by 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.