West Marches breaks on continuity, not on scheduling

The format’s known failure mode

Every write-up of running West Marches lands on the same problem: the shared record. Players who were not on last week’s expedition need to know what it found, parties need to not re-clear the same ruin, and a GM needs to know which faction the Tuesday group annoyed before the Saturday group walks into it.

The usual answer is a player-maintained wiki and session reports written by whoever volunteers. It works while enthusiasm holds. What it does not survive is a busy month, and a West Marches game that loses its record loses the thing that made the persistent world persistent.

A wiki nobody has to volunteer for

Recording each expedition produces the write-up automatically: what the party found, who they met, what they left unresolved. Entities extracted from every session accumulate into one campaign wiki, so the world’s record grows from play rather than from somebody’s free time.

The read-only shared wiki link is close to purpose-built for this format and is not framed that way anywhere else on this site: your whole roster can browse the campaign wiki, with your GM notes stripped, and none of them need an account to do it. For a twenty-player game, "no account needed" is the difference between a resource people use and one they do not.

Multiple GMs, one continuity

Open tables often run with more than one GM, which multiplies the problem: two people now need to stay current on a world neither of them sees all of. A shared record built from every session is the cheapest way to keep co-GMs in sync without a weekly handover meeting, and the same read-only shared wiki link your players use is how a co-GM reads yours: searchable, with your GM notes stripped.

Linking accounts is a different thing. Guild Master links up to four others onto one plan, each with their own hours, but it shares the plan, not your campaigns: a linked co-GM gets Guild Master for the campaigns they run on their own account, and linking does not open your transcripts, recaps or Ask Your Campaign to them.

Play-by-post and text expeditions count too

Plenty of open tables run downtime, travel or whole expeditions in text on Discord or a forum. That content is already a transcript, so it can be imported directly — paste it in or upload a .txt — and it runs the same chain as recorded audio: entities into the wiki and a recap, plus relationships on Dungeon Master and up. It consumes no transcription hours, and every plan includes imports (two a month free, ten on Dungeon Master, unlimited on Guild Master).

For a format where half the world-changing decisions happen between sessions in a text channel, that is not a side feature.

The format is having a moment

Critical Role’s fourth campaign, which began in October 2025, splits thirteen players across three groups playing at separate tables in one shared world, with actions in one affecting the others. Coverage has connected it to West Marches directly. A format that used to need explaining now has the largest actual-play show in the hobby demonstrating it weekly — which is worth knowing if you are pitching an open table to your own group.