Freeform Friday: A Mercenary Company, or Fixing West Marches For My Table

I find the idea of mercenary companies endlessly fascinating. The emotionally grey nature of fighting for coin, the scheming and desperate clients, and the endless bloodshed are equally horrific and interesting. Running a mercenary company is the epitome of a true sandbox experience. You can go anywhere, do anything, all while building up your Company business and infrastructure. Despite the horrific reality of actual mercenary companies, both new and old, there are alluring groups from fiction: Schlock Mercenary's Tagon's Toughs, The Black Company's Black Company, and the mercenary company you run in Battle Brothers.

That sandbox nature is what attracts me to the idea of running an RPG around a mercenary company. A lot of RPG sandbox hex crawls right now use the ideas from the original West Marches campaign. I have tried to run my fair share of this style of campaign. What it is supposed to look like:

1. Adventure parties drawn from a larger pool of players.

2. Flexible time schedules built around arranging a session like you would an in real life get together. Adult scheduling is hard: kids, spouses, work, hobbies, families, etc. and West Marches tries to fix that by putting a lot of the scheduling work load on the players who are left to themselves to organize and drum up support for the quests and rumors they want to explore.

3. No regular plot. The plot threads are either disconnected or built organically as the party explores.

4. Single session gameplay baked in. Typically this means that there is a mechanic for handling getting the party back to town if they don't make it back there themselves.

This is a great system for a lot of groups and slots in nicely with a lot of the ideals of OSR gameplay: not having a regular plot, having sessions that favor dungeon crawling, and having a larger roster of characters/players and not one specific party allows for more death and consequences. 

My initial plays with my group used this framework with a adventuring guild shell. However there were some implications with a West Marches style campaign that did not work as well for us:

1. Generally static locations. Yes, West Marches could be played by relocating from town to town but the asymmetrical nature of the play and scheduling does not seem to support that very well. The exploration is great sandbox play but the adventuring parties have to keep wandering further afield to get to newer and less well trodden areas. (This is actually great and a hidden compliment to the system but is not always what my groups wanted)

2. No regular plot. Now I have drunk enough of the OSR kool-aid to be shocked at this statement. It should be "write characters, areas, and atmosphere, not stories!" Yes, stories will write themselves organically from the pieces that my players and I build together at the table, however it can be hard to sustain that continuous throughput of riffing on each other's story threads when I am with a different group of players every time. I find it actually easier and requires less prep to have a regular group or semi-regular group that I can recycle the same stuff and be sure they will get some of the call backs. At this point I am pretty much a zero-prep GM. I will jot down about three sentences of ideas and then we are off, borrowing liberally from pop culture, mythology, generators, and created content. 

3. Single sessions baked in. Sometimes my players do not want to go back to town, sometimes I want an adventure area that will take several sessions to play out, and sometimes sessions have to end earlier than we would like for varies reasons and we want to pick up where we left off when we can. West Marches can sometimes accommodate this stuff, but it is not what it is built for.

So I made some modifications to how downtime, leveling, and the meta aspects of the game would work at our table: 

Each session done at my table gives every player who was invited to play (whether they said yes or no to playing) a Company Step to redeem. The Company Step is basically a focused form of downtime. It is what advances the regional and factional threats, allows the players to make choices for their characters' Mercenary Company, and allows them to level up and make other long term advancements.

What this process looks like:

1. Party Actions: Each player with a Company Step saved up chooses an action for the Company Step.

2. Company Encounter Table Check: GM rolls for a check on the company encounter table.

3. GM Description: The GM describes the results of the encounter table check and the players' actions.

4. Clean-up: The GM tracks the time, the players' party's resources, and anything else that needs a time check.

5. Repeat: Repeat steps 1-4 until each player has used every Company Step they have accumulated.

I went over the Company Encounter Table Check a bit on Wednesday but I will be going into more detail in what these look like over the coming weeks. 

What my goals for my system are:

1. To allow flexible scheduling without sacrificing multi-session gameplay or having players falling too far behind when they are out for a few sessions. The fictional Company of our setting allows fictional reasoning for why a character shows up halfway through a multi session mission to join the group or replace a dead character: the Company sent them in as back up.

2. Allow the Company HQ to move around the board as the players see fit while still allowing missions to explore out from it. I have not implemented this solution yet but I plan on having a part of the Company Step be an optional HQ move. The HQ will give benefits and drawbacks to populated areas it is near and if it is in the middle of nowhere the HQ will provide some minimal benefits with the players able to utilize the camp followers for trade, building, etc.

3. Have the fiction of the Company give a diegetic reason for players to control multiple characters: they are sending them off on missions, to lessen the blow of character death. In addition the Company gives a diegetic reason for characters joining an adventure midway through a session or multi-session mission: the Company would send back up as needed as character's are freed up from their Company duties.

It remains to be seen if all of my goals are being accomplished because of the mechanics of my system. We will continue to explore the downtime/Company Step mechanic in further detail over the coming weeks.

If you enjoyed this I would recommend checking out my system: A Crucible For Silver. It is currently free in its alpha form but I may eventually create a paid-for form of it.