More Worldwizard Thoughts
We wrapped-up our second game of Worldwizard this past Saturday. My broader thoughts about the game remain the same, but there are a few things I want to dissect after completing a second game.
My table of three players agreed from the start that we should strive to make this map denser, to have various civilizations and cultures butt-up on each other in aggressive ways. We accomplished this, creating a couple spots in the final map where competing cultures and civilizations butted heads with each other. But even using a smaller map and taking many more turns than the game by suggests, we still could not fill in the entire map. Sometimes this led to fruitful stories - why do burgeoning civilizations in the land south of the central mountains keep failing? - but mostly it just left a third of the map uninhabited and with no ideas or hooks to draw player characters toward them. Maybe with a larger group this would be different, but I am skeptical.
I also decided I don't like the game's directive to give each culture you create a real world language. It was stifling. For example, I gave a group of halflings (and later monsterfolk) Icelandic as a language early on. This was entirely driven by my reading a lot of Norse sagas and eddas these past few years. Early on this gave me a focus for stories to tell with them, but by the end of the session I created them in I was tapped out on directions to take them in. I spent the next few weeks between games trying to find ways to make sure they weren't just comical halfling vikings. I got there in the end, but it was a lot of extra work I might have avoided by just saying they spoke Hobbit or even a fictional language detached from strong preconceptions.
The adherence to real world language also ground our game to a halt several times as each of us opened our Internet browsers to try and figure out how to name people or places in Welsh or Sanskrit. I can't speak to the other two players, but I still don't feel confident with the names I came-up with. After we finished the game, we gave names to any place we didn't get to in-play. By the end of that I gave up trying to give rivers or cities plausible Welsh or Icelandic names and just gave them fantasy-ass fantasy names. That desert next to the subtropical, Welsh speaking, ghost-marrying knights? That's the Sinspear Desert. I can't spend another half-hour reading Wikipedia articles about Welsh naming conventions for places!
Critiques aside, our second game went well! When we finished we took the map and discussed where we wanted to set our next campaign. Do we explore Dinosaur Island in an attempt to stop their invasion of the nearby elvish jungles? Do we venture into the abode of the primordial beast that captured Hervor, immortal godhead of the halflings, and attempt to win her freedom, or failing that, retrieve her enchanted crystal spear? We eventually settled on addressing the conflict with the break-away religious state of Nova Sinfonia, who are successfully invading two separate countries thanks to their enslavement of the ghosts and fairies within the country's borders.
Importantly, all those possible campaigns came directly out of the world building we did. I didn't have to take a hook or idea and retrofit it to our world because by the end it was easy to point to several places and go "I want to find out what happens next!" All in all, we had a fun time with Worldwizard!