Inspired by the West Marches campaign structure and the curious pages of John Dee’s diaries, this is a proposal for running a larger, looser, and more player-driven mode of The Dee Sanction RPG.
August 3rd, 1581. All the night very strange knocking and rapping in my chamber.
August 4th. And this night likewise.
— The Diaries of John Dee
In my ongoing experiment that is tabletop gaming, few campaign structures offer as much freedom—and demand as much self-discipline—as the West Marches style. First outlined by Ben Robbins in his now-famous blog post, the core idea in a West Marches game is simple: put control of scheduling, group composition, and adventure goals into the hands of the players. The Game Master becomes the world, rather than the organiser. Players decide what they want to investigate, assemble a team, and book time with the GM to make it happen.
What if The Dee Sanction adopted this approach?
What if the strange whispers, demonic dreams, and uncanny reports of Elizabethan England—especially those recorded by Doctor Dee himself—could serve as anchor points in a sprawling, semi-open campaign?
Enter the Grand Campaign
In this model, The Dee Sanction becomes more than a game about your Agents solving this mystery in tonight's session. It becomes a chronicle. A sprawling tapestry of events where many Agents—some recurring, some briefly glimpsed—interact with an ongoing timeline of supernatural and political threat.
Dee’s diaries, notorious for blending the mundane and the mystical, offer the perfect narrative framework. They are inconsistent, subjective, and often perplexing—but, in that, they echo the same shadowed truths the game seeks to explore. A game calendar could run alongside the real dates Dee recorded: aligning player activity to the entries, and weaving historical events and Dee’s own cryptic observations into a structured timeline of missions.
September 10th, 1579. My dream of me being naked, and my skin all overwrought with work like some kind of tuft mockado, with crosses blue and red; and on my left arm in a wreath I read, “Without me you can do nothing.”
These fragments are story seeds. Any one of them could spark a night’s adventure. Together, they could provide the skeleton of a years-long campaign.
The Role of the Stone Houses
In West Marches games, the Town is the place of safety. It's where the adventurers gather, rest, and prepare between forays into danger. In The Dee Sanction, this safe zone becomes the Stone Houses—ritually sanctified redoubts scattered across England. These are not hubs of bustling activity, but hushed places of ritual and secrecy, established through careful rites and maintained by silent allies.
Agents always begin and end their operations at a Stone House. While these are not magical gateways to anywhere—no fast travel is allowed—the structure does allow for large shifts in time and place. One session might be set in Norfolk on All Hallows’ Eve, the next in Sussex in the spring of the following year. The connection is not geography but continuity: the Agents' journals, the consequences of their past actions, and the slow build-up of threat in the wider world.
The war against the unseen rages on. The Monad Edition equips you to take your place in history.
Pledge now and step into the shadows.
A Game of Marks and Threads
In this grander version of The Dee Sanction, the Tradecraft system—normally used to pursue a particular threat over several sessions—becomes a campaign’s core mechanism. Each session might see progress made toward completing a Mark: a specific investigation into a Fae incursion, demonic activity, political subversion, or courtly betrayal. But unlike linear campaign arcs, here the Agents might also begin new threads in the same session, or encounter clues that relate to other missions pursued by different players.
Like the Brindlewood Bay model of progressive mystery-solving, this structure leans heavily on player agency and GM flexibility. The players choose which threats matter most. The world reacts. If no one answers a growing threat in Devon, it festers. If two different groups investigate the same courtier weeks apart, their notes and outcomes may clash—or align in startling ways.
Managing the Timeline
To maintain the integrity of this shared world, chronology is everything. Sessions must proceed along a fixed campaign timeline. You could allow parallel sessions with different players only if they do not share Agents, but this opens the door to inconsistencies, retcons, and coordination headaches. The guiding principle is simple: don’t try to be too clever. The West Marches format isn’t about opening up time for complex storytelling tricks—it’s about reducing the GM’s burden and empowering players to build the campaign themselves.
What does that mean in practice?
Players schedule sessions by contacting the GM with a goal: “We want to investigate the disappearances near Tilbury Fort.”
The GM prepares only that mission, building on known threats, Dee’s entries, or historical context.
The calendar moves forward. Journals and mission notes are critical to keeping the world consistent.
New players and characters can join the campaign anytime—join the next mission from a Stone House.
Closing Thoughts: Scales of Mystery
The Dee Sanction doesn’t need long adventures to thrive in this model. One session could uncover a new threat. Another might resolve a Mark. Another might fail, with the Agents retreating under duress. It is not about tightly plotted story arcs—it’s about letting players choose which mysteries matter and how deeply they want to entangle themselves in the web of Dee’s half-hidden world.
The more I think about this model, the more I want to run it—not just as a curiosity or an experiment but as a living campaign anchored in a shifting, haunted Elizabethan world.
Let the Dee Marches begin.
If this idea resonates with you, or you’ve run something similar in The Dee Sanction or another historical RPG, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Let’s chart the supernatural map of Elizabethan England together.