The best fantasy world-building game I've ever played just dropped
It's time for Worldwizard, baby
When I wanted to make a collaborative world for my players to make a fresh fantasy campaign in, I went straight to the best source I know: Perilous Wilds, by Jason Lutes. I hopped on Lutes’ Discord and asked if anyone had tips for playing the collaborative setting-building material. Lutes hopped in and said something like “I’m actually working on something new if you want to test it out,” and dropped me a link labeled Worldwizard.
I ran it with several groups. I wrote up playtest notes. I fell in love. I think that Worldwizard is just the Best In Show for games for a group that wants to sit down and build an epic fantasy world from scratch.
Here’s a simple summary: In Worldwizard, you and your friends start with a literal blank hex map at the scale of an entire world, usually several large continents, and end up with hundreds of thousands of years of history, a detailed landscape, the epic history of several fallen civilizations, and a world of fantasy races and peoples leading right up to the “present day” of your campaign.
Some day in the past week or something, Lutes dropped the final version of Worldwizard on itch for $5. You can get in on DTRPG, but he gets less money.
So now I’m gonna tell you about it because it fucking rocks.
It’s like Sid Meyer’s Civilization meets the Silmarillion
First of all, let’s talk about how it goes.
At the beginning of the game, you start with a giant hex map, like 50x27 hexes, each representing possibly a hundred miles. We’re talking your whole planet. You and your friends just start drawing some continents, dividing the land and sea however you like, making some cool islands. Lutes includes some blank maps with continental boundaries if you like.
The game is played in four ages. The first age is the Primordial Age, representing millions of early years of your planet. All you do is make terrain. Start building mountains, add forests, lakes, rivers, jungles, whatever. Everyone goes around the table building the landscape on the map, spending an hour drawing together.
The subsequent three ages are Prehistoric, Ancient and Present. In these ages, you spent a simple resource called action points to make up little people groups, develop them into civilizations, expand them, send them to war, create new technology or religions. Or you can spend your points making “avatars,” which can be a god, or a hero, or a monster, or a mythic figure.
Wanna save your action points? You can “pass” on your turn, generate more, and hit the world with a cataclysm, or an earthquake, or a monster attack, or a demon incursion. Most of the game is rolling on tables, or picking from tables. Whatever you do, it’s all history.
Here’s the kicker: Between each age, every civiliation or avatar you make has to roll to either continue to the next age, die out, or spend action points to survive. Which means you can spend all of the Prehistoric age building a people group with a mighty citadel with some sick aqueducts only to watch them disappear suddenly into obscurity. Twice while playing, I spent the Ancient age creating a people group that took over the world like the Roman empire, only to have them collapse spectacularly (the Present age usually becomes largely about the fractious infighting that comes in its wake).
What the magic of this game is:
Without needing to brief your players on a ton of backstory, you get the feeling of a rich setting with a true time abyss. One player I ran for wasted a bunch of action points in the Prehistoric phase making a ton of doomed people groups. But all of those freakish dog-men and snakefolk left their ruins behind on the map! We wrote some explanations for how some of those civs died, but others are a total mystery to still be explored.
When players have a hand in writing the lore, they get a deep command of the world in a fun way without having to learn all that shit. For one world, just tracking all of the developments created a 17-page lore document. But everyone at the table knows it all inside-out already, just by dint of having made it all together!
Naming conventions!! In true Perilous Wilds style, every civilization you create is given a real-world linguistic root that it uses for its naming conventions. Then that group begins to apply its naming conventions to both itself and everything around it. So, for example, we’ve got a group of stone giants that use Arabic, who call themselves the “Eimlaq” and have no name for their mountain home. But the Herrians use Basque, and to them, the Eimlaq are called the Ondegai, and live in the region they call Ibiltaria. Continents are named by those with the power to name them. Events take on vastly different meanings that live on in linguistic differences. Watching this shit develop in real-time is absolutely nuts.
Different player behavior emerges. You have some people who want to conquer the world, some who want to take on a little island all their own, some who want to just make up gods and heroes, some who want to make faction fights using everyone else’s civilizations. And it all works together! No matter what, you end up with a living history.
Honestly, drawing together is fun, drawing maps is fun, and labeling maps is fun. Nobody dislikes this.
What do you do when you’re done? Pick a hex and start your campaign. Use Perilous Wilds, use Microscope, use The Quiet Year, whatever. By this point in your play experience, you’re going to have tons of places you’re curious about, lost civilizations, ruins, political rivalries. Play Dungeon World, play Cairn, play whatever. I played Blades in the Dark in our world, and now we’re going to play Freebooters on the Frontier. Or set it aside and never return to it again.
Anyway, I think it’s all sick, and soon I’m going to run Lutes’s other game Freebooters on the Frontier 2e, which is playtesting now, in the world we made. The guy also just finished his Kickstarter for Perilous Voids, which is the best alternative to both Shawn Tomkin’s Starforged oracles and Stars Without Number, in terms of sci-fi world-building. All around, good year for Lutes.
What else is going on:
I finished a Brindlewood Bay campaign, maybe I’ll recap my thoughts. I think we had a killer time, and I’d run it again for a one-shot, but I’m gonna need a big ol’ break before running another Gauntlet game again.
Last month I published my biggest YouTube video so far, and it didn’t bring me any closer to wanting to continue doing YouTube videos. It also led to a bunch of new subscribers here on Substack, and the first thing they’re now seeing is a review of a game they’ve already seen an early review of.
I ran my first ever Scum & Villainy and it was incredible, and my first ever Blades in the Dark and it was bad. I think I have this funny thing where I’m better at improvising in sci-fi than fantasy? Maybe I should be a sci-fi GM…
I’ve finally got Urban Shadows on my shelf, and I think me and the guys in Brooklyn are itching for some vampires/werewolves/wizards stuff.
I’m writing fiction again.
Nice review! I've been wanting to try out a game like that. I'm going to put this on list for when I finish my current solo games.
I'm going to give this a try because of of the great review. Thanks!