West Marches campaigns are a beautiful idea and a logistical nightmare. The idea: a large pool of players, sessions scheduled by the players themselves, a sandbox world they explore in different groupings each week. The nightmare: keeping track of who knows what, who's been where, what state the world is in, and what happened in last week's session that this week's players don't know about.
Most West Marches campaigns die not from lack of player interest but from DM burnout — and DM burnout in West Marches is almost always a worldbuilding-tooling problem in disguise. This is a guide to the setup that actually scales.
What makes West Marches different
A traditional campaign has the same five players sitting at the same table experiencing the same story. A West Marches campaign has 15 to 30 players forming different groups week by week, exploring a shared world at their own pace. The implications:
No single party narrative. There's no "the party" — there are parties, plural, who may never meet. Each session creates ripples in the world that affect other sessions.
Player knowledge is asymmetric. Player A might know about the goblin caves because their group went there in session three. Player B has no idea those caves exist. Player C heard rumors second-hand. Tracking this matters for everything from quest design to dialogue.
Time passes between sessions for everyone. The classic West Marches structure has in-world time pass at the rate of real time. A faction that's growing while no one's watching is genuinely growing. A character whose location was raided three weeks ago has had three weeks to react.
The world has to feel alive on its own. Because no single group is the protagonist, the world can't be on a plot rail waiting for the party. Things have to be happening whether or not anyone's there to see them.
All of this puts pressure on the DM's reference system that ordinary campaigns don't.
The state-tracking problem
The core challenge of West Marches is state tracking. You have to know, at any moment:
What's the current state of every region of the map
Which factions are doing what right now
What every player character has experienced
What rumors are circulating and to whom
What's happened in the world since the last session for each location
Which NPCs are alive, dead, on the move, or in changed circumstances
In a traditional campaign, most of this is implicit in the shared narrative. In West Marches, it's explicit, multi-threaded, and constantly changing.
DMs typically try to track this in one of three ways: their head (works for one month, then collapses), a Word document (works for a season, then becomes unsearchable), or a wiki/Notion setup (works longer but eventually drowns in maintenance overhead).
The pattern is the same: the system works until the campaign gets large enough that the system was supposed to help, and then the system becomes another thing the DM is fighting.
The setup that scales
A working West Marches setup needs five pieces, all of them connected to each other.
A regional map with state. Not just a static map — each region needs to track what's currently there, who's been there, what's changed recently, and what's happening even when no party is present. When a party visits a region, the DM should be able to immediately see "okay, since last visit a faction has moved in, two NPCs left, rumors say bandits in the south."
A faction tracker with active goals. Every faction has goals, resources, current activities, and a relationship to other factions. Between sessions, factions take actions — these get logged, even when no party witnesses them. The world moving on its own is what makes it feel alive.
A character knowledge ledger. For each player character, what they know — about places, NPCs, factions, plots, rumors. When a party splits or a new group forms, the DM can immediately see what knowledge the group collectively has, and what they don't.
A session log linked to everything. Every session changes the world. The log captures what happened, what state changed as a result, and which characters now know what. Crucially, the log connects to the entries it affected: visiting a region updates the region's "last visited" state and the visiting characters' knowledge.
A timeline of in-world events. Everything in the campaign happens on a timeline — sessions, faction actions, NPC movements, world events. This is what lets you answer "what's been happening in the north while the southern group has been adventuring" without having to reconstruct it from memory.
The key word in all of this is connected. A session log that just lives as a document doesn't update the world state. A faction tracker that doesn't link to the regions where factions operate doesn't help you when a party enters one of those regions. The whole setup has to be a connected system, not five separate documents.
The between-sessions workflow
This is where West Marches DMs win or lose. The actual session is the fun part. The work that makes the campaign feel alive happens between sessions.
A workable between-sessions workflow:
Within 24 hours of a session, log the events. What happened, where, who was involved, what changed. The closer to the session, the more accurate. Three days later, half the details are gone.
Update affected entries. The location entries that were visited, the NPCs that interacted with the party, the factions whose plans were affected. This is where having connected tooling matters — a session log that automatically updates the entries it references saves enormous time.
Run faction turns. Every two to four weeks of real time, every faction takes an action toward its goals. Some of these will be visible to players (army movements, attacks, political shifts), some invisible (a faction quietly recruiting, an NPC gathering information). Log them on the timeline.
Plant hooks for next session. Based on what's happened in the world, what rumors would be reaching the players' base of operations? What new opportunities exist? What changes do players need to know about? These become the launch points for the next group's session.
Update the rumor mill. What's circulating? Where? Who heard what? Players love feeling like the world is full of mysteries they're piecing together. That feeling is created by a rumor system the DM is actively curating.
This sounds like a lot. With the right tooling — where entries connect to each other automatically and the timeline is the central nervous system — it's an hour or two between sessions. With the wrong tooling, it's a part-time job.
Player-facing materials
West Marches usually has a player-facing wiki where players can record what they've discovered. This is wonderful in theory and frustrating in practice if it's separate from your DM tooling.
The model that works: a single connected world where some entries (or some fields within entries) are visible to players and some aren't. NPCs have a public name and basic description; their secret motivations and faction allegiances are DM-only. Locations have a public summary based on what's been discovered, and DM notes about what's actually there. A new player-character can see what's been discovered without spoiling what hasn't.
Trying to maintain two parallel systems — DM notes and a player wiki — is how DMs burn out. Maintain one connected system with visibility controls, and the player wiki is just a filtered view of the same data.
Why most tools fight West Marches DMs
Generic wiki tools and PKM tools (Notion, Obsidian, dedicated wikis) can be made to work for West Marches, but they fight you in specific ways:
They treat entries as independent documents. You're constantly cross-referencing manually.
They have no concept of "what knowledge does this character have" — you build that yourself out of tags and relations, and it falls apart at scale.
They don't have real timelines, just databases sorted by date. Faction actions and session events and in-world history all need to coexist on a single line you can read.
They don't catch contradictions. When a player references something they "remember from session four," there's no easy way to verify whether their character actually knows that.
They aren't built for the connected, evolving, multi-thread world that West Marches asks for.
Where Inkwarden fits
Inkwarden is built for connected worlds that change. The world encyclopedia keeps regions, factions, NPCs, and player characters linked, so when one entry updates, the connections everywhere else stay coherent. The timeline runs through everything — session events, faction actions, world history — so you can see what's been happening at a glance. Player characters can have their own knowledge state, so you know what they know.
The character voice feature is particularly useful for West Marches: when a party encounters an NPC, you can talk to that NPC in their own voice, grounded in their faction, their goals, and what they know about recent events. NPCs that feel distinct without the DM having to remember every detail of their backstory in the moment.
Join the Inkwarden waitlist if you're running — or thinking about running — a West Marches campaign and your current tooling is starting to creak.
The bottom line
West Marches campaigns are sustainable when the world is doing the heavy lifting. Players exploring a world that feels alive, where things happen between sessions, where rumors propagate and factions move and the map fills in piece by piece — that's the magic of the format. It's also enormous bookkeeping work, and the DMs who burn out are the DMs whose tooling makes that bookkeeping painful.
Set up a connected system. Maintain it after every session. Let the world move on its own. The reward is a campaign that runs for years, not weeks.