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Ultimate West Marches

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Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Dec 2021 21:42

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https://www.patreon.com/posts/60464148

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icycalm wrote:There are forlorn islands to sail or swim to, snow-capped peaks to climb, massive open fields and thick forests to traverse and ride through, all manner of incredible buildings, ruined, functional, underground.
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icycalm
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Dec 2021 09:35

I have found a way to allow EVERYONE to play in East Marches: all 16 of the current players, whenever they can make it.

All we need is for ONE new player to start the campaign, and the moment he has enough money to hire a soldier, that soldier can be played by any player who is available at game time. This soldier won’t have much of a personality nor can he break off and pursue his own goals. He is a hireling and he wants to stay in the protagonist’s employ—for as long as he doesn’t fail his morale checks at any rate. And of course he has to follow direct orders. But otherwise he can be moved on the board as normal, he gains levels and even gold (his pay) and can spend them as he likes. He doesn’t ROLE-PLAY, but he does come along for the adventure, and he does get to move tactically in battle. For the most part he will be a fighter, but eventually it will be possible to hire expensive units like spellcasters.

Having players from other campaigns control the hirelings is actually more immersive than the adventurer controlling them and micromanaging them. And if the army gets above the number of players we have, the players can be promoted to lieutenants and assigned soldiers that follow them around in squads with that TaleSpire mod, “follow the leader” or whatever it’s called. This mod is functional right now.

In short we’re ready for an insane TaleSpire-powered D&D survival-builder strategy campaign as long as we get ONE new player to lead the army. feth and trev have both expressed interest. It’d be insane to get both, as then the total number of players could reach 18 lol. But if they can’t make it now, maybe someone else will jump in at some point.

At any rate I found the solution to satisfy EVERYONE, AND further increase the realism and immersion. This campaign is a bomb waiting to explode right in the face of the TaleSpire community and the videogame industry at large.

I am ready to do it, and will patiently wait until the players are ready too.
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Dec 2021 21:12

Interesting tidbit: Steven Lumpkin, Sr. Systems Designer at Guerrilla, working on Horizon Forbidden West, is a DM who in his spare time is designing a West Marches-style campaign. He even has a Trello for it.

https://twitter.com/Silent0siris/status ... 0157338624

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https://twitter.com/silent0siris/status ... 9850858496

Steven Lumpkin @Silent0siris wrote:Absolutely! Forged in the Marches is going all the way

It’s designed from the ground up as a west-marches-style, dark fantasy exploration/adventure game set in a world of danger and wonder.

What is out there? How will it change you? Will you survive?


Nothing I have seen is interesting in the least, compared to what I am doing. He's making his own stupid world instead of using a professional one. He isn't using TaleSpire. He doesn't have survival-building or strategy elements. His map is tiny and stupid.

But I do love his title, and I might steal it.

Alex Kierkegaard's Pathfinder: Forged in the Marches has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 04 Jan 2022 00:11

Brave Adventurer Wanted!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/60693880

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icycalm wrote:I told you TaleSpire and 3D VTTs are about to explode in a videogame industry that's not prepared for it and has no idea of it, and I am pointing it out to you as it's happening in real-time.
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2022 16:44

I’ve been making some progress with this. Dungeon magazine had about 220 issues, with about four adventures per issue. Issue 200 has a catalogue of all past adventures plus it highlights some of the coolest and more popular ones, so it gives me someplace to start instead of drowning in a sea of 1,000 adventures.

It also lists the systems, which go from 1E to 4E, and the levels of each adventure, as well as which of them were set in some particular world. The world-specific ones are few and I will leave them alone, to be placed in their worlds when a team unlocks them. They even have adventures for such obscure regions as the Forgotten Realms’ Al-Qadim, Arabian-inspired setting. Pretty neat.

Of course all rules and NPCs/monsters will have to be adapted to PF1, and this is the first time I will attempt such a thing. But it shouldn’t be too hard because I am not trying to be faithful to the source material in terms of rules. I won’t even be using the maps in these adventures, I’ll be adapting them to existing TaleSpire boards. I just want the story and development of the adventures, the clues etc., because that is the hardest part to do well, and it takes massive talent and experience which I lack. Substituting some rooms and monsters on the other hand is easy in comparison. Hard to fuck that up, especially when the new rooms and monsters you have are also awesome and made by other experienced, talented people.

It’s still a lot of work putting all this together, and also fighting with TaleSpire’s janky controls at the same time, so I can’t promise a start date. I am aiming for a couple of weeks from now at any rate. Worst case scenario we can just play a short introductory session just outside the town’s walls to get us started and hyped and familiarized with TaleSpire’s controls.

Note that we will start with the attempt to run all the rules ourselves as on a tabletop, with no automation, so study up the core rules. If we succeed, it will be tremendously beneficial also for our Fantasy Grounds campaigns. Nothing beats knowing the rules inside out, and it will be our goal to accomplish this asap. It is the only way to one day become capable of adding more rulebooks in.
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 16 Jan 2022 17:10

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It’s insane to think I have 220 issues of this sitting on my hard drive. Such treasures.

Note the racism in the last pic btw lol. Maybe the woke folk have a point after all.
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 25 Feb 2022 13:59

An update on the West Marches campaign.

It is 100% happening.

I had been sceptical for the last couple of weeks of my ability to pull it off, for two reasons, both of which just now evaporated. The number 1 reason was that I will be simply overworked trying to run both the PA events and the four regular Pathfinder campaigns, to have the time and energy to add a fifth one—most of which will even need to be built by me, and thus equaling the sum of all the others in workload. And number 2 was that I hadn’t yet found a way to meld all the best TaleSpire boards and biomes into a single West Marches-style campaign. How do you add deserts and snow landscapes and jungles and plains and oceans to what is basically a short-range campaign? I’ve been puzzling over this for MONTHS and had found no solution. This isn’t a traditional videogame where the desert biome is within three screens of the ice biome. No player would buy that in a real role-playing game. So I had resigned myself to basically only using two-three biomes.

But all this changed after I saw Istallri’s latest board. It inspired me to a solution to problem 2, and once I had that solution—which is insanely majestic—I resolved that there’s no amount of effort that I am not willing to expend to make it happen. This will be the most glorious West Marches campaign ever, and one of the best campaigns of all time—for ANY videogame genre. The TaleSpire boards and slabs are exploding in quality and quantity—we’re talking sets of such detail and scale as have never been seen in any kind of CRPG, and someone NEEDS to blend them into a giant full-TaleSpire campaign with thousands of custom HeroForge NPCs and videogame-imported monsters, adding mass combat on top of that with thousands of units, AND 17-player multiplayer.

So, do not by any means visit the Tales Tavern site again if you want to play in this campaign, whether as a player character or a hireling. Do yourself the favor of exploring the world I am building for you and encountering these incredible locales in the game. I will never link anything from that site again, I will only be linking the assets as Bouncyrock releases them. And by the way, the only limitation I will place on the West Marches campaign is for you to avoid the water, since we don’t have ships yet in TaleSpire. There will be lots of water, and you’ll be able to sail anywhere you want and even construct rafts and ships plank-by-plank and even raise a navy, and this will be theoretically possible from the very first session: i.e. nothing will be stopping you from going to the water right next to the starting town and crafting a raft right then and there, but please just don’t do it until Bouncyrock releases a full naval set, which they’ve said that they will. We just don’t know when, but until then there’ll be tons of directions to go in, and shittons of other biomes and locations to explore.
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Re: Ultimate West Marches

Unread postby icycalm » 16 Mar 2022 16:28

You won’t believe what I am designing. I think it’s gonna blow away all published campaigns ever. I can barely sleep thinking about it. And the new boards people are building with the new assets are out of this world and fueling my inspiration. Don’t look them up (that’s cheating) just wait a tiny bit longer and you’ll encounter them in the game. We start in two weeks, but you’ll see lots of updates on Patreon long before this.
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