speaking of floating chunks of rock - let’s just make the world weird. We’re talking about an area of unexplored wilderness on the edge of civilisation, here. We need there to be reasons that nobody has explored it yet. “It’s weird and terrifying” is a good reason.
It might also be worth picking up Perilous Wilds for Dungeon World for some help with region generation
The group I’m running this for are very Sword & Sorcery-oriented, so I should lean more into that sort of tone for the world than classic fantasy. And I think, again, this makes DCC a really good fit for the game. I might also look at the Hyperborea books for setting stuff, though, even if I don't use the ruleset.

Initially I think I want three regions, right on the doorstep of the PCs, with enough detail that I could run games in them and stuff seeded into them to push play out into the further regions, which I’ll build as and when the players tell me they intend to explore.