What does that mean?
Bastion is the most recent iteration of an online living world Dungeons and Dragons 5E Discord server and community I've helped run for the past four years. With a fluctuating team of up to 10 others, I've created four separate worlds, digital economies, customized crafting systems, and dozens of storylines. I also run weekly sessions to help maintain the overall feeling of the world.​ Using this framework, I've learned how to create long-running stories almost entirely from user-generated feedback and influence. It has greatly influenced my understanding and approach to designing interactive experiences over digital mediums.
How A West Marches Works
A traditional West Marches is a group of Dungeon Masters who all run games within a shared world with a central home base for all of their players. Players can jump into any session run by any DM and use the same character.
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We do a version of that where we heavily focus on player-driven stories, an interconnected world and a team of DMs who build each setting together and coordinate to create year-long living stories.
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I joined this west marches in 2019 and the DM team in 2020. Since then, I've helped build, administrate, manage and run sessions and worlds 24/7, 365 days a year for four years. It's much work, but it's the greatest storytelling outlet I've found.
Our Settings
Four years of building worlds led me to run four separate storylines, each with a half-dozen subplots for up to 60+ players. Here're the basics of what those stories were like.
My Responsibilities
1
Running Games
Running games is simple enough; you schedule a session using a Discord bot that alerts them to its posting and waits for people to sign up. Each session needs to be part of an ongoing storyline and accessible to new players, which led me to create the "Last Time" document idea. An external and DM-updated Google doc that recaps the previous session and provides a source for any extra information for players.
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Creating Worlds
Shortly before a server ends, whether due to inactive players or a server-wide finale, the DMs begin discussing and creating our next setting. This is usually a two—to three-month process involving daily discussions, weekly meetings, numerous votes, polls, and player feedback sessions so we can learn what improvements or changes they want to see in the future.
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Community Management
Managing a community of 60+ people means you need to enforce strict rules to keep the community healthy and happy; we have a distinct HR process to help us handle complaints, warnings and bans from our player base. Every decision is made by all of the DMs, and any reprimanding of bad behaviour is handled with at least two DMs: one to act as a bearer of the consequences and another to be a witness in case of any improper conduct from the other DM.
Narrative Experience
1
Pyrius Academy
The story I created in Pyrius was maybe my favourite but also the most complicated. It had three components: crime in New York City, Musical Elements, and a metafictional living story surrounding two magic swords and their wielders slowly forced together into an endless cycle of fighting.
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It was a lot, but I balanced each element and ended up with an epic finale. From Pyrius, I learned when to pull story threads back, how to combine multiple small plots into one larger one, and that good metafiction is incredibly hard to write.
2
Stewards of a Dream
Stewards was an interesting case where any being could become a demigod if they were associated with a particular ideal enough. Using this world idea, I based my story around a continent where a villain rebelled against their old gods by locking away their memories of them so they disappeared. To hide the lock that could free them, he made it a demigod in its own right to give power to his followers and help him work towards his final goal: becoming the Demigod of Deicide.
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The story played with Mindscapes, faked memories, and loads of hidden mystery surrounding a location that was missing its knowledge. During Stewards, I continued practicing weaving stories together and learned how to show, not tell, using themed combat.
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Bastion West Marches
Bastion is ongoing, so hopefully, it ends well, but the story revolves around a group of dead villains who escaped Hell after winding up on the wrong side of a revolution. Now they're looking to build an army, resurrect an ancient arch-fiend and turn the world into a new Hell where they rule.
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It's a sandbox campaign where the players decide which escapee from Hell to pursue. Each bounty adds a new piece to the puzzle to build to the showdown against the central villains.