I am still prepping my Brutal Magic Desert Campaign, which is basically prep-finished at this point, sans actually, ya know, running the game. I took May off because I was pretty busy with travel nearly every weekend but the game was mentally cooking that whole time. I am not super happy with my encounter tables but that’s something that needs to be tested in play before I toss it out. Otherwise, I will end up redoing every little bit of this campaign and never get around to playing it.

But I digress: talking about the BMDC is not why I am here, for I have been thinking about ideas for other campaigns in other systems. Is that a form of procrastination? Yes. Will I let it stop me? Never.

Sometimes it is more fun to think about a campaign than it is to do the nitty gritty of prepping it, and sometimes probably more fun to think about the campaign than actually play it. Maybe some of these ideas would totally suck – but they sure do sound cool, at least to me.

Extraction Shooters Are Really Just West Marches For FPS Games

I said what I said.

If you’re lost, an extraction shooter (or looter shooter, as they are sometimes called) refers to a subgenre of FPS video games where generally, you get dropped into a map to scavenge loot, PVP, fight NPC bosses, and ultimately survive long enough to leave the map with your ill-gotten gains before a long-ish match timer runs out. Usually, if you die your body – with all the gear you brought into the map + all your loot – can be looted by other players while you get ejected from the session back to your hub/main lobby/whatever.

With me so far? Great. If not, boo hoo I tried. Google it. If I am speaking in too vague of generalities, it’s because there’s a handful of these games with variations of the base formula but it nearly always boils down to:

1. Get in
2. Get loot
3. Get out
4. ???
5. Profit

What does that sound like? A West Marches game? Wow reader, you’re so right! I was thinking the same thing.

A friend of mine sent me a youtube video of some normie explaining to brainrotted 5E stans what a West Marches campaign is and how it works. Being based and OSR pilled I of course already knew what it was, but the point of my friend sending it to me was it came up on his feed and he was like, “wow this sounds like it would work for our group, you should put your own spin on this and run it.” So now I feel obligated to do just that, but it also got the gears turning, and this friend of mine is a big extraction shooter fan and I guess I had a Jimmy Neutron brain blast connecting the dots.

I’ve played several of these extraction shooters, to wit:

Escape From Tarkov – the OG extraction shooter, set in modern day not-Russia featuring gritty, relatively realistic combat and autistic levels of detail in gun customization. It’s a shitty game made by shitty people but nobody has dethroned the king. Janky, frustrating, and addicting in equal measure.

Hunt: Showdown – Supernatural bounty hunting in zombie-filled Bayou circa 1895. More arcade-y combat, focused more on finding the location of big monster bosses and extracting with their bounty tokens than scavenging loot. Think Jonah Hex meets Resident Evil. I love the vibes, love the “cowboy guns” which I grew up shooting irl, and love the tighter focus.

Marauders – Dieselpunk space pirates duking it out in flying submarines on the way to loot space stations. Far less popular after the initial launch, but has a cool vibe and bonus points for having space ships (and several very obscure 20th century weapons).

The Cycle: Frontier – Generic scifi. Not very interesting visually, writing was cringe, and the gunplay didn’t feel good so my friends and I didn’t stick with this one very long. Included here for completeness’ sake.

I Bet You Thought This Was About RPGs Not My Half-Assed Review Of Video Games

And you’d be right. So to get back on track, let’s see how we could turn one of these extraction shooters into a West Marches RPG – or at the very least, what mechanics we steal from these games.

I have actually done some work at some point of actually adapting EFT and am cannibalizing some of that for this writeup. Hopefully what is below makes some sort of sense. It’s an adaptation of elements of the video game to tabletop/p&p mechanics in a way that clicks, I think, and could be used in a general sense.

So how would we expect the EFT mechanics adapted RPG to look?

• Goal is to venture out from home base to scavenge goods to survive in wreck of a city
• Stars Without Number/Traveller/Cyperpunk 2020 as mechanical base
• Household goods as treasure, with inventory slot management being important
• Google Earth maps of whatever city you’re setting your game in as dungeon/encounter maps
• PC “reputation” scores for NPCs/factions affecting how they treat you/services offered
• A stash/hideout that is upgradable by using specific scavenged goods to unlock services/bonuses
• Survival mechanics (food/water, encumbrance, fatigue)
• Pointcrawl of different districts/specific buildings in the city of varying risk/reward
• Different loot pools for different places (nails & tools at hardware store point, food at market, etc)

What about Hunt: Showdown?

• Goal is to fight your way through several points of interest to hunt for undead bosses & collect bounties
• Boot Hill as mechanical base
• Fairly-weak “mob” enemies with specific debilitating abilities (slow, poison, blind, choke, etc)
• Bosses with specific attacks/resistances/strategies to beat them; take back proof of bounty
• Pointcrawl web of small dungeons, containing either a boss or a clue to which dungeon they’re in
• Level up gives perk points used to either heal lost max health or buy perks
• Max level lets you retire PC for meta currency (lame, instead unlocks classes/bonuses for new PC?)

And now doing Marauders…

• Goal is to dogfight your crew’s pirate ship to raid & loot mining/military/civvie space stations
• Stars Without Number/Traveller as mechanical base
• Lots of spaceship combat in vicinity of PoIs
• 1-man escape/boarding pods, used for ship boarding & looting wrecks/disabled ships/PoIs
• Space stations, derelict ships, asteroid colonies as dungeons & are PoIs on pointcrawl
• Loot is building materials, food/med supplies, intel/war plans, bullion, weapons & ammo, parts
• Faction standing for trading/donating to war effort/doing missions

So There We Have It, I Guess

How workable do these seem? Are there mechanics or elements that would adapt well to other West Marches campaigns? Did this even make sense?