The Weathered Dragon WestMarch League (WDWL)
What is the WDWL?
The weathered dragon westmarch league (WDWL) is a community of players from around the world who play D&D with and against each other. It’s free to join the WDWL (join our discord here or email Sam here). There are two seasons every year — Spring and Fall — and each season lasts four months. The Spring season runs from January to April and the Fall season runs from September to December.
How does the WDWL Work?
At the start of each month of the season, the Weathered Dragon Press will release a unique one-shot adventure module on the League Discord, mailing list, and the WD Press Blog. These modules will be written and designed by WD Press authors and artists, and they’ll always be free and published on a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — this license means you’re allowed to use and distribute and remix and adapt and build on the module anyway you want as long as you give credit to the creators and as long as anything you publish yourself uses the same kind of license).
After the module is released to the league, players should go forth and complete the adventure module sometime in the next three weeks. After three weeks, WD Press will release a nomination and scoring form for that month’s adventure (sample form here) through the league discord, mailing list, and WD Press blog. PLayers and DMS should then nominate their favorite moments from playing the adventure, focusing on things like best roleplaying quote, best out-of-context quote, best combat-based tactical move, and so on. The best nominations are then curated by the League runners, and presented to the league community for voting. the top vote-getters in each category accumulate points which will be added to a leaderboard, and the players with the highest point totals in each category get prizes at the end of the season.
What are the WDWL Competitive Categories?
With league input, these could change, but for now the competitive categories will be:
Best Roleplaying Quote (your table's best in-character quote from the game)
Best Out-of-Context Quote (Your Table’s Best in or out-of-character, contextless quote from the game)
Smartest tactical maneuver (Your table’s best in-combat move)
Most Optimized Turn (the most amount of damage (or healing) done by a single player in a single turn)
Best Above Table Talk (Your table’s best moment of "above table" strategizing)
Best Storytelling Investment (your table's best moment of "in character" investment/commitment to the story)
Best fan art (Your group’s best doodles, drawings, or designs inspired by the adventure module)
Additionally, each adventure module will have some hidden items peppered throughout the module, as well as some “big red buttons” meant to entice the chaos goblins at your tables.
Who can I play with and Where do I PLay?
Whoever you want and wherever you want! Our Discord has a looking for group channel, and you’re more than welcome to play the modules online using a VTT, or at a bar with your regular group (if you have one). If you’re a IRL or virtual pay-to-play DM, you’re also more than welcome to use WDWL adventures as part of that hustle (technically, your paid players are paying you for your performance as a dM, not for the written module). Same thing if you run a live-play podcast or stream. And if you’re having trouble finding a table, virtual or otherwise, reach out to the mods on the Discord, and we’ll see if we can help out.
Is this like the D&D Adventurer’s League?
Kind of! Very similar, in fact. It’s more like Pub Quiz, though. The big difference between the D&D Adventurer’s League and the Weathered Dragon Westmarch League is the idea that a community of gamers from around the world will play the same adventure at roughly the same time. This is what D&D and TTRPGs are all about: a shared experience. We’ve all (Hopefully) known the joy of sharing a tabletop gaming experience with friends around the same table. We hope the WDWL can extend that joy from our tables to yours and beyond, creating a network of shared experiences, characters, references, in-jokes and so on. That’s the hope, anyway!
What’s “Westmarch”?
There’s a good write-up of the “westmarch” (or “westmarches”) style of gameplay here. The author writes “It is very much a player driven style of campaign. It is the players’ job to collect the party, schedule the time, and figure out where they would like to go for each session. Not every player plays in every session, which is what allows large amounts of players to all be in the same campaign. This style of campaign would be great as a group activity, due to how it is formatted.”
Matt Colville also has a lengthier explanation of Westmarches here:
For right now, we’re using “westmarch” to refer to a style of play in which there isn’t an overarching campaign narrative, but there is a shared/common realm or world. This is the “phase one” version of the WDWL.
The “Phase two” version of the WDWL will be closer to the traditional definition of a westmarch-style D&D game in which not only is there no overarching campaign narrative, but the players — i.e. the WDWL participants — generate ideas for the adventure modules. We’re hoping to build a critical mass of regular league players who will start to contribute adventure ideas (& maybe even write and publish some through the WD Press), making the “Westmarch” component of the Weathered Dragon Westmarch League more in line with the traditional definition of the play style.
Alright, I’m in. Now what?
Join our discord! or join our mailing list!
