# Stars/Worlds Without Number (General Thread)



## Aldarc (May 23, 2021)

This is simply meant to be a general discussion thread for Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number.

A few people have been talking about it here and there in the forum, but I am curious who has looked through it yet? What do you think of the rules, GM advice, or sandboxing toolkit? Who has run a game with it? What were your experiences? Or what do you plan to run with it? Has anyone homebrewed anything with it?

Let's talk Stars and Worlds Without Number.

Edit: included Stars Without Number.


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## kenada (May 23, 2021)

I’ve mostly completed my read-through of the Deluxe edition. The only parts I haven’t finished reading (“Heroic Classes and Characters”, “Legates”) are ones I won’t be using (because I want OSR-style grittiness).



Aldarc said:


> What do you think of the rules, GM advice, or sandboxing toolkit?



I think the book is fairly well organized. Most rules are organized together in a logical way. It’s a breath of fresh air coming from Pathfinder 2e, but it lacks the succinctness of Old-School Essentials. Sometimes it uses bolded text to call out important things, but there is room for improvement. The “Magic” chapter in particular buries important information in paragraphs of text. You have to dig to find out how many spells you learn or gain at advancement.

There are some parts that weren’t great (though they don’t detract from my overall like of the system). WWN is based on B/X, but it omits several key procedures. There is a section on wilderness exploration, but there is no procedure for running it. There are also no procedures for handling encounters. B/X has a strong procedure, and it tells you when and how to transition. This is particularly problematic in WWN because this is one of the few places where the rules are not all in the same place. Reaction rolls, morale, and instinct (a new mechanic) are all off in a separate chapter (“Creatures of a Far Age”).

WWN describes several different types of challenges you can run, and they’re mostly pretty good. However, the investigation challenge is not. When I was first skimming the book, I initially thought it was discussing three clue rule. That had me excited initially, but I was wrong. It actually abandons the sandbox approach for a railroad: run three scenes to discover the clues, and the PCs have to succeed at them all or fail (or get a deus ex machina). There are techniques you can overlay a sandbox to support a mystery scenario, so I was very disappointed by that.

I also don’t care for the bestiary. The writing is really good and evocative. The new creatures are really creepy. However, everything is (again) buried in walls of text. Abilities are noted in bold, but if you want to run a creature, you have to dig out the supporting text from the fluff. If I weren’t doing my own setting, I’d have to prepare my own stat blocks for a lot of things.

I think the only issue I have is I wish projects had more mechanical weight (something like a progress clock). They give you some structure for figuring out who might get involved or be affected by it, but the resolution appears to come down mostly to fiat. Given the mechanics behind factions, which seems like a cool way to create a dynamic world without a lot of work on the GM’s part, that was also a bit disappointing.

It’s also worth calling out that there is an undocumented group check mechanic. “The Rules of the Game” describes how to run skill checks. It discussed scenarios where the group needs to work together to help one person succeed (“Aiding a Skill Check”), but WWN also has rules for when the group needs to succeed collectively. Both escape and foraging have you use the best modifier of the group to make a single check. I only stumbled across this because the surprise rules make no sense without group checks (what happens if everyone rolls but some fail? It’s not said).

Otherwise, I think the GMing stuff is pretty cool. There are tons of tables, and I’m really looking forward to getting into setting creation (more on that below). The system as a whole has a very strong 3e vibe. I’d describe it as B/X with the best of 3e added.



Aldarc said:


> Who has run a game with it? What were your experiences?



We ran a one-shot last week, and we’re switching to it as the system of choice for my campaign. We were already doing a sandbox, so all the tools are very handy. I already have my own setting, which already fit somewhat (due to Dying Earth influences), but I’m starting the process of setting creation to see if it could improve things and to bring it in line with WWN’s default assumptions.

The session itself went pretty well. I posted a bit about it in my “A Pathfinder Group Tries Old-School Essentials” thread. We struggled with OSE because the characters just didn’t have enough meat to them for my players, and combat was just too hard. They felt completely incompetent. In WWN, the classes have more mechanical weight, and things like Shock damage make warriors extremely awesome at killing things. As one of my players put it, the game felt dangerous, but they weren’t pathetically weak.

I’ve just started working through the setting creation chapter. The thing that really sticks out is how frequently Kevin reminds you to keep your focus on producing playable material, which is a good thing. While adapting my setting during world creation, I found I actually had a lot of gaps. I’d just defined some species because I wanted the PCs to have options in prior iterations (5e, PF2, OSE), but none of that was really tied together in a believable way. I’d defined various homelands for the species, but the core conceit prevented them from working. I’d also been struggling through the Alexandrian’s approach to hexcrawls, which proved just to onerous, so the region where play was actually happened turned out to be very poorly defined.

Here’s an example of what I mean with regards to the species and their homelands. When I worked through world creation, it asks if there are any special physics in your setting. I’d originally conceived of the setting as a hard sci-fi setting but got away from that in a later revision. I wanted to pivot back to that but keep the general nature of the changes I’d made in the revision (where the world was flat), so the world became an Alderson disk. Also inspired by Frederick Pohl’s _The World at the End of Time_, I wanted the world to be traveling at relativistic speeds after the death of the universe (it just hadn’t caught up with the setting yet).

That’s all neat, but WWN keeps reminding the GM: you can have fun with setting creation if you like, but you need to be focusing on creating usable, playable content. That lead me to start thinking about the implications of those core setting conceits. How do I have seasons (the sun’s precession causes them due to the wobble induced by the mechanism that keeps it from crashing into the disk)? How can you navigate between continents if the stars are gone (due to the death of the universe)? Well, you can’t, and that’s what told me I need to reconsider the original premise of the campaign (an expedition sent to another continent) and how the PCs would even be part of such thing.

Fortuitously, I had events in my setting’s history that could map nicely into some of the system’s assumptions. The War of the Giants had taken place in the past, and it resulted in the departure of dragons in the setting. I took that and reframed that a bit. The departure of the dragons happened with a precursor civilization (at an unspecified point in the past) when the dragons came and destroyed them. This time, the War of the Giants became a war between the current empire and the fiends and celestials who descended from the heavens (around the time the stars started going out, which some people mistook as the gods in heaven coming down to punish them). Eventually, the fiends and celestials also disappeared for some reason, and about a thousand years later, we have the current date.

What I’m left with is a world that’s dying, in decline, and making progress is difficult. The Legacy of prior civilizations doesn’t want to be understood, so people struggle to advance beyond what they have discovered. Because of the lack of stars, there are few living outside of settled areas, so much of the wilderness is untamed and dangerous. Once I start adding the other layers (regional and kingdom backdrops, geography, nations, factions, etc), I should have a sandbox setting with a _lot_ of potential and mechanics and tools to make that work. Because of how burdensome it is to prep all the things, the settlement where the campaign is based is barely detailed, and that sucks (because it means it barely makes sense and isn’t a good source of events or drama even though it should be).



Aldarc said:


> Or what do you plan to run with it? Has anyone homebrewed anything with it?



I didn’t like the official one (or any of the unofficial ones), so I put together a character sheet. There are a handful of things that don’t have dedicated boxes: initiative, speed, languages. To be honest, I forgot to include them, but they have reasonable defaults, and they can be put in the notes section on the back.


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## hawkeyefan (May 23, 2021)

I’ve only skimmed it, so I’ll be curious to see peoples’ thoughts on it. It seems interesting from what I’ve seen, and very much like Stars Without Number, but with some changes.

Good breakdown, @kenada


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## Aldarc (May 24, 2021)

That was far more thorough than I was expecting, @kenada, but thank you. I was also a Kickstarter backer, though just at the pdf level, so I had been followingly loosely along through beta releases. But I have not forced myself to engage in a more concerted reading of the text. 


kenada said:


> I’ve mostly completed my read-through of the Deluxe edition. The only parts I haven’t finished reading (“Heroic Classes and Characters”, “Legates”) are ones I won’t be using (because I want OSR-style grittiness).



My own players may be more inclined towards the heroic mode, but I'm not sure how either feels in actual play, so I would definitely be interested if people have experience running both for comparison purposes. 



kenada said:


> I think the book is fairly well organized. Most rules are organized together in a logical way. It’s a breath of fresh air coming from Pathfinder 2e, but it lacks the succinctness of Old-School Essentials. Sometimes it uses bolded text to call out important things, but there is room for improvement. The “Magic” chapter in particular buries important information in paragraphs of text. You have to dig to find out how many spells you learn or gain at advancement.



Aren't these in the tables or am I thinking of something else? 



kenada said:


> There are some parts that weren’t great (though they don’t detract from my overall like of the system). WWN is based on B/X, but it omits several key procedures. There is a section on wilderness exploration, but there is no procedure for running it. There are also no procedures for handling encounters. B/X has a strong procedure, and it tells you when and how to transition. This is particularly problematic in WWN because this is one of the few places where the rules are not all in the same place. Reaction rolls, morale, and instinct (a new mechanic) are all off in a separate chapter (“Creatures of a Far Age”).



This may be one of the problems of WWN transitioning from SWN, which is likely far less interested in wilderness exploration. 



kenada said:


> Otherwise, I think the GMing stuff is pretty cool. There are tons of tables, and I’m really looking forward to getting into setting creation (more on that below). The system as a whole has a very strong 3e vibe. I’d describe it as B/X with the best of 3e added.



IMHO, there is a strong conceptual link in SWN/WWN to Green Ronin's True 20 system from the d20 era. True 20 reduced classes to the 3e's NPC classes: i.e., warrior, expert, and adept. Each class would also get a special core ability that you would only get from starting in that class. True 20 also had mixed/partial classes in the core book with transparent math about making your own in the Companion. So when I see the duplication of the Warrior, Expert, and Mystic/Mage in SWN/WWN, then it's hard not to get a T20 vibe. 



kenada said:


> We ran a one-shot last week, and we’re switching to it as the system of choice for my campaign. We were already doing a sandbox, so all the tools are very handy. I already have my own setting, which already fit somewhat (due to Dying Earth influences), but I’m starting the process of setting creation to see if it could improve things and to bring it in line with WWN’s default assumptions.
> 
> The session itself went pretty well. I posted a bit about it in my “A Pathfinder Group Tries Old-School Essentials” thread. We struggled with OSE because the characters just didn’t have enough meat to them for my players, and combat was just too hard. They felt completely incompetent. In WWN, the classes have more mechanical weight, and things like Shock damage make warriors extremely awesome at killing things. As one of my players put it, the game felt dangerous, but they weren’t pathetically weak.



Discussion of your WWN play sessions would definitely be welcome in this thread. 



kenada said:


> I’ve just started working through the setting creation chapter. The thing that really sticks out is how frequently Kevin reminds you to keep your focus on producing playable material, which is a good thing. While adapting my setting during world creation, I found I actually had a lot of gaps. I’d just defined some species because I wanted the PCs to have options in prior iterations (5e, PF2, OSE), but none of that was really tied together in a believable way. I’d defined various homelands for the species, but the core conceit prevented them from working. I’d also been struggling through the Alexandrian’s approach to hexcrawls, which proved just to onerous, so the region where play was actually happened turned out to be very poorly defined.
> 
> Here’s an example of what I mean with regards to the species and their homelands. When I worked through world creation, it asks if there are any special physics in your setting. I’d originally conceived of the setting as a hard sci-fi setting but got away from that in a later revision. I wanted to pivot back to that but keep the general nature of the changes I’d made in the revision (where the world was flat), so the world became an Alderson disk. Also inspired by Frederick Pohl’s _The World at the End of Time_, I wanted the world to be traveling at relativistic speeds after the death of the universe (it just hadn’t caught up with the setting yet).
> 
> ...



This chapter is IMHO a real treasure of the book. Kevin Crawford does a good job of providing reasonable guidelines for world-building that is oriented towards (1) playable content and (2) effective use of the GM's time. He also de-mystifies the entire process of running a sandbox. I watched one GM on YouTube who was planning their upcoming WWN campaign and using this chapter to world-build. You could tell that this section riled the feathers a little for both the GM and their co-host, but I think that's due to the book basically calling out gratuitous, self-serving world-building rather than play-oriented world-building. I believe that at one point, Crawford even says that your players won't care about most of it. Crawford is far more of a pragmatist when it comes to his world-building approach, which I highly appreciate. 

As an aside, I wish that this book had existed for one of my old D&D GMs for this chapter alone. After our PF1 campaign was done, we got together to tentatively brainstorm a possible D&D 5e campaign. I recommended starting their focus on the starting town and the surrounding environs. We brainstormed the name of a town and a hook for its founding. I then let him due to the rest. We reconvened after about two weeks. When I asked his progress, he said the he had given the world two moons, calculated the size of the planet and its annual cycle, and whole bunch more. I was not surprised that he burned out on GMing after only about 2-3 sessions of play, though it's possible there were other contributing factors behind the scenes. So I think that this sort of world-building advice would have helped him considerably in keeping him grounded and focused. There are other GMs who I also have played with who have suffered a similar "world-building sickness." I definitely want to try working through the setting creation guidelines myself, if only to see how it plays out when one follows the guidelines as prescribed. I definitely have some tentative ideas. 

I have personally wanted to use WWN to run essentially "Islands Without Number." This would be more of a high seas island-hopping sandbox adventure. However, I'm not a fan of the Vancian cynicism of the Dying Earth genre, so I will likely change that, but it would be nice to potentially incorporate some of these science fantasy elements. I have been debating between two different versions of the setting. 

The first would be something more analogous to adventuring in an off-brand Middle Earth that has been shattered into islands rather than existing as a solid landmass (The Westlands of ME) or completely submerged (Beleriand) with various ruins and relics of the First, Second, and early Third age being hidden throughout the archipelago. The second idea is something more akin to a Maritime Southeast Asian or Pirates of Dark Water* fantasy that involves ascended ancients/aliens/"makers" (think Stargate SG-1) and their human/demihuman "progeny" who fathom only a remote, tiny sliver of their legacy. I'm leaning towards the latter. 

* PoDW was drawn by an art studio in the Philippines, and you can see SEA and Filipino influences in some of the aesthetics (cf. the Filipino kampilan sword and Ioz's sword).


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## hawkeyefan (May 24, 2021)

Aldarc said:


> When I asked his progress, he said the he had given the world two moons, calculated the size of the planet and its annual cycle, and whole bunch more.




Ugh channel all that creative energy into stuff that won’t matter.


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## Retreater (May 24, 2021)

Reading through the free PDF at the moment. Seems okay, just overly wordy. I don't care for the organization, as important rules seem to be buried in paragraphs of text. 
I also don't care for the toolkit approach to designing monsters. I would prefer to have more creatures already statted up and ready to play.
These are just my first impressions, however, and subject to change.


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## kenada (May 24, 2021)

Aldarc said:


> My own players may be more inclined towards the heroic mode, but I'm not sure how either feels in actual play, so I would definitely be interested if people have experience running both for comparison purposes.



While my preference is for the default, I’d also like to hear people’s experiences with heroic mode. In particular, I wonder how well it works with 3e and newer adventures (like how the default is compatible with old-school ones).



Aldarc said:


> Aren't these in the tables or am I thinking of something else?



I’ve seen it asked a few times on reddit, so I don’t think it is called out in a table anywhere. It’s listed under your tradition benefits for each tradition as well as in the character advancement section of “The Rules of the Game”. The number of starting spells is only called out in the summary of character creation section of “Character Creation” (as far as I can tell).



Aldarc said:


> IMHO, there is a strong conceptual link in SWN/WWN to Green Ronin's True 20 system from the d20 era. True 20 reduced classes to the 3e's NPC classes: i.e., warrior, expert, and adept. Each class would also get a special core ability that you would only get from starting in that class. True 20 also had mixed/partial classes in the core book with transparent math about making your own in the Companion. So when I see the duplication of the Warrior, Expert, and Mystic/Mage in SWN/WWN, then it's hard not to get a T20 vibe.



Aside from the obvious similarities with saving throws, I was struck by how much the action economy reminded me of 3e. It’s arguably closer to 4e, but something about it reminded me more of 3e. Character creation is also similar, but it seems much less vulnerable to system mastery compared to 3e and (especially) Pathfinder. I know there was one broken combo (healer/vowed) discovered around release, but it got fixed in errata soon after.



Aldarc said:


> Discussion of your WWN play sessions would definitely be welcome in this thread.



Cool. I’ll put that in a separate post. We just had the one so far, but it felt different compared to some of our starts with other systems.



Aldarc said:


> This chapter is IMHO a real treasure of the book. Kevin Crawford does a good job of providing reasonable guidelines for world-building that is oriented towards (1) playable content and (2) effective use of the GM's time. He also de-mystifies the entire process of running a sandbox. I watched one GM on YouTube who was planning their upcoming WWN campaign and using this chapter to world-build. You could tell that this section riled the feathers a little for both the GM and their co-host, but I think that's due to the book basically calling out gratuitous, self-serving world-building rather than play-oriented world-building. I believe that at one point, Crawford even says that your players won't care about most of it. Crawford is far more of a pragmatist when it comes to his world-building approach, which I highly appreciate.



Do you have a link to the video? I’d like to give it a watch.



Aldarc said:


> However, I'm not a fan of the Vancian cynicism of the Dying Earth genre, so I will likely change that, but it would be nice to potentially incorporate some of these science fantasy elements. I have been debating between two different versions of the setting.
> 
> The first would be something more analogous to adventuring in an off-brand Middle Earth that has been shattered into islands rather than existing as a solid landmass (The Westlands of ME) or completely submerged (Beleriand) with various ruins and relics of the First, Second, and early Third age being hidden throughout the archipelago. The second idea is something more akin to a Maritime Southeast Asian or Pirates of Dark Water* fantasy that involves ascended ancients/aliens/"makers" (think Stargate SG-1) and their human/demihuman "progeny" who fathom only a remote, tiny sliver of their legacy. I'm leaning towards the latter.
> 
> * PoDW was drawn by an art studio in the Philippines, and you can see SEA and Filipino influences in some of the aesthetics (cf. the Filipino kampilan sword and Ioz's sword).



I wonder if some of the sector creation stuff from SWN could be repurposed to generate an island-hopping campaign. I guess you’d generate the islands and establish their political boundaries, then switch over to WWN for the fantasy-related tags and other procedures, which isn’t really making all that much use of it. Regardless, it seems like an interesting idea, and divorcing WWN from its core setting seems doable.


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## kenada (May 24, 2021)

This session report is going to be a bit brief. It was our first time back in-person, so we started the session with a group lunch and then spent a while socializing before getting into the system and then actually playing. Technically, the session was a one-shot (hence why I hadn’t done setting creation yet), but I had a hunch we’d be switching over from OSE.

The premise of the “one-shot” was that we were going to retcon our prior session of OSE. In that previous session, the group had come up with a plan to attack some ghouls in a barrow. They’d brought supplies, abandoned their plan because of hubris, and got routed.

The original party consisted of an acrobat, a barbarian, a cleric, and a thief. We were using the advanced fantasy genre rules with homebrew races. When I converted them to WWN, I tried to keep the spirit of the characters. I did not create homebrew foci for my homebrew species (though there were concessions made for small ones), but I may do so later. Note that there are no humans in my setting, so I’m treating the species as fungible by default.

*Deirdre:* the barbarian was converted to a warrior with the barbarian background. I gave her the whirlwind assault focus at level 2. Shocking Assault was tempting, but she uses a “big” weapon, and it felt more fun to have her wade into battle and kill lots of enemies. I had to switch her weapon over from a two-handed sword (OSE) to a great axe because great swords are too expensive for 1st level characters.
*Dingo:* the thief was converted as a pure expert with the criminal (thief) background. I gave him Specialist (Sneak) and Trapmaster. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do for his second focus, but Trapmaster ended up being a really good choice (the player seemed to like it).
*La Nachou:* the acrobat was the most difficult to convert. The acrobat’s thing is its leaping abilities, but the player also felt his character was kind of useless. If you can set it up, you get double damage, but that’s not always easy or possible. For this character, I made him a specialist/partial-mage with the High Magic tradition and the artisan background (because he’d rolled coppersmith as his secondary skill in OSE). I chose *Velicitous Imbuement* and *The Excellent Transpicuous Transformation* along with Retain Sorcery to let him do that multiple times per day. I gave La Nachou Alert and Impervious Defense for his foci.
*Tama Nya:* the cleric was converted over as a partial-mage/partial-mage with the Healer and Necromancer traditions. I’m not currently allowing the Gyre-specific classes from “Arts of the Gyre”, so Sarulite Blood Priest wasn’t an option. I took Armored Magic for her focus. This more or less recreated the basic cleric from OSE except she was much better at healing and killing undead (because *Smite the Dead* does guaranteed damage).
Since we rolled something approximating 3d6 in order (roll seven times in order, drop lowest result), I kept the results from OSE and reused them for WWN. I also followed WWN’s rule for assigning a 14. In the future, we’ll just use follow the normal character creation process. Hit points were rolled, and I took the equipment packages and tweaked them to fit. I also converted our money over from OSE at a 25:1 ratio (I was using a sp-based economy, but it was just multiplying OSE prices by 10).

Before we got started, everyone had a chance to buy equipment. They bought a bunch of oil, which was the original plan from OSE. They wanted to set up an ambush and set the ghouls on fire. For the ghouls themselves, I converted them from OSE with a few tweaks. I followed the naturalistic armor recommendations from WWN and gave them only a single attack (since that seems to be the norm) doing the naturalistic amount of damage. I patterned their paralyzing attack after the Polop weapons, which give you two chances to avoid the paralysis (first you lose your next Main action then you are paralyzed for the rest of the scene). While I could have used the OSE ghoul as written, this felt more in the spirit of WWN.

We started off the session outside the dungeon (Deeps?). It has multiple entrances, and I wanted to give the PCs a chance to decide how to go about things. They’d been here before, so they knew what the trade-offs were depending on the entrance. They could choose to climb down the side of the cliff and enter on the sea-side opening. The risk there is a trap that could trigger, dropping portcullises and alerting the ghouls to their presence. There is a chimney they could climb down, which would put them in an alcove off to the side. They seemed averse to climbing though. The entrance they chose was one hidden under dirt and leather, and buried under some rocks. They crawled through it and entered the barrow.

Once inside the dungeon, I engaged with my exploration procedure. By default WWN assumes an abstract dungeon layout. I like maps, so I followed the slightly more strict time progression. I kept distances abstract, choosing to track time based on scenes since the party spent most of their time sneaking about the hallways trying to get information. They had a lantern they used to provide light. My assumption is ghouls see just fine in the dark (and most nasty things probably do if they are active at night, since there are no stars). The ghouls here had a deal with some locals to come in and worship at a shrine, so they are not default hostile to people who come into their lair. Otherwise, the party’s sneaking about would not have been as effective.

Unlike last time, the party didn’t just completely abandon their plan. I’m sure that was part of it, but they also seemed to key in on Dingo’s Trapmaster focus. They wanted to set something up with that and stage an ambush. Even though that was literally their plan last time, having it be on Dingo’s character sheet seemed to reinforce that it was something they should do. Anyway, they snuck down the passage (shuttering their lantern as they snuck past the ghouls in their dining hall) and made their way to the alcove.

While they were doing this, I was rolling wandering encounter checks. I like the way WWN gives you guidelines on how frequently to roll. OSE does this too, but it’s mostly up to discretion. Since the sight was not particularly organized or alert, I was rolling every three turns. Fortunately, I got a 1 the first time I rolled. I’d run out of time, so I went with what I had. In the future, I think following the suggestion in WWN to tie it back to the inhabitants is a good one. I had an existing table of events, which rolled for a patrol. The master of the ghouls was going to leave her room and walk about the dungeon. I had her coming up ahead, and the party had to decide what to do.

They were near a door, so they opened it up and saw the fire beetle inside. For some reason, they thought it was a good idea to leave a ration in the hallway for the beetle. They retreated back and listened. They heard a ghoul come out and say something, but none of them spoke the innate language of the undead, so they had no idea what he was saying (mostly something along the lines of ‘why is this here?’). They then decided to fall back again to another passage, back closer to where they entered. They left a trail of coins this time, and at the end of the passage, Dingo set up a fire trap, and they set up an ambush.

I figured at this point word had gotten back to the master (a Lady Ghast and an accompanying ghoul) that someone was up to something. She found the coins followed them to see what was happening. The other ghoul led the way. When the ghoul got to the trap, it activated, and the ghoul got burnt. Since it was a set ambush, I gave the party a surprise round (they made their group Dex/Sneak versus the ghouls’ roll), and they alpha-striked them. The ghoul died right away. It had had barely any hit points left, and Deirdre moved into position to finish it off. She then make a Snap Attack to make a ranged attack against Lady Ghast. Tama cast *Smite the Dead*, and either Dingo or La Nachou finished off Lady Ghast at the start of the combat round itself (the party against won initiative).

Note that what we did with Make a Snap Attack was a mistake. I’d initially read it as you sacrifice your next Main Action. It’s actually your Main Action for the round. If you go first, you’re only going to Make a Snap Attack if you are reacting to someone who reacted to you (there is a good example of this in the SWN section on combat). If you want to interrupt someone, you have to Hold an Action. Even if we hadn’t run that wrongly, I think the party would have won overwhelmingly. Deirdre had used her Veteran’s Luck to good effect. Even without it, she still dealt a minimum of 4 damage to anything with an AC of 15 or less.

After that, they returned to the area with the fire beetle. At this point, the dungeon was on alert, but I was rolling terribly on my wandering encounter checks. They snuck into that area and found a ghoul dressed in priest robes and the fire bettle (named Glowy or something like that). There was a statue of the Sovereign of Disgust, one of the celestial lords, and a minor cult back in the Grand Kingdom. This is pre-world-building, so I expect religion will be different, so this could change (since WWN’s procedure seems more focused on the religions themselves rather than on grab bags of deities). Regardless, the ghoul asked if they were there to worship. He could get the boot and step on them if they’d like. Tama responded by blowing the ghoul up with her last casting of *Smite the Dead*. The player _really_ liked that. Glowy freaked out, and they eventually calmed it down with some rations.

The party grabbed some valuable-looking candlesticks made of silver and left. I figured since Dingo had a thief background, it would be his thing to know the value of stuff like that. I communicated that secretly to the player and left it up to him what to tell the party. I don’t think he actually has yet.  The party snuck back out and made camp. During the night, the ghouls followed them back to their camp, but I rolled “predictably hostile” for their reaction when the watch found them. Tama really wanted to blow them up (but she was out of spells). The ghouls confirmed they were the ones who killed the boss, and decided to back off (figuring it wasn’t worth determining empirically whether they could take the party).

We wrapped at that point because I didn’t want to do any wilderness exploration or travel without having setting generation completed (because I knew the map would likely change). I’m using a hybrid of individual and group goals for XP. You set two group goals at the start of the session, and you get 3 XP for the first you complete. Anyone who helps gets 1 XP (for each goal completed). Whether a goal is completed is determined by group consensus. There was no group goal because that is determined at the end of the session (to help me with planning). Everyone got 4–7 XP. We’re using a slower version of the slow (2× slow) track since I expect the average amount of XP to be higher.

Overall, the players liked it. The guy who played La Nachou thought it was the coolest character he’s played. The Tama’s player was really into killing undead in OSE, but the character was not particularly good at it. Now the character is much better. Deirdre’s player has terrible dice luck, so both Shock damage and Veteran’s Luck lets him not suck at combat (a common source of amusement in other systems). Dingo also got to do some cool stuff, and I was happy to see they were really into setting up traps. I expect this to be a common tactic going forward.


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## Aldarc (May 24, 2021)

kenada said:


> I’ve seen it asked a few times on reddit, so I don’t think it is called out in a table anywhere. It’s listed under your tradition benefits for each tradition as well as in the character advancement section of “The Rules of the Game”. The number of starting spells is only called out in the summary of character creation section of “Character Creation” (as far as I can tell).



Achso. 



kenada said:


> Aside from the obvious similarities with saving throws, I was struck by how much the action economy reminded me of 3e. It’s arguably closer to 4e, but something about it reminded me more of 3e. Character creation is also similar, but it seems much less vulnerable to system mastery compared to 3e and (especially) Pathfinder. I know there was one broken combo (healer/vowed) discovered around release, but it got fixed in errata soon after.



SWN/WWN is definitely OSR, but it's not ashamed from incorporating ideas from outside of that scope. 

Is the errata simply included/updated as part of the standard document or is it separate? 



kenada said:


> Do you have a link to the video? I’d like to give it a watch.



I just did a search for WWN on YouTube. I was looking for play videos to see the mechanics in action. There are only two channels so far that seem to have done anything with it so far: Garblag Games and Adventures in Lollygagging. The former is the one that I was talking about. They basically walk-through the setting creation of their game in a 3-part video and then have a Session 0 video for character creation, but they haven't reached actual play yet. The latter has a 3-part play campaign that is still ongoing, but I am only still partway through their first video. 



kenada said:


> I wonder if some of the sector creation stuff from SWN could be repurposed to generate an island-hopping campaign. I guess you’d generate the islands and establish their political boundaries, then switch over to WWN for the fantasy-related tags and other procedures, which isn’t really making all that much use of it. Regardless, it seems like an interesting idea, and divorcing WWN from its core setting seems doable.



I may have to use the sector creation stuff from SWN for that purpose. Divorcing WWN from its setting seems easy. 



hawkeyefan said:


> Ugh channel all that creative energy into stuff that won’t matter.



It was a bit of a railroad campaign anyway, so I wasn't surprised that it ended in a trainwreck. I can confirm though that none of this stuff ever came up in the sessions we played. My opinions about world-building that I have espoused before did not come out of nowhere, but from firsthand experience of dealing with this GM and others like him who caught "world-building sickness."


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## kenada (May 24, 2021)

Aldarc said:


> Is the errata simply included/updated as part of the standard document or is it separate?



Kevin Crawford described what he was thinking of doing here on reddit, which is pretty close to what he ended up doing. The PDF was updated in early April. My print-on-demand copy does not reflect the changes.

*Brutal Counter* can only be used once per round against a single foe.
*Swift Healer* is limited to once per scene on any given target.
*Healer’s Knife* does not benefit from arts that modify *Healing Touch*.



Aldarc said:


> I just did a search for WWN on YouTube. I was looking for play videos to see the mechanics in action. There are only two channels so far that seem to have done anything with it so far: Garblag Games and Adventures in Lollygagging. The former is the one that I was talking about. They basically walk-through the setting creation of their game in a 3-part video and then have a Session 0 video for character creation, but they haven't reached actual play yet. The latter has a 3-part play campaign that is still ongoing, but I am only still partway through their first video.



Thanks. I’m not big on actual plays, but I’d like to see how setting creation goes for other GMs.


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## Aldarc (May 26, 2021)

kenada said:


> I wonder if some of the sector creation stuff from SWN could be repurposed to generate an island-hopping campaign. I guess you’d generate the islands and establish their political boundaries, then switch over to WWN for the fantasy-related tags and other procedures, which isn’t really making all that much use of it. Regardless, it seems like an interesting idea, and divorcing WWN from its core setting seems doable.



A bit of a follow-up, but apparently someone in the WWN Subreddit has already done a WWN conversion of the ship rules from SWN for an "Age of Sails" sort of campaign.


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## kenada (May 28, 2021)

Okay, wow. I’ve been working on the regional part of setting generation for most of this week a few hours every evening. It’s a lot more involved than coming up with the world setting. It could be I had an evocative idea that wrote itself (for the world), but I struggled with the region-level details a bit at first.

The first challenging part is it asks you to name the region. Naming things is hard. I eventually decided that it would be named in the languages of one of the nations, and then decided that would be Old English. I spent an evening just digging through Old English stuff looking for something that stuck out to me. I kind of wish the naming came last, so you would have all the other elements of the region there to provide potential ideas.

After that came the distinctive terrain features. I struggled with that too, but that is because I took the suggestion to use the tables as advisory. I eventually abandoned that, and things went much better. When Kevin Crawford suggests you can use some tables to help you out, what he’s actually saying is use those tables unless you have a strong idea for that element. It’s much easier to roll up some ideas and riff off those than it is to come up with them out of nowhere.

I’m almost done with region creation. I just need to finish up the relationships between the groups and decide which factions I want to detail. I’m doing my creation in a mind map (so I haven’t even written anything yet), but the word count is going to be about triple what I wrote for the world setting. After all that is done, I get to do kingdom creation then go through religion and society creation.

The amount of content you generate is quite impressive. I think I’ve written more about this one region than I have about the entire setting in previous iterations. The thing that really sticks out to me is that the setting details are all adventure focus. All of the groups have their histories and issues, and those are all potential sources of adventure. That’s in contrast to prior attempts that wasted a lot of words on things like army composition.

I started watching the first set of videos you linked @Aldarc, but I never got far enough into them to see where feathers got riled, but I can guess. I had to learn to trust the process. Oh, I rolled this, but I had some other idea instead. It turns out that riffing on the dice almost always produced things that were more interesting than what I had in mind originally (like decadent nomads who supply the region’s exotic drugs or a republic that has been stuck in perpetual war for generations or a group of Blighted who are both horrifying and tragic).


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## Aldarc (May 29, 2021)

kenada said:


> Okay, wow. I’ve been working on the regional part of setting generation for most of this week a few hours every evening. It’s a lot more involved than coming up with the world setting. It could be I had an evocative idea that wrote itself (for the world), but I struggled with the region-level details a bit at first.



I got stuck here as well, partially because one of the main things that trips me up about world-building: maps. I like having a basic sense of the _geo_ part of the _geo_-political and cultural landscape, but I don't have the greatest map-making or artistic talent. I noticed the map in the one WWN world-building video I mentioned, and so I just flat out asked them what mapping program they used. It's apparently Inkarnate, so I've been toying with that the past day or so. 

As a side note: (1) islands are a lot of work and (2) no matter how weird or unrealistic you think that the shapes of your lands look, the real world produces far weirder and more varied geography. I'm beginning to think that one reason why fantasy maps look unrealistic is simply because people don't make their geography look weird enough. 



kenada said:


> The first challenging part is it asks you to name the region. Naming things is hard. I eventually decided that it would be named in the languages of one of the nations, and then decided that would be Old English. I spent an evening just digging through Old English stuff looking for something that stuck out to me. I kind of wish the naming came last, so you would have all the other elements of the region there to provide potential ideas.



Agreed. This is the other thing that I find challenging. There is a reason why I often find myself reusing names. Right now, I'm just putting placeholder names and flagging them so I can come back to this point at a later stage. I do try to apply certain guidelines for name generation though. For example, one naming guideline that I put in place for this current project is "no '_th_' sound." 



kenada said:


> After that came the distinctive terrain features. I struggled with that too, but that is because I took the suggestion to use the tables as advisory. I eventually abandoned that, and things went much better. When Kevin Crawford suggests you can use some tables to help you out, what he’s actually saying is use those tables unless you have a strong idea for that element. It’s much easier to roll up some ideas and riff off those than it is to come up with them out of nowhere.



I am having a different sort of issue. Fantasy adventure often imagines these incredibly varied landscapes: e.g., small islands over here, mountains here next to the "blasted lands," desert next to the jungle, grasslands next to the ancient farmlands, etc. But in my case, I know that I'm basically dealing with a large tropical mega-archipelago with volcanic mountain chains. 



kenada said:


> I’m almost done with region creation. I just need to finish up the relationships between the groups and decide which factions I want to detail. I’m doing my creation in a mind map (so I haven’t even written anything yet), but the word count is going to be about triple what I wrote for the world setting. After all that is done, I get to do kingdom creation then go through religion and society creation.
> 
> The amount of content you generate is quite impressive. I think I’ve written more about this one region than I have about the entire setting in previous iterations. The thing that really sticks out to me is that the setting details are all adventure focus. All of the groups have their histories and issues, and those are all potential sources of adventure. That’s in contrast to prior attempts that wasted a lot of words on things like army composition.



I'm impressed with the guidelines in this book. As you say, if you follow the advice, it forces useable content creation. 



kenada said:


> I started watching the first set of videos you linked @Aldarc, but* I never got far enough into them to see where feathers got riled, but I can guess.* I had to learn to trust the process. Oh, I rolled this, but I had some other idea instead. It turns out that riffing on the dice almost always produced things that were more interesting than what I had in mind originally (like decadent nomads who supply the region’s exotic drugs or a republic that has been stuck in perpetual war for generations or a group of Blighted who are both horrifying and tragic).



I may be overstating how riled their feathers were as they took it in good humor. I believe they were reacting with bemusement to the part in the book about players generally not caring about your WB, don't WB for things that you won't need, how it's often gratuitous, etc.


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## kenada (May 29, 2021)

Aldarc said:


> I got stuck here as well, partially because one of the main things that trips me up about world-building: maps. I like having a basic sense of the _geo_ part of the _geo_-political and cultural landscape, but I don't have the greatest map-making or artistic talent. I noticed the map in the one WWN world-building video I mentioned, and so I just flat out asked them what mapping program they used. It's apparently Inkarnate, so I've been toying with that the past day or so.



While I had previous versions I could use as a base (see: v1 and v2), I ended up having making some fairly big changes. I followed WWN’s advice not to go too detailed, so it’s just a sketch currently. I did the first of those prior iterations in Campaign Cartographer 3+ and the second in Tiled using a couple of pixel hex tilesets I bought on itch.io (tileset 1 and tileset 2). I’m probably going to go with CC3+ again, but I’m just leaving it as a sketch for now while I work through kingdom creation.



Aldarc said:


> As a side note: (1) islands are a lot of work and (2) no matter how weird or unrealistic you think that the shapes of your lands look, the real world produces far weirder and more varied geography. I'm beginning to think that one reason why fantasy maps look unrealistic is simply because people don't make their geography look weird enough.



I wonder if starting with a fractal terrain tool would work better. I assume part of the issue is the coastlines and other features don’t match our intuitive expectations of what they should look like, so it’s like some uncanny valley thing.



Aldarc said:


> Agreed. This is the other thing that I find challenging. There is a reason why I often find myself reusing names. Right now, I'm just putting placeholder names and flagging them so I can come back to this point at a later stage. I do try to apply certain guidelines for name generation though.



Aside from naming the region, I’m just using generic names too. “Orc Nation”, “Kobold Nation”, “Vuple Nomads”, and so on. I’ll give them proper names once I go through kingdom creation and pick linguistic touchstones. It wasn’t worth further delay trying to figure out names for everything while I was trying to put together the framework. 



Aldarc said:


> For example, one naming guideline that I put in place for this current project is "no '_th_' sound."



Kevin Crawford’s makes a pointed observation on fantasy names devised by GMs. I’ve opted to keep the English names for the distinctive features because those can be evocative to players in a way that foreign ones won’t, but I’m going to lean heavily on linguistic touchstones for everything else. (Also, no “th” is a good guideline!)



Aldarc said:


> I am having a different sort of issue. Fantasy adventure often imagines these incredibly varied landscapes: e.g., small islands over here, mountains here next to the "blasted lands," desert next to the jungle, grasslands next to the ancient farmlands, etc. But in my case, I know that I'm basically dealing with a large tropical mega-archipelago with volcanic mountain chains.



Roll a bunch of stuff then try to figure out how it makes sense?

So if you get: pit, ancient farmland, canyons, swamp, rain forest, weathered mountains. You could have the pit be a permanent whirlpool that legends say leads to paradise, but no one who has entered has come back alive. The ancient farmland is an island chain that was terraformed to support growing food from non-tropical climates. The canyon is a trench on the bottom of the sea where a sea-dwelling, sapient species lives. The swamp is a fouled, boglike area between several islands where sea-dwelling Outsiders went to die (like beached whales except more evil). The locals are deathly afraid of whatever could be in there (so that means treasure, right?). The rain forest is the default biome for islands. The weathered mountains are a central chain of islands with a large, dormant volcano at the center that hasn’t erupted for eons and has worn down over time into a big hill with a caldera.


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## Aldarc (May 29, 2021)

kenada said:


> While I had previous versions I could use as a base (see: v1 and v2), I ended up having making some fairly big changes. I followed WWN’s advice not to go too detailed, so it’s just a sketch currently. I did the first of those prior iterations in Campaign Cartographer 3+ and the second in Tiled using a couple of pixel hex tilesets I bought on itch.io (tileset 1 and tileset 2). I’m probably going to go with CC3+ again, but I’m just leaving it as a sketch for now while I work through kingdom creation.
> 
> I wonder if starting with a fractal terrain tool would work better. I assume part of the issue is the coastlines and other features don’t match our intuitive expectations of what they should look like, so it’s like some uncanny valley thing.



Nice work! I decided to stop here as far as my notions for the archipelago. This was all done with the free version of Inkarnate and toying around with just the land stage. The inspiration should be familiar: 


Spoiler












kenada said:


> Aside from naming the region, I’m just using generic names too. “Orc Nation”, “Kobold Nation”, “Vuple Nomads”, and so on. I’ll give them proper names once I go through kingdom creation and pick linguistic touchstones. It wasn’t worth further delay trying to figure out names for everything while I was trying to put together the framework.



Pretty much. 



kenada said:


> Roll a bunch of stuff then try to figure out how it makes sense?
> 
> So if you get: pit, ancient farmland, canyons, swamp, rain forest, weathered mountains. You could have the pit be a permanent whirlpool that legends say leads to paradise, but no one who has entered has come back alive. The ancient farmland is an island chain that was terraformed to support growing food from non-tropical climates. The canyon is a trench on the bottom of the sea where a sea-dwelling, sapient species lives. The swamp is a fouled, boglike area between several islands where sea-dwelling Outsiders went to die (like beached whales except more evil). The locals are deathly afraid of whatever could be in there (so that means treasure, right?). The rain forest is the default biome for islands. The weathered mountains are a central chain of islands with a large, dormant volcano at the center that hasn’t erupted for eons and has worn down over time into a big hill with a caldera.



I may do that. I do know that I will be lifting at least one thing from Pirates of Dark Water. There will be some cavernous atolls where some "pale warrior" elves live.


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## kenada (Jun 1, 2021)

Another update! I’m _almost_ done with my first kingdom. It’s like a rabbit hole that never ends. I think I’m done, and then I flip through and see the community section. It’s all good though. I’ve only encountered a couple of issues with the process so far, and one is self-inflicted. The self-inflicted issue is that the campaign is set in an area of conflict, so I’m going to have to go through kingdom generation a couple of more times to get everything established for the players. I’m getting better at it, but I’d be done if we were just in the middle of one or the other.*

The other issue I have is the religion construction section seems rather biased towards monotheistic religions. It doesn’t really give any advice or guidance on doing a polytheistic one. Historical religions tended to be polytheistic, and it’s a common trope in fantasy, so it’s something I want in my setting. I ended up just picking an arbitrary number of deities and rolled for each on the society function and portfolio tables.

Things did take an interesting turn when I got “It was an artificial construct built by humans” for a deity that was also declared illegal. I decided to tie that into the current religion (since that was a previous one that had fallen out of favor) by making it an ancient A.I. that had secretly then overtly taken over after the old institutions faltered and lost trust a while back.

Something I wish I had done differently (and plan to change) is not use a mind map. It was good for generating ideas at first, but it did not scale up as I started adding more and more information. I’m going to need to move what I have so far, which is rapidly approaching 5k words of just notes, over to Scrivener, so I can take advantage of its ability to organize information while I write.

* Why not change? Continuity with the pre-WWN/retcon campaign. The PCs had established a settlement near what is now an opposition settlement. There are a few touchstones I and my players have identified that I wanted to keep, and that settlement is one of them. It doesn’t make sense to have two settlements right next to each other, but it should when they’re on opposite sides of a river on opposite borders and with different allegiances.


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## Fanaelialae (Jun 7, 2021)

Aldarc said:


> Nice work! I decided to stop here as far as my notions for the archipelago. This was all done with the free version of Inkarnate and toying around with just the land stage. The inspiration should be familiar:
> 
> 
> Spoiler
> ...



I used to use Inkarnate myself. It's quite good, but I felt it was a bit too limitIng (at least the free version). I ultimately found Wonderdraft, which is a desktop application that produces very similar quality maps to Inkarnate, but has a broader toolset. Just in case you're interested.


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## Aldarc (Jun 7, 2021)

Fanaelialae said:


> I used to use Inkarnate myself. It's quite good, but I felt it was a bit too limitIng (at least the free version). I ultimately found Wonderdraft, which is a desktop application that produces very similar quality maps to Inkarnate, but has a broader toolset. Just in case you're interested.



Much appreciated. My main need for a map program was just to get a better sense of the geography. But I may need this for when I have to go into further detail.

I've done additional work and alterations to the map about a few days ago, and put a bunch of names up.


Spoiler








There are a lot of regions, nations, and the like - far more than what WWN recommends - but several things: (1) the area this is based on (the Malay Archipelago) is far bigger in reality than it commonly appears on maps (e.g., Sumatra is larger than the state of California); and (2) I'm only really concerning myself with six of them as the major players for detailing and about four of them as mid or minor players of note, such as Rul, a "neutral" nation ruled by a Council of Magi that trains guild mages in the region.


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## Yora (Jun 17, 2021)

I've been looking at the gameplay rules sections now, and I quite like it. I might actually use it instead of B/X for the campaign I am working on.

But one thing that just seems very odd to me is shock damage. I fully understand how the mechanics work, they are not that difficult. But why does this mechanic exist in the first place? What's its purpose and what is it supposed to add to the game? Dealing damage to enemies even on a miss unless they have really good armor just feels weird.
Is it supposed to speed up combat? Or to make ranged weapons worse? I'm tempted to just outright ignore it, but I assume there was some kind of reasoning to add this new mechanic to a game that otherwise is just regular stuff we've seen many times before.


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## Fanaelialae (Jun 17, 2021)

Yora said:


> I've been looking at the gameplay rules sections now, and I quite like it. I might actually use it instead of B/X for the campaign I am working on.
> 
> But one thing that just seems very odd to me is shock damage. I fully understand how the mechanics work, they are not that difficult. But why does this mechanic exist in the first place? What's its purpose and what is it supposed to add to the game? Dealing damage to enemies even on a miss unless they have really good armor just feels weird.
> Is it supposed to speed up combat? Or to make ranged weapons worse? I'm tempted to just outright ignore it, but I assume there was some kind of reasoning to add this new mechanic to a game that otherwise is just regular stuff we've seen many times before.



I wouldn't get rid of Shock damage if you're going to use WWN. It's fairly core to the Warrior's ability to deal damage (it's even called out as such in the class entry).

The game describes Shock as "the inevitable harm that is done when an unarmored target is assailed by something sharp in melee range."

I see it as the wearing down of an enemy who isn't so heavily armored that they can largely shrug off your attacks. If you've done martial arts, or even play-fought with tree branches, you know that blocking a hard strike hurts. It sends a shock, up through your arms, all the way into your shoulders and torso. Shock damage wears opponents down and leaves them open to a lethal blow in a similar manner, IMO.

I think it's too core to the combat to remove without completely breaking at least the warrior class. If you don't want to use shock, I wouldn't recommend using WWN.


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## Yora (Jun 17, 2021)

Really?! I wouldn't say that it's all the system is about or all it brings to the table. There's a lot more than that.

Of course I could just do what the rules say and shrug it off. But I still really wonder what purpose it is supposed to fulfill.


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## Fanaelialae (Jun 17, 2021)

Yora said:


> Really?! I wouldn't say that it's all the system is about or all it brings to the table. There's a lot more than that.
> 
> Of course I could just do what the rules say and shrug it off. But I still really wonder what purpose it is supposed to fulfill.



It's not all the system is about, but it is a significant part of what makes the warrior class good. The system is designed so that an experienced warrior with the right foci can kill weaker opponents even on a miss. Take that away, and you're taking away a major part of what makes the warrior good.


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## Yora (Jun 17, 2021)

So it might be in the game to boost the warrior class?


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## Fanaelialae (Jun 17, 2021)

Yora said:


> So it might be in the game to boost the warrior class?



It's not just the warrior. I believe that the monk-equivalent mage partial class (I'm away from my book ATM and can't recall the name) also leverages the shock mechanic, as might others.

It's an important part of the combat system. It is threaded through classes, foci, weapons, etc.

It's there to represent that trained combatants are dangerous in melee. In a gun fight the wall you're hiding behind might take the brunt of the damage. In melee combat, even if you're blocking all attacks, YOU are taking the brunt.


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## Yora (Jun 17, 2021)

On a different topic, anyone had had experience with system strain? Now that's a mechanic that I really like from the look of it.

With healing between fights being so easily accessible that it's basically unlimited, a well rested party heading out for their new adventure after a longer break can easily heal up everyone to full hit points after every fight for maybe a day or two. But once the system strain reaches its limit, you'll be down to one or two healings a day, regardless of how much healing resources you have.

I suspect that this makes one day adventures followed by a week or two of rest pretty easy as hit points are concerned, as you can heal back to full after every encounter. But having to deal with even minor injuries over many consecutive days could lead to quite interesting dynamics that I don't even want to speculate about without seeing it in action. And now that I think of it, this is where shock damage also might come into play. At least for characters who don't have heavier armor.

I also really like system strain as a mechanic for deprivation and exposure. It won't actively hurt you, but it still makes you more vulnerable in the long term. Having some small critters with minor poison attacks that don't cause damage but cause a point of system strain also seems like a fun option.


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## kenada (Jun 17, 2021)

Shock damage comes from Stars Without Number, which describes it as the danger melee weapons pose to ill-armored opponents. From what I’ve read, Kevin Crawford feels the common approach (of missing frequently) isn’t representative of melee fights. Shock damage is meant to represent the harm you receive in melee even if you don’t take a direct blow. For example, getting swarmed is nasty because the crowd will deal its shock damage regardless of the target’s AC.

Another thing to keep in mind is that shock is your _minimum_ damage. You deal it on a hit or a miss provided the target’s defenses are below the threshold (or you are making a swarm attack). If you are wielding a long sword (2/AC 13 shock damage) and roll a 1 on 1d8+1, then you deal 3 damage to any target with AC 13 or less. If you get into melee with something, it’s going to mess you up. That’s the advantage of ranged weapons. They help prevent you from taking damage unnecessarily.

Regarding system strain, I agree in concept, but we haven’t had it come up yet (because our second session is this Saturday, and our first was abbreviated and very hard on the ghouls involved). Once we’ve gotten some experience with it, I’ll report back. I should also note that system strain serves as a check while exploring. If you push yourself too hard and take system strain from a negative effect (like trying to sleep outside without adequate heating or enough food), then it’s potentially lethal. If the party pushes too hard, they could end up vulnerable to the elements if they are not careful with their supplies.


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## kenada (Jun 20, 2021)

We had our third session session zero today. I set down a copy of the part of the map I developed while working through setting creation, and everything changed.



Spoiler: Section of my region map










I had assumed I would go over the setting some, then we would start play. We did, but it ended up being much more in depth than I expected. We ended up spending a couple of hours on it. By the end, we’d charted a completely different course. I had already dropped some of the conceits from the previous iteration, but I tried to keep the idea of the PCs as explorers. It was meant to be a sandbox game, and they’d decide what to do next. Well, they did.

The basic premise of the region is that it’s a frontier. The kingdom that existed there was destroyed in an accident. A neighboring nation eventually came to push back the Outsiders who had come forth again (through a portal accidentally opened in the Donarhus, the megastructure serving as the capital located in 0509 on the map). I’m not sure why, but my players took a big interested in that. They want to get inside and loot it.

After working on setting prep, I struggled a bit with what to prep for my hex map’s key. The region map I generated ended up _much_ larger than my previous one (~56k vs. ~17k square miles). My previous approach was to prep every hex. I thought I could use tags to make that easier to do here. I’d use the generators to create content the PCs could discover. The thing that changed was me. I finally understood how WWN goes about creating its sandbox.

The sandbox is not about having everything prepped for everywhere. It’s working at a higher level than that. That’s why points of interest are comparatively sparse. You’re not supposed to pixel-bitch your way across the landscape. The game is presenting you with a setting made out of adventure hooks, and you’re supposed to go see which ones are interesting.

Our next session is in about a month. Setting generation produced a ton of notes (about 12k words) that I want to organize into something both for myself and my players. I also want to finish up my hex map (I have the terrain done, but I need to finish up the settlements and ruins in a few other parts of the map) and create an in-setting variant for my players to reference.

Once I’m done with my prep, the game should be very easy to run going forward. It’s been a long time since I’ve run something without having to do a ton of work between sessions, and I’m really looking forward to it.


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## Raduin711 (Jun 21, 2021)

That map looks great! 

I recently bought SWN so I appreciate people's experience with this kind of system.

The two things I am wanting to change are the stat bonuses (to bring them more in line with D&D) and roll d20's for skill checks. Seems like it should be doable...


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## Yora (Jun 21, 2021)

Those are the original D&D modifiers from 1974, which were designed for rolling 3d6 in order for attributes. I recently saw someone write a post why such low modifiers are actually a good system. Maybe I can find it again.


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## kenada (Jun 21, 2021)

Yora said:


> Those are the original D&D modifiers from 1974, which were designed for rolling 3d6 in order for attributes. I recently saw someone write a post why such low modifiers are actually a good system. Maybe I can find it again.



They’re similar but flatter (assuming basic rather than OD&D, since the latter didn’t really have consistent modifiers). I believe the argument for smaller modifiers usually goes that it reduces the importance of having the best ability scores. It also simplifies the monster math. Compare monster stat blocks from pre-3e to post-3e. The former are _much_ simpler. WWN adds instinct to the mix, but it’s still pretty simple.



Raduin711 said:


> That map looks great!



Thanks! I made it in Campaign Cartographer 3+ and was really pleased with how nicely it came out. Some of the other maps I’ve done in that program not been so nice. 



Raduin711 said:


> The two things I am wanting to change are the stat bonuses (to bring them more in line with D&D) and roll d20's for skill checks. Seems like it should be doable...



Do you mean D&D (i.e., 3e–5e) or _D&D_ (i.e., B/X, BECMI, etc)? Using the B/X modifiers might be okay, but modern ones are too big. Changing the modifiers that much would have knock-on effects across the system. The same goes for skills. It doesn’t seem worth the work. You’d be better off using the system-neutral parts with whatever system you’d rather use.


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## Yora (Jun 21, 2021)

Characters can use skill points to get up to five attribute improvements during the 10 levels of the game. Which is quite a lot.

The Develop Attribute focus also lets you treat the modifier for any attribute as +1 higher without changing the attribute score, and you can it multiple times for different attributes.

The Evasion, Physical, and Metal saving throws let you pick the modifier from one of two attributes, whichever is better.

The Punch, Shoot, and Stab skills add their skill ranks to attack rolls.

The rules very much take into account that attribute modifiers are quite low and works with that.


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## kenada (Jun 21, 2021)

There’s also the default assumption that skills should be reliable while fighting is less so due to the chaos of combat. That’s why skills and attacking/saving use different distributions. Using a d20 would make skills less reliable. You can work around that by letting characters take 10 or by giving them passive skill scores. However, another core assumption is that you only roll in exceptional circumstances.

From an OSR perspective, one of the criticisms of skill systems in D&D is that they’re too prescriptive. If the thief has a skill that lets them hide in shadows, then only the thief can do it. If you don’t put ranks in a skill, you’re either completely incompetent at it or incapable of even trying. 3e really went down the path of using the skill system as a simulation engine. It had lots of trivial DCs that could occasionally fail. I once had a character fail a DC 0 check to climb down a ladder during combat. The effect was they just needed to take their time, but it came across as very silly in the moment. In SWN/WWN, you’re never supposed to roll when the difficulty would be less than 6 (standard is 8).

Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number assume PCs are competent at their roles in life. If you’re a sailor or a pilot, you’re going to be good at sailor or pilot things and just succeed usually at doing them. The only time you should be making a check is when the circumstances are exceptional (such as attempting to sail a ship in a storm). The mechanisms for making skills reliable in D&D aren’t really equivalent, and ignoring the check based on background is not normative as far as I’m aware. You should typically _want_ to roll in those systems because it’s a means of demonstrating your investment in that skill.

Beyond that skill stuff and what @Yora said, you’d have to change the monster math. They’d need boosts to their AC and attack rolls as well as hit points. You’d also need to increase the damage monsters dealt, and you’d need to change their saving throws and skills. SWN and WWN are designed to be compatible with other “classic” games, so you’d lose that compatibility. Anything wanted to use (such as monsters, since the bestiaries in those games are a bit small) would require additional conversion work. I expect it’s possible to systematize the conversion, but it seems like a lot of work just for bigger numbers. It just doesn’t seem worth it.



Yora said:


> The Develop Attribute focus also lets you treat the modifier for any attribute as +1 higher without changing the attribute score, and you can it multiple times for different attributes.



I’m pretty sure that’s specific to Worlds Without Number. However, both WWN and SWN have foci for non-human species, which can include bonuses to your attribute modifiers.


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## Yora (Jun 21, 2021)

Well, this is a Worlds Without Number thread.


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## kenada (Jun 21, 2021)

Yora said:


> Well, this is a Worlds Without Number thread.



True, but @Raduin711 had mentioned picking up SWN and modifying that.


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## Ruin Explorer (Jun 22, 2021)

Aldarc said:


> This is simply meant to be a general discussion thread for Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number.
> 
> A few people have been talking about it here and there in the forum, but I am curious who has looked through it yet? What do you think of the rules, GM advice, or sandboxing toolkit? Who has run a game with it? What were your experiences? Or what do you plan to run with it? Has anyone homebrewed anything with it?
> 
> Let's talk Worlds Without Number.



I haven't run it yet, but system-wise it addresses a huge number of my concerns with D&D-style games in general, mechanically, specifically:

1) Eliminates d20-based skill checks in favour of narrower-range, more predictable rolling. Better skill system generally.

2) Possible to KO or insta-kill enemies within the rules, with a well-designed mechanism.

3) Makes warrior and spellcaster classes both significantly dangerous and threatening.

4) System stress provides a limit to magical and non-magical healing, but a sufficiently high one to not be crippling nor so high it's irrelevant (looking at you 4E!).

5) Instinct and Morale rules strongly encourage better "combat roleplaying" of enemies in a great way.

6) Half-class system is a lot better than multiclass systems of 3E/5E and offers great options.

Setting-wise I was slightly disappointed with the default setting. It has huge promise but never _quite_ lives up to it. I get that we're supposed to randomly-generate the specifics but there's just a bit more needed to make a lot of the nations really comprehensible. Also the sea being basically off-limits was a bit meh (same with space, I get that helps to upset the aliens and feels a bit Prince of Nothing but and obviously I can ignore it, but I was surprised it was the default). Truly great take on elves/dwarves though, and indeed all the non-human races are pretty interesting and exactly in-tune with the presented broad setting concept.

About the only outright bad thing for my money is the Frail debuff you get if reduced to 0 HP, but _don't_ get if magically healed, which means that you basically have a 5E-style whack-a-mole if you have a magical healer (which is a half-class). It also means if you only have non-magic healers, whilst the out-of-combat healing they can do is solid, if anyone hits 0 ever, no matter how briefly, they're basically out of action for a week, which seems like too big a discontinuity from the "whack-a-mole" of magical healing (to me).

I was also surprised that the "Heroic" options were treated as a block, like apply all this or don't, where in fact I think it would make sense to see the Heroic options as a toolkit, like you could have the extra HP, but not the extra half-class/Heroic class.


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## Raduin711 (Jun 22, 2021)

kenada said:


> True, but @Raduin711 had mentioned picking up SWN and modifying that.



Sorry to go off topic, I figured the rules were probably similar and could probably be equally applied to WWN.


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## kenada (Jun 22, 2021)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Setting-wise I was slightly disappointed with the default setting. It has huge promise but never _quite_ lives up to it. I get that we're supposed to randomly-generate the specifics but there's just a bit more needed to make a lot of the nations really comprehensible.



I’m curious to know whether the Gyre was generated using the tools in the “Creating Your Campaign” chapter. Most of it reads like it could have been — except for the religions, which I found disappointing.


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## kenada (Jun 22, 2021)

Raduin711 said:


> Sorry to go off topic, I figured the rules were probably similar and could probably be equally applied to WWN.



I thought it was a fair question. I was just noting the context. While WWN was designed to be compatible with SWN, there are some differences in class design and available foci. I doubt using Develop Attribute will cause problems in SWN, but it’s something you’d have to bring in from WWN.


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## Yora (Jul 8, 2021)

I am trying to understand the system for Renown and major projects, which turns out to be quite difficult because the actual rules are hidden within walls and walls of examples. What's the difference between the difficulty and the renown cost for a project? In some paragraphs they seem to be the same thing, but in other places they are mentioned as two separate things the PCs have to deal with.


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## Aldarc (Jul 8, 2021)

Added Stars Without Number to thread title and discussion.


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## kenada (Jul 8, 2021)

Yora said:


> I am trying to understand the system for Renown and major projects, which turns out to be quite difficult because the actual rules are hidden within walls and walls of examples.



This is an unfortunate and pervasive problem with WWN. 



Yora said:


> What's the difference between the difficulty and the renown cost for a project? In some paragraphs they seem to be the same thing, but in other places they are mentioned as two separate things the PCs have to deal with.



There are two ways PCs can go about acquiring enough Renown to complete a project. They can earn Renown by adventuring, but they can also take steps to decrease the difficulty. The “Decreasing the Difficulty” section describes several ways PCs can go about doing that. The reason for the distinction is that Renown gained towards decreasing the difficulty of a project does not affect the PCs’ own Renown.

For example, while trying to establish a trade route, the PCs spend 50,000 sp buying off bandits and recalcitrant officials. That’s enough sp to purchase 17 Renown, which reduces the difficulty of the project accordingly. If the PCs had 10 Renown before they started bribing everyone, they’d still have 10 Renown afterward (plus whatever they earn normally per “Renown Rewards” on pages 254–255).


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## Yora (Jul 17, 2021)

Rules question: When a character goes from mortally wounded to frail, is he only unable to regain hit points from natural healing, or does he also not recover any system strain while being frail?


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## TwoSix (Jul 17, 2021)

Yora said:


> Rules question: When a character goes from mortally wounded to frail, is he only unable to regain hit points from natural healing, or does he also not recover any system strain while being frail?



Characters who are frail do not recover (although I suppose _reduce_ would be more accurate) System Strain.  Page 48, first column, under the Natural Healing header.


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## Yora (Jul 17, 2021)

_wipes glasses_

Ah, there it is.

Wall of Text strikes again.


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## kenada (Jul 20, 2021)

The offset print version of the book is available on Sine Nomine’s web store.

My copy came today. I also have the PoD version. The offset print version is much nicer. The cover is sized correctly, so it lays flat properly when open. It also doesn’t suffer from the “gray” text problem with PoD when black text is printed on top of images — like in tables with alternating white and non-white row backgrounds. It also appears to include the errata, which my PoD copy does not.

We still haven’t done a second session. I’ve needed to push back a couple of times due to not being ready. That’s somewhat on me. I was falling into old habits for prep, which was just too much. If things go well, we should have our second session on August 7th.

And now a question for everyone here: how large are your groups? We had four players, but one decided to take a break, leaving us with three. WWN is all about _old-school_, so encounters aren’t balanced for the PCs, but do things keep working more or less with smaller groups? We’ve got a warrior, a healer/partial-necromancer, and an expert. It seems like the major roles are covered.


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## TwoSix (Jul 20, 2021)

kenada said:


> The offset print version of the book is available on Sine Nomine’s web store.
> 
> My copy came today. I also have the PoD version. The offset print version is much nicer. The cover is sized correctly, so it lays flat properly when open. It also doesn’t suffer from the “gray” text problem with PoD when black text is printed on top of images — like in tables with alternating white and non-white row backgrounds. It also appears to include the errata, which my PoD copy does not.
> 
> ...



I DM for a group of 3 players, a group of 5 players, and a group of 7 players.  I'm planning on doing my Dark Sun WWN game with the 7 player group.


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## Yora (Jul 20, 2021)

I'm working on a new campaign right now and aiming to start with five players. So when one drops out I still got four left, and when one can't make it it's still three players and we can play.
I am planning for something with a smaller group, so the fifth player is really mostly the margin of error, since I expect there to be some rotation of players at the start until you have a group of four established regulars who are in for the long haul.

While much of the game is based on OD&D and B/X, the main factor that made those old games tailored for large groups was the XP for treasure mechanic, which isn't in WWN by default. When the game isn't so much about the constant hauling of loot taken from beneath the butts of sleeping dragons or pried from the hands of a hibernating lich, large parties with a fast overturn of PCs aren't really a necessity.

If such a thing is desired, I would definitely through out the Henchkeeper focus. It requires way too much of an investment for very little gain. The henchpeople suck and aren't worth 2 foci. I'd just replace those with the henchmen rules from Basic Fantasy (which is completely free).
If PCs having henchmen is desired, then locking them between two foci really isn't the way to go. They should be free and much stronger. (Though I guess with the WWN XP system, having them get a share of the fixed amount of XP does no longer work as an incentive not to have a whole entourage of them at all times.)

I wrote down some notes to give players an idea what they can expect of WWN as a game when I start looking for players. Maybe this might be useful to some.


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## kenada (Jul 20, 2021)

Thanks @TwoSix and @Yora. It sounds like we should be okay. My players didn’t seem particularly fond of retainers in OSE, so I won’t really push that as an option.



Yora said:


> If such a thing is desired, I would definitely through out the Henchkeeper focus. It requires way too much of an investment for very little gain. The henchpeople suck and aren't worth 2 foci. I'd just replace those with the henchmen rules from Basic Fantasy (which is completely free).



As I understand it, Henchkeeper doesn’t stop you from getting hirelings the normal way (see the intro on page 24 and also page 34). It just guarantees you’ll find someone, won’t have to pay them, and they’ll be loyal unless you put them in “unacceptable danger”. If you don’t want to spend 2 foci on that, you should be able to hire someone (subject to their being available and willing to work for you).



Yora said:


> I wrote down some notes to give players an idea what they can expect of WWN as a game when I start looking for players. Maybe this might be useful to some.



Are there some house rules in there? The initiative rules look like B/X.


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## John Desmarais (Jul 20, 2021)

Yora said:


> I wrote down some notes to give players an idea what they can expect of WWN as a game when I start looking for players. Maybe this might be useful to some.




That's keen.  My copy arrived today and I'm all excited to run something with it (a big solid book creates more excitement than big ephemeral PDFs) - but I need to bring one of my current games to a graceful conclusion first, then convince one of my groups to give it a try.  Your doc will help.

One note though, if you use the rules in the Demihumans of the Latter Earth chapter, then race does have a mechanical effect (in the form of predefined foci).


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## TwoSix (Jul 21, 2021)

Yora said:


> I wrote down some notes to give players an idea what they can expect of WWN as a game when I start looking for players. Maybe this might be useful to some.



This is a really nice document, thank you!  Very succinct (which is not WWN's strength). 



kenada said:


> Are there some house rules in there? The initiative rules look like B/X.



This looks like the initiative rules I have in my book.  1d8+highest Dex mod in the party, group initiative.


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## Yora (Jul 21, 2021)

I wrote it specifically for my campaign, not as a straight up summary. I'd actually have to check myself if everything matches the book. There's probably some things in WWN that made me immediately think "yeah, not gonna use that" and then never thought about it again. (I think I wrote my own takes on rolling stats and checking for wandering monsters.)
Probably best use it as a reference for which parts of the rules to look up because there might be something unexpected or intereating.


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## kenada (Jul 21, 2021)

TwoSix said:


> This looks like the initiative rules I have in my book.  1d8+highest Dex mod in the party, group initiative.



Initiative isn’t rerolled every round in WWN. Surprise is based on an opposed Dex/Stealth or Wis/Notice check, assuming it is possible (which the book notes is almost never in a Deep unless one side has set up an ambush).


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## TwoSix (Jul 21, 2021)

kenada said:


> Initiative isn’t rerolled every round in WWN. Surprise is based on an opposed Dex/Stealth or Wis/Notice check, assuming it is possible (which the book notes is almost never in a Deep unless one side has set up an ambush).



Ahh, I missed that line in the summary.  Yea, initiative is only at the start of the fight in the core rules.


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## Yora (Jul 21, 2021)

Rolling initiative on a d8 instead of a d6 is one of those things where I really don't see the point of relearning doing something marginally different than I'm used to for no apparent gain. Those are things that I throw out so quickly I don't even remember it later.

Though I think a general cheat sheet for "How WWN is different from B/X" without the specific classes, spells, foci, and backgrounds might really be a useful thing for new people. You can get the rules for free already, so it wouldn't give away any content shared only with paying customers.


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## kenada (Jul 21, 2021)

This is the cheat sheet I put together. For my game. It’s a funky size because it’s designed to be printed out and pasted on a landscape GM screen. The last two pages are a bit haphazard because they don’t go on the screen. They’re just a backup reference. I tried to do it in the same style as OSE.

Off the top of my head, the only house rule is the end of session procedure on the last page. I did take a few liberties clarifying things. Action economy is omitted because the list of actions in the book is good enough and can be printed out.

Group checks are defined. The rules mention this procedure in a few places but does not define it. I defined it.
Attacks include automatic miss and failure. This is not described in the rules, but it is noted on the cheat sheet in the book.
Shock damage is explained differently, but it should be functionally the same.
Wandering encounter distance for site exploration. Loosely inspired by B/X and based on the wilderness encounter distance dice.
Exploration procedures are described more like B/X. I outlined a wilderness procedure, but it should be functionally the same.
Scouting for points of interest is specified in square miles because I do not use player-facing hexes.


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## Aldarc (Jul 21, 2021)

Thanks to @Yora's threads, I may whip up a more S&S inspired setting for WWN.


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## Yora (Jul 21, 2021)

Having just been introduced to Kenshi, I want my upcoming WWN S&S campaign to be like that. 

I was just thinking about the logistic for a long-distance travel based campaign, and it seems clear that not a great deal of thought was put into this aspect.

Rations come in portions of "one week" when you buy them, which I assume is meant for "7 days". But their encumbrance is listed as 4. There are rules for penalties for not eating, which are based on days. So what happens to encumbrance when you eat one day's ration?

Travel speeds are given in miles per hour, but depending on terrain it might 1.5 or 0.5 miles per hour. The game also recommends using 6 mile hexes. It would be vastly more convenient if travel speeds would be given as hexes per day. Encumbrance doesn't impact travel speed at all. But I do notice with appreciation that mounts with faster movement rates don't make overland travel faster, since they can't be sprinting the entire day.

These issues are not new and go back 40 years. But for a tome of this size made specifically for sandbox games, I think this is something that really should have seen a major overhaul.


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## kenada (Jul 21, 2021)

Yora said:


> Rations come in portions of "one week" when you buy them, which I assume is meant for "7 days". But their encumbrance is listed as 4. There are rules for penalties for not eating, which are based on days. So what happens to encumbrance when you eat one day's ration?



Rations feels like it ought to be one of those bundled things, but it’s not. I think we’re going to treat them as either all there or not for simplicity’s sake. Otherwise, the easiest thing to do is reduce the encumbrance by 1 for every 2 rations consumed.



Yora said:


> Travel speeds are given in miles per hour, but depending on terrain it might 1.5 or 0.5 miles per hour. The game also recommends using 6 mile hexes. It would be vastly more convenient if travel speeds would be given as hexes per day. Encumbrance doesn't impact travel speed at all. But I do notice with appreciation that mounts with faster movement rates don't make overland travel faster, since they can't be sprinting the entire day.



This feels like another place where WWN is too verbose for its own good. If it just did what OSE/BX does, it would be easy. PCs generally travel for ten hours per day, and the distance traveled is their movement rate in miles. If you want hexes, divide by five. The terrain type table should just be a list of modifiers.

Speaking of which, road travel seems a bit too good. 2× is almost (but not quite) taking the run action every round for ten hours straight. I’d expect PCs to be very fatigued jogging for ten hours straight. The Alexandrian’s method is too fiddly, but I think having separate on-/off-road speeds is the way to go. I may tweak it for my game. 

WWN also has nothing to say about getting lost. I assume it’s a “don’t make the PCs look incompetent at their role in life” thing, but one should expect there to be situations (like _arratu_ wastelands) where success isn’t a sure thing. It’s not difficult to devise a DC, but still.


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## Yora (Jul 21, 2021)

From what I remember, Red Tide and Spears of the Dawn didn't really go into travel either. I think Crawford just doesn't consider what happens between sites relevant.


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## Yora (Jul 22, 2021)

Turns out (as usual) that a paragraph in another chapter mentions the seven rations with an encumbrance of 4 is a packed bundle. Loose rations are 1 encumbrance for 1 day's food.
Though this once again makes me question how much of a good idea this whole bundle thing is. That it takes an additional round to unpack something that is bundled probably won't matter in play, but it makes the whole encumbrance system more complicated.


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## Yora (Jul 28, 2021)

Questing Beast is doing a review of it. 30 minutes for part 1.


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## Yora (Aug 3, 2021)

I've been looking up the probabilities for rolling hit points in AnyDice, and I'm really not seeing an improvement of replacing 1d4 with 1d6-1 and 1d10 with 1d6+2.

The average amount of hit points for characters remains exactly the same. However, the odds for very high and very low results change quite significantly.

For mages, rolling 1d6-1 means they have a chance to roll a 5, but also a chance to roll a 0, which also counts as 1 hp.
1d4 with a +1 Con modifier means a spread of 2 to 5. (1d6-1)+1 results in a spread of 1 to 6.
Mages get a chance to get higher hp than on a d4, but this comes with a much greater chance to get only 1.

For warriors it's the opposite. They end up with a deceased chance to get very high hp, and a decrease chance to get very low hp.

I feel that this hurts mages a lot more than it helps warriors. And increases randomness for low level characters, while higher level characters are trending closer to an average anyway. (Fewer dice means more outliers, more dice means closer to average.)

A fighter with only modest hp isn't great, but at least it has some hp to work with. A mage with almost no hp is having a much worse day. This seems like a bad change to me.


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## Aldarc (Aug 3, 2021)

Yora said:


> I've been looking up the probabilities for rolling hit points in AnyDice, and I'm really not seeing an improvement of replacing 1d4 with 1d6-1 and 1d10 with 1d6+2.
> 
> The average amount of hit points for characters remains exactly the same. However, the odds for very high and very low results change quite significantly.
> 
> ...



I prefer using set/average HP anyway. 



Aldarc said:


> Thanks to @Yora's threads, I may whip up a more S&S inspired setting for WWN.



So as a follow-up:

Here is my new iteration for a Sword & Sorcery setting: _Dunia_. In many respects, however, it also leans heavily into Sword & Soul, including Crawford's Spears of the Dawn and Charles Saunders's _Imaro_, but the campaign uses WWN. It sets WWN's idea of weird, alien Outsiders who have come and gone from a world they have altered but puts it in the context of humanity in a quasi-African setting, so there are also post-colonial tones to it.

The Azulans are the optional Elves/Melniboneans/Atlanteans. The Saurians are the obligatory Snake/Lizard-folk. Not sure what else there may be as far as demihumans go.

This map was done on Wonderdraft. It's still a draft.



>


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## kenada (Aug 4, 2021)

Our “first” session is this weekend. I’m going through adventure creation, flip through the exploration challenges section, and see a part on generating points of interest for hex crawls. Why isn’t this stuff all in one place? There’s a bunch on generating points of interest in the wilderness tags section of the setting creation chapter. Why have something slightly different in the adventure chapter? These things should build off and complement each other.

This is my biggest frustration with WWN. I miss this stuff and default to my old ways, which is Alexandrian-style hexcrawl prep (i.e., all the things). I’ve generated so much unnecessary crap. I think I have a handle on it now, but I could have done without the frustration. With all that said, I love the tags-based generators. I’m pretty good at riffing off a few bits of input. I just need to not burn myself out in the process.


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## Malmuria (Aug 4, 2021)

Yora said:


> Questing Beast is doing a review of it. 30 minutes for part 1.



One thing that QB says is that the system feels like a stripped down 3e.  I wonder if it would be a good OSR-ish game for people who like 3e and pathfinder


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## Yora (Aug 4, 2021)

That would greatly depend on what people like about 3rd edition. I really started with 3rd and WWN does feel very familiar to what I'm used to as the default for D&D. I believe Ben also got into D&D later, so that might also be his perception.
But there's really not that much that is specifically like the main distinguishing elements of 3rd edition. There's only three classes (with five mage traditions) and you're locked into your initial pick for the whole campaign. Foci are like feats, but those are in 5th and I believe 4th edition as well. There are skill points, but they work quite different from 3rd edition. And the whole magic system is almost entirely different.
I really don't know where the similar feel to 3rd edition comes from, but I'm with Ben on this that it seems taking influences from that system.


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## Aldarc (Aug 4, 2021)

Yora said:


> That would greatly depend on what people like about 3rd edition. I really started with 3rd and WWN does feel very familiar to what I'm used to as the default for D&D. I believe Ben also got into D&D later, so that might also be his perception.
> But there's really not that much that is specifically like the main distinguishing elements of 3rd edition. There's only three classes (with five mage traditions) and you're locked into your initial pick for the whole campaign. Foci are like feats, but those are in 5th and I believe 4th edition as well. There are skill points, but they work quite different from 3rd edition. And the whole magic system is almost entirely different.
> I really don't know where the similar feel to 3rd edition comes from, but I'm with Ben on this that it seems taking influences from that system.



I would propose True 20 as a transitional form that likely influenced Stars Without Number. 

True 20 came out as a generic version of Blue Rose RPG during the d20 OGL era of 3E. BR and T20 stripped everything down to a single d20 die and all the classes down to three: Warrior, Expert, and Adept. These were the NPC classes from 3E D&D. But then they split up levels between feats and talents. Also every class got a unique ability for starting in that class as your base class: e.g., a Warrior could spend one Conviction point to erase all bruised and hurt conditions. Magic involved skill rolls (often against fatigue) and used powers as opposed to spells. 

IMHO, while Crawford clearly deviates from this, there does appear to be influence. Warrior, Expert, Adept in BR/T20 -> Warrior, Expert, Mystic in SWN and Warrior, Expert, Mage in WWN. Adept Powers in T20 become Mystic Psionic Techniques in SWN.


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## Yora (Aug 4, 2021)

That too. WWN really takes from everywhere, combining a wide range of good ideas into a solid system.


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## kenada (Aug 4, 2021)

I was also reminded of 3e when I first read WWN. You can see where it’s built on B/X, but character customization and the action economy are both very reminiscent of 3e. I haven’t played any T20-based games, so I can’t speak to that influence, but it stuck me as doing the sorts of things with 3e that people were doing in their house rules.

I was also reminded a bit of 4e (particularly the lack of iterative attacks and the powerful class abilities), but I try not to draw too much attention to that to my players because they didn’t like 4e.


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## Yora (Aug 4, 2021)

Here's part 2:


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## kenada (Aug 14, 2021)

I finally got to run a session using the stuff I put together using the various tools. I posted a recap over in the session recap thread, so I won’t go back over all that stuff. Instead, I’ll focus on the tools WWN gave me to put together the session.

For the most part, they worked pretty well. The tags I rolled for Finland and for the various courts gave me interesting situations. I don’t think I would have tied together Horsiel’s court with Finland if I hadn’t rolled the tags. There’s also some stuff that can drive the tension between the various nations. That’s all good stuff.

For the ruined settlement of Hirzhus, I decided to generate it as a twenty room dungeon. I used the generator described in the adventure creation chapter then grouped together the various pieces to make interesting places in the settlement. Some of the loops got turned into buildings while others got turned into the flooded amphitheater. I’m awful at designing settlements, so this was really nice.

If I have any complaint, it’s that keying a twenty room dungeon takes too long. I think I spent four or five hours on it (including sketching out a terrible map and working on the court). Overall prep was probably eight to ten hours, but some of that was re-reading the books and doing one-time prep I won’t have to redo (like generating points of interest for the hexcrawl portion).

However, I’m really happy that the book underestimates how long it would take my group to explore a dungeon. It suggests a ten room dungeon would take less than a session and a twenty room one about a session. My group is maybe half way through this one. The primary challenge is exploration, but I also included secondary combat, investigation, and social ones. There’s another faction (some dark creepers who want Horiel’s stuff and to find a way into the magician’s iterum) they haven’t even met yet. Only the coffer corpses and creature (unmet yet) are outright hostile, so it’s mostly going to be exploration and intrigue.

I should note I didn’t exactly run the social stuff as a challenge per se, but parleying and talking to people is important. Horsiel is also keeping information back, and the party might learn something from the other faction too (though they are probably going to be less kind about it). For investigations, I flat out ignored the book. The investigation challenge stuff is bad. I followed the three clue rule and used node-based design to layer on the clues to figuring out the magician’s fate. The procedure in WWN is just too railroad-y for my taste.


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## Malmuria (Aug 14, 2021)

kenada said:


> I finally got to run a session using the stuff I put together using the various tools. I posted a recap over in the session recap thread, so I won’t go back over all that stuff. Instead, I’ll focus on the tools WWN gave me to put together the session.
> 
> For the most part, they worked pretty well. The tags I rolled for Finland and for the various courts gave me interesting situations. I don’t think I would have tied together Horsiel’s court with Finland if I hadn’t rolled the tags. There’s also some stuff that can drive the tension between the various nations. That’s all good stuff.
> 
> ...



It might be hard to tell after just one session, but how robust does the overall design seem to be for a longer term campaign (15+ sessions)?  I posted in another thread that I'm reconsidering the extreme minimalism of osr rules lite games for anything other than 1-5 session dungeon crawls.  Did your players enjoy the customization aspects of the game, or did those get in the way of "don't look at your character sheet" style osr play?


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## kenada (Aug 15, 2021)

Malmuria said:


> It might be hard to tell after just one session, but how robust does the overall design seem to be for a longer term campaign (15+ sessions)?



It’s probably too soon to say, but it’s still basically D&D. I think something WWN has going for it is that XP-for-treasure is not the default, so you can direct the core loop however makes sense, and the rewards can be adapted to support that.



Malmuria said:


> I posted in another thread that I'm reconsidering the extreme minimalism of osr rules lite games for anything other than 1-5 session dungeon crawls.  Did your players enjoy the customization aspects of the game, or did those get in the way of "don't look at your character sheet" style osr play?



We were a 3e/PF1 group for a long time, so WWN feels pretty good to my players. The rules are a lot lighter, but there’s still a good bit of character customization, and the characters are very competent by default. Since this was not technically* our first session, we ended up hitting second level today. Everyone seemed excited about the cool new things they could do.

The “don’t be limited by your character sheet” stuff is tricky because my agenda leans more towards the Right to Dream than OSR-style play. I _don’t_ think a clever solution should work around a flaw or limitation on your sheet. Smart play is still important though because the world is dangerous, and it’s not tuned for your success (e.g., almost nothing in the current location can be defeated head-on by the PCs currently).


* We did a one-shot using their OSE characters that I converted. I expected that we would switch, so the conversion included their progress towards 2nd level. That started them at about 25%, and the one-shot took them most of the rest of the way. This session picked up from the one-shot (in a rebooted setting based on WWN’s setting building procedures).


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## Yora (Aug 15, 2021)

Got another rules question:

When you get a bonus skill level from a focus, does that focus pay for that one skill level, or does it remain a bonus that is added on top of what you actually paid for with skill points?
I am under the impression that it is the former, based on how the rules for character creation make it clear that getting a bonus skill doesn't let you get a skill level to greater than level-1, which is the maximum for 1st level characters.
This would mean that deciding when to take a focus that provides a bonus skill makes a big difference to the skill point cost to get it to that level. Which is not like how these things are usually handled in the d20 system. But I think it's fully justified in that you gain the benefit from the bonus skill immediately once you take it. Even though you paid more in hindsight when you look back at 10th level, you did get to use your bonus skill for the whole time since you took the focus.
But I think this is something that players could easily misunderstand and then get miffed when it's pointed out to them. I think this would go down easier if you can show them a line in the book that spells it out and it's not simply "I'm the GM and I chose to interpret it that way."


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## kenada (Aug 15, 2021)

Yora said:


> When you get a bonus skill level from a focus, does that focus pay for that one skill level, or does it remain a bonus that is added on top of what you actually paid for with skill points?



It depends on when you get the bonus skill. During character creation, it increases the skill. After character creation, it gives you three skill points towards increasing the skill (see page 55, “Choose New Foci”). The advantage to taking a bonus skill during character creation is it lets you stack it up with your other choices to boost skills to level-1 (equivalent to a free skill point later).


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## Yora (Aug 15, 2021)

I really never saw that rule before. It's hidden away in a section about foci, and I've not seen anything in the sections about skills that would indicate that such a rule could exist somewhere in the first place.
Good to know.


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## kenada (Aug 15, 2021)

Yora said:


> I really never saw that rule before. It's hidden away in a section about foci, and I've not seen anything in the sections about skills that would indicate that such a rule could exist somewhere in the first place.
> Good to know.



I missed it too. The section on foci refers you to page 11, but it really should be page 55. 

I only found out because your post prompted me to go check reddit for an official clarification. I didn’t find one, but I did find mention in r/SWN of receiving three skill points when gaining a bonus skill after character creation, which prompted me to go see if it was the same in WWN.


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## kenada (Aug 17, 2021)

Does anyone know how fast the party moves while exploring if you’re not using a simplified map diagram? Or what distinguishes a small trap from other traps?

While reviewing the cheat sheet I linked previously to improve its organization, I am finding things that are just underspecified or missing. How traps work isn’t discussed _at all_.

I assume I should be (mostly) fine using B/X to fill in the gaps, but I shouldn’t need to do that. WWN should be a complete game.


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## Yora (Aug 17, 2021)

As far as I am able to tell, there is no exploration speed.

A turn is about the same time as a scene, so I would say moving from one room to the next takes no time and simply starts another scene, and if the distance is a bit longer you spend one turn walking and start another turn when you get there.
Though I'll also be using exploration speed and dungeons of specified dimensions.


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## kenada (Aug 17, 2021)

Yora said:


> A turn is about the same time as a scene, so I would say moving from one room to the next takes no time and simply starts another scene, and if the distance is a bit longer you spend one turn walking and start another turn when you get there.



That’s pretty much how simplified ruin exploration works. If you’re using a simplified diagram (such as one created by the procedures in the book), and you care about tracking resources, then it takes one turn to move between “rooms of interest”.



Yora said:


> Though I'll also be using exploration speed and dungeons of specified dimensions.



This is what I want to do, and the lack of an actual speed is irksome. What I ended up deciding was to crib from B/X: exploration speed is your movement rate in yards per turn.

I’m probably going to do the same thing for traps. I assume what WWN means by “small traps” is the same as B/X, which is what OSE calls “treasure traps”. Now I just need to decide how they work in practice (i.e., use saving throws like 3e or a flat chance like B/X).

I swear I’m going to end up with my own retroclone of WWN before long, which is very silly.


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## Yora (Aug 17, 2021)

A method I worked out to deal with exploration speed is to dig up the old B/X rule that a party must spend 1 turn resting after every 5 turns exploring or get a -1 penalty to all attack and damage roll. Instead of having different exploration speeds based on encumbrance, encumbrance instead reduces the number of turns you can explore before having to take a break. If you reduce the turns before a break down to 3 or 1, you get roughly similar distances covered as when you reduce movement speed from 120 to 90 or 60.

This method works whether you are measuring the distance that is explored per turn, or simply say that each turn is one area. But I feel that makes it more intuitive for players why they take longer to explore with heavy gear even though they are really just taking a few steps every minute or so.


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## kenada (Aug 17, 2021)

Yora said:


> A method I worked out to deal with exploration speed is to dig up the old B/X rule that a party must spend 1 turn resting after every 5 turns exploring or get a -1 penalty to all attack and damage roll. Instead of having different exploration speeds based on encumbrance, encumbrance instead reduces the number of turns you can explore before having to take a break. If you reduce the turns before a break down to 3 or 1, you get roughly similar distances covered as when you reduce movement speed from 120 to 90 or 60.



I was leaning towards not including mandatory rest because it feels like a change from WWN, and I’m just supplementing WWN from B/X right now instead of changing it, but that’s an interesting idea.



Yora said:


> This method works whether you are measuring the distance that is explored per turn, or simply say that each turn is one area. But I feel that makes it more intuitive for players why they take longer to explore with heavy gear even though they are really just taking a few steps every minute or so.



I like the way that works with either simplified or detailed movement. How does it interact with combat? Just use the reduced movement speeds in combat?

⁂​
However, I’m not worried too much about encumbrance. My players got burned badly by it in OSE (the barbarian didn’t bother to manage her load and was moving 10′ in combat), so they are being really mindful about it in WWN. My main concern is just how far they go in a turn since I plan to use detailed maps for most dungeons.


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## kenada (Aug 18, 2021)

Question about encumbrance. Does anyone know how this is supposed to work?



> Characters can push their limits by carrying more than is comfortable. An extra two Readied or four Stowed items can be carried, but this slows them down; their Move action allows them to move only 20 feet instead of 30. A further two Readied or four Stowed items can be carried beyond that, but that slows them down to 15 feet per Move action.




I can see two interpretations. Suppose your Strength attribute is 10. Normally, you can carry 5 readied items and 10 stowed items. If you carry 7 readied items, then your speed would be reduced to 20′. What happens when you also carry 11 stowed items? Nothing, because you need to bump things past the first set of extra items; or you now move 15′, because you carried a further set of items past your carrying capacity?

The latter was my initial interpretation, but I’m not sure about that now.


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## Yora (Aug 18, 2021)

As I see it, either 4 stowed items or 2 readied item each count as exceeding your limit once. If you have both 4 stowed and 2 readied above your regular limit, you exceed your limit twice and get slowed to 15.
You can't have "8 extra stowed and 2 extra readied" or "4 extra stowed and 4 extra readied, because that would be exceeding your limit three times.

In all situations, the limit for readied items is half as much as for stowed items, so I think effectively 1 readied items works like 2 stowed items for the limits. I would allow players to have 2 extra stowed and 1 extra readied and still be at 20 feet.


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## kenada (Aug 18, 2021)

Yora said:


> As I see it, either 4 stowed items or 2 readied item each count as exceeding your limit once. If you have both 4 stowed and 2 readied above your regular limit, you exceed your limit twice and get slowed to 15.
> You can't have "8 extra stowed and 2 extra readied" or "4 extra stowed and 4 extra readied, because that would be exceeding your limit three times.



Sounds like my initial interpretation. I think that makes sense. Maybe I’m over thinking it.


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## Yora (Aug 20, 2021)

Of all the rules in Worlds Without Number, there is one that stands out to me as looking particularly dubious, and that's the Healer's Healing Touch ability. The unlimited healing potential gets countered by the wonderfully looking System Strain mechanic, but still Healing Touch looks like it's too good.

The basic Healing Touch heals 2d6 as a Main action at touch range.
Empowered Healer heals 2d6+level.
Far Healer has a range of 10 feet per level. (Which is about everyone in a fight by 3rd level.)
Swift Healer enables healing as an On Turn Action one time per level per day.

Purge Ailment and Refined Restoration are so good players will probably pick them before taking all three of the above Healing Touch improvement,  but by sixth level they have five Healer Arts, and 2d6+6 healing at 60 feet range, and up to six times per day as an On Turn Action is really quite potent. A warrior who can get into a chokepoint to be attacked by only one or two enemies at a time with a healer supporting him can hold those enemies back until he maxes out his System Strain. 12 hp healed on average, 12 times, that's 144 hp worth of healing, compared to having 37 hit point. And if he reaches his limit, someone else in the party can take over and the Healer continue to pump unlimited healing. Of course, the party wpuld be in real trouble after that being almost unable to heal for the next week or two, but still...

But it's how easy magical healing deals with bringing people back who went down that actually feels strange to me. If you go down, someone has to make a moderately difficult Heal skill check. If you survive, you can get back up after 10 minutes with 1 hp. You are then frail and can't heal naturally until you get 1 week of rest or 1 hour of surgery. There's also neat rules for first aid.
I really like the sound of that system. But instead of all of that, getting Healing touch gets rid of all of that. One Healing Touch, potentially at range, and your back to full fighting ability.

I just can't see any group going anywhere without one of the PCs being a healer. Being a special half-class and the way dual-classing works, being a an expert/healer or warrior/healer really isn't that much of a sacrifice. They keep getting their hit points and can wear their regular armor, and experts still get their additional skill point each level and their regular attack bonus.
If all, or at least most parties have a healer with them, then the whole system of non-magical recovery becomes pretty much redundant.

One option I see is to say that magic healing does not automatically remove the frail condition, or that only Healing Touch does not. That would make healing potions relevant to parties with healers again.

But what are your thoughts on this?


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## kenada (Aug 20, 2021)

Someone asked about healing on r/WWN a month or so ago, and Kevin Crawford replied. The gist of it is that you are expected to go into a fight at full hit points. System Strain is the balancing factor that prevents you from doing that indefinitely.

It’s different from OSR games. I’m not sure how I feel about it. Given how tough the check is to stabilize someone, having magical healing available is a no-brainer. It removes the risk of failure as well as the Frail quality.

On the other hand, if you are reckless, you will have significant downtime while you recover System Strain. However, the GM needs to make that mean something, or it becomes as much of a cost as Treat Wounds is in Pathfinder 2e (basically none).

Like I said, I don’t know. We have not really had to deal with the consequences of healing yet. The whole subsystem feels like a convoluted approach to mitigating OSR-style lethality while trying to avoid the downsides. 

Having not played or run SWN, I don’t know how well it was executed (but Kevin said he wanted healing to be easy because it is in SWN).


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## kenada (Aug 21, 2021)

Here is an interesting complication. According to Kevin Crawford, you _only_ get a full night’s rest if you sleep 8 hours. That means your typical adventuring party that takes watches will not be able to recover hit points or lose System Strain from natural healing. That also suggests mages won’t be able to recover spells or Committed Effort either.


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## TwoSix (Aug 21, 2021)

kenada said:


> Here is an interesting complication. According to Kevin Crawford, you _only_ get a full night’s rest if you sleep 8 hours. That means your typical adventuring party that takes watches will not be able to recover hit points or lose System Strain from natural healing. That also suggests mages won’t be able to recover spells or Committed Effort either.



Yea, I'd definitely house rule that.  6 hours seems sufficient, and I'd allow a watch in the middle.  4 2-hour watches is our default for D&D type games.


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## kenada (Aug 21, 2021)

TwoSix said:


> Yea, I'd definitely house rule that.  6 hours seems sufficient, and I'd allow a watch in the middle.  4 2-hour watches is our default for D&D type games.



I think Kevin Crawford agrees regarding the automaton. That’s how I’d do things too (because otherwise it’s a pointless benefit).

The way I did things in Pathfinder and 5e was to bookend the adventuring day with 16 hours of time the PCs can spend resting and preparing. During the night, they take watches. Since we never played enough OSE to have it come up, I’m inclined to see how it works RAW in WWN.


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## Aldarc (Aug 21, 2021)

Apparently, someone on Reddit also had asked Kevin Crawford about running WWN for low or no magic campaigns. He supplied *optional rules* for slow healing, no magic, as well as the Wise (an expert that's a bit of a witch or medicine man with subtle curses and the like) and the Alchemist.


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## Yora (Aug 21, 2021)

What really has be curious is how System Strain will interact with sandbox campaign structures. As long as you still have System Strain capacity available, healing is effectively free. Once you bottom out, it's a single healing per day. Best case 2d6+Healer level. Then you might go three days without getting injured, recover 30 hp and back to full health, but still go into the next fight knowing you can't get healed.

Where it gets interesting is that this is something that happens to each PC separately, depending on how much they got hit and their Constitution scores. Perhaps you might get situations where players decide to hole up in a defensible place for a few days to let one or two PCs recover System Strain, with possibly some low level experts fighting off attackers because they are still without System Strain.

But I think the biggest factor is going to be the length of time between opportunities to rest and recover in a safe place for a week or two between adventures. If the adventure takes only a single day, PCs can take so much damage that they require 10 or 12 healings but still reach home again at full hp. If on average, each PC doesn't require more than one healing per day, they can basically go on forever.

These could be very interesting things in a sandbox campaign in which the players have free choice how far and how long they want to travel, and which dangerous areas to go into. It adds an interesting new resource that players have to learn to effectively monitor and manage. Something I definitely want to play with in my next campaign.

I just had an idea for a house rule right now: Instead of healing 2d6+Heal skill(+Healer level), Healing Touch only heals 1d6 plus modifiers. That's the amount you heal with first aid, but as a Main Action instead of a Turn, and potentially even at range. Having a healer in the group means you still only heal about the same amount (until Empowered Healer comes in), but you can have healing in the middle of an ongoing battle.
The difference between 2d6+2 and 1d6+2 is about a reduction to two thirds the total. However, not having run a campaign with it yet, I don't have a reference how much impact that actually has. But I am considering putting it in the rules info sheet for my campaign that 2d6 is experimental and might be reduced to 1d6 later if Healing Touch turns out to be too effective.

This seems like something that really can't be determined without having playtested it for a couple of adventures.


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## kenada (Aug 29, 2021)

We had our second session today and our first major combat. The barbarian (full warrior) is incredibly effective at destroying anything with only a few hit dice. She massacred a bunch of dark creepers and finished off a dark stalker using a whirlwind attack. They all combusted or exploded when they died, so she ended up Mortally Wounded, and the priest ended up blinded, but it was impressive what she did without even needing an attack roll.

The remaining dark creeper made his morale check and instinct check, but I figured he’d just try to get out of there anyway. His monstrous drive is _theft_, so I figure he would just bolt and live to steal another day. I guess he could try to take the treasure, but he’s not got the tool, and he probably doesn’t want to risk having the party wander up on him.

That does make me wonder instinct checks. Has anyone here gotten any good mileage out of them? We’ve had a few other combats, but they were one-sided or against effectively invulnerable creatures (coffer corpses can only be damaged by magical attacks). Is all the extra rolling worth it on top of morale checks and the rest of what’s happening in combat?

Otherwise, I seem to be getting two to three sessions out of the adventure I generated, which is really good. That makes the amount of time spent prepping about equal or possibly less than the time spent running the session. Depending on how things go, I may be able to drop _Halls of the Blood King_ into the game. One of the treasures is a deed to a manor, and the core conceit would work pretty well as an iterum.


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## Yora (Aug 29, 2021)

Instinct is one of the things I didn't really see the point of. It's clear what it us meant for, but it doesn't strike me as something that needs mechanics to handle it. Unnecessary additional dice rollingis the impression I get, and with it being one of the very few things that are explicitly stated as optional, it seems a bit like the decision to have it in the book wasn't very enthusiastic.
Rolling dice only when really necessary is what's pulling me to this game framework.


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## kenada (Aug 29, 2021)

I hadn’t even noticed instinct was explicitly optional ….

I realized this morning that you only act “normally” when you roll over, so I actually got it backwards (though holding off and not trying to shank or rob the PCs is arguably sub-optimal). I guess it’s kind of like a d10-based saving throw to act normally. I’m not ready to abandon it quite yet, but I’d like to see it have an effect with a group (e.g., spiders not fighting tactically*).

Speaking of saving throws, my players continue to be confused by them. I don’t know if we just need to get used to having classic saving throw mechanics with modern categories, but they keep thinking you need to roll under. I may add a “+” to the entries on their sheets like WWN does for monsters as a way to emphasize how they work.


* We had a 4e GM who always tried to take optimal advantage of the abilities monsters had, so creatures like spiders would dance around to make sure they all could get Combat Advantage while doing their thing. That left a lasting, negative impression of 4e in my group. “Instinct means don’t do that” has obvious appeal.


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## kenada (Sep 4, 2021)

I’ve been working on a replacement for the wilderness exploration rules in WWN. As mentioned previously, they’re a bit incomplete. The B/X rules also aren’t particularly good themselves. These rules draw inspiration from a few sources.

The Alexandrian’s series on hexcrawls;
Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood hexcrawl procedure;
A very casual scan of the _Forbidden Lands Quickstart_;
Pathfinder 2e’s hexploration subsystem; and
B/X’s exploration rules.
One of the requirements I have for this system is that hexes not be a player-facing structure. You shouldn’t know I am using a hex map behind the screen. While my procedure does describe things in terms of hexes, it’s used as a shortcut. The system should work without actually mentioning hexes at the table. After running _Kingmaker_, I’m a big fan of player-unknown hexes.

Most of the systems I looked at broke the day down into segments. The only one that didn’t also measure progress by hexes was the Alexandrian’s. I can understand why. Trying to track miles traveled using the Alexandrian’s system is a major pain in the ass. It’s tedious, and you end up fiddling with fractional progress or losing progress. Another issue I take with segments is non-exploration activities fit with them badly. If the PCs stop or do something while traveling, they either waste the segment, it throws everything off, or you ignore the time cost.

I want choices to be meaningful while exploring. One of the things I liked in my perusal of the _Forbidden Lands Quickstart_ is checks are usually made by the PCs. That is one of the things I included in my system. I also want diegetic mechanics. If the players are deciding what to do, I want them to talk about it like they would with their characters would. Segments pretty badly violate that, especially with the issue noted above. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I realized there was an obvious solution.

Measure all activities using the same units.

Game handle travel using traditional units for distance: you can travel X miles per day, and that converts into so many hexes (at six miles per hex). However, they use the wrong units. How do we usually measure the length of a trip? We judge them by how long it takes. For example, it took us an hour and a half to drive to Dayton, Ohio, on Monday. A flight to China takes about 14 hours, but it can take 30 hours depending on layovers.

What I did was normalize all exploration activity costs on time. Each hex has a different time cost to cross. This lets us just use hours, and the PCs can decide what they want to do using intuitive reasoning. If we’ve traveled for three hours, there’s still time to forage for a bit even though we also spent an hour goofing off in the roadside tavern. This also lets me use hexes to track progress while simultaneously hiding them. How far away is the next town? Well, it’s through the forest and over the mountain, so it’s about a day’s travel.

For the activities themselves, I looked at various sources and tried to get a good collection. I replaced percentile or x-in-6 checks with PC skill checks. When you go searching for a previously found location, I don’t roll to see if you found it — the player rolls. I also distinguished between making camp and sleeping. That was something that feels weird about the segmented approaches. You end up wasting downtime at camp (because of the length of segments), or PCs don’t actually have time for the things they need to do (like preparing spells).

The random events section is based pretty heavily on Gavin’s procedure. I decoupled the checks from his phases, but I kept the tables. I accidentally ran my procedure wrongly in PF2, generating tons more events than normal. It created a very interesting and fun session, so I think he’s right on track. The note on weather is there because I’m currently leaning towards using the generator from the _Wilderness Survival Guide_ to do weather, but I didn’t want to strip it out completely. The weather tables aren’t present though. You’ll need to get them from Gavin’s PDF.

I’ve attached a copy of my WIP draft. We’re not playing again until September 25, so we won’t have an opportunity to test them before then (and that assumes we actually do some hex exploration). These rules assume some of the WWN procedure is still in place (such as privation). It may be that this approach totally doesn’t work, but it feels like it should. I’m sharing it here before we’ve had chance to test it to get feedback. Note that the layout is designed to create half-letter booklets, but I’ve exported the spreads to make it easy to read just these pages.


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## The-Magic-Sword (Sep 8, 2021)

kenada said:


> I’ve been working on a replacement for the wilderness exploration rules in WWN. As mentioned previously, they’re a bit incomplete. The B/X rules also aren’t particularly good themselves. These rules draw inspiration from a few sources.
> 
> The Alexandrian’s series on hexcrawls;
> Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood hexcrawl procedure;
> ...



I appreciate the abstraction of using time now that I read your reasoning for it, but here's some feedback.

1. I notice that the random events being rolled three times per day feels like a lot if Journeys are on the longer side, a month of travel would be 90 random events, this is easy for the GM to season of course by just... pretending they rolled 'no event' for many of these results-- I'd be tempted to suggest a cooldown period when a random event actually happens, or just dropping the number of rolls to two, day and night. 

2. Your random location area is interesting, I'm going to mark it, but overall I'm assuming you feel confident about your ability to run a tomb off the cuff for your players, or the contents of a portal-- portals in particular feel as though they should be keyed, unless you have an unlisted plan for where they go. I guess WWN itself might be lightweight enough to just do it?

I'd abstract some of these in general-- strange tree could be 'strange flora' so that they don't come across weird trees in the desert. That might be an adjustment you'd have made while running though.

3. I'd list some common movement rates for horses and such, just so you don't have to calculate them if your players take the obvious route or if you want to track NPCs running around on the map.

4. What happens if I spend 3 hours fortifying my camp? Do I just take the best of those rolls? Does the GM just say no?


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## Yora (Sep 8, 2021)

Instead of "x in 6" chances for random events, I prefer "1 in x".
You also get a range of different probabilities, but it's easier to remember what you're actually rolling. With a rule of "something always happens on 1", you can also roll in the open or let the players roll, and everyone knows immediately what the result will mean without having to explain it.


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## kenada (Sep 8, 2021)

The-Magic-Sword said:


> 1. I notice that the random events being rolled three times per day feels like a lot if Journeys are on the longer side, a month of travel would be 90 random events, this is easy for the GM to season of course by just... pretending they rolled 'no event' for many of these results-- I'd be tempted to suggest a cooldown period when a random event actually happens, or just dropping the number of rolls to two, day and night.



#1 and #2 came straight from Gavin’s Dolmenwood procedure, so you prompted me to dig into the numbers a bit. This is what things look like assuming that the third event is from the Camping table.


*No events*7.41%*One event*33.33%*Two events*44.44%*Three events*14.81%

Looking at it over the course of a month*, you should have about twenty days with events.

If we change the tables to use a d20 (filling in the new entries with “Uneventful”), the distribution changes to this.


*No events*28.80%*One event*45.60%*Two event*22.40%*Three events*3.20%

This time it’s about 10 days.

I once accidentally ran the Alexandrian’s procedure with the wrong chance of encounters. It generated encounters very frequently, which made for an interesting session. I’d like to lean towards having events more often than not because otherwise nothing is happening while you explore. For example, the default frequency in WWN is just too low. Events basically never happen. On the other hand, the quantity of events looks weird over longer periods of time.

Hmm. Let’s see what a d16 looks like.


*No events*18.75%*One event*43.75%*Two events*31.25%*Three events*6.25%

Over a month, about half the days should have at least one event.

I’m leaning towards a d12- or d16-based table. Even though the Alexandrian had you rolling six times, my dice luck was terrible. The chance of having at least one event was 4-in-6, but we’d have multi-day streaks of no events, which is just boring when you’re trying to explore.



The-Magic-Sword said:


> 2. Your random location area is interesting, I'm going to mark it, but overall I'm assuming you feel confident about your ability to run a tomb off the cuff for your players, or the contents of a portal-- portals in particular feel as though they should be keyed, unless you have an unlisted plan for where they go.
> 
> I'd abstract some of these in general-- strange tree could be 'strange flora' so that they don't come across weird trees in the desert. That might be an adjustment you'd have made while running though.



I raised an eyebrow at the portal entry when I first saw it, but I decided to keep it. “Portal” can be pretty malleable. For example, there is a tramway system in the region where the PCs are exploring, so a “portal” might be a new entrance to that (even one that occurred naturally due to a collapse or something). The same goes for the “strange tree” entry. WWN encourages you to roll with strange or incongruous results with generators. However, if things don’t work after playing with it some, I’m open to the idea of changing things.



The-Magic-Sword said:


> I guess WWN itself might be lightweight enough to just do it?



WWN provides copious content generators. If an idea doesn’t come to mind, I can roll a couple of location tags and synthesize them into a location with a situation. The system is based on B/X with some stuff from 3e, so monster stats are pretty trivial (and generally things aren’t balanced to the capabilities of the PCs anyway).



The-Magic-Sword said:


> 3. I'd list some common movement rates for horses and such, just so you don't have to calculate them if your players take the obvious route or if you want to track NPCs running around on the map.



That’s a good point, though they’ll be in another section. I’m following the organization of OSE, which breaks things down by topic. Horses and beasts of burden will be in their own section.



The-Magic-Sword said:


> 4. What happens if I spend 3 hours fortifying my camp? Do I just take the best of those rolls? Does the GM just say no?



I’d just let them have a very fortified camp if they wanted that. Maybe they fail a bunch, or maybe they get everything. If they want to spend their time doing that instead of something else, I don’t see any reason to stop them.

The default assumption is a ten hour adventuring day. Maybe that’s worth calling out?

Also, sleep needs to be _uninterrupted_ in WWN to benefit from natural healing or to get back spell slots or daily committed Effort. If you spend three hours fortifying camp, that’s at least half your day dedicated to sleeping and setting up camp. If you need to take watches, then you’re looking at three hours of adventuring at most.



* Calculating as a binomial distribution with _p = no events_, _k = number of days_, _n = 30_. The number of days with no events is the solution where _Pr(X ≤ k) = 1_.


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## The-Magic-Sword (Sep 8, 2021)

Fair enough! Ultimately the intentionality of what you're trying to get out of it is most important-- so in terms of event frequency and timing, if the numbers make sense for the kinds of output you want, then that's what really matters. Personally then, I think it sounds like its in the phase where its very ready for playtesting at your table!


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## kenada (Sep 8, 2021)

Yora said:


> Instead of "x in 6" chances for random events, I prefer "1 in x".
> You also get a range of different probabilities, but it's easier to remember what you're actually rolling. With a rule of "something always happens on 1", you can also roll in the open or let the players roll, and everyone knows immediately what the result will mean without having to explain it.



I like X-in-6 here because changing X results in a linear change in the chance of success, and it’s simple. You make 4 traps, so the chance is 4-in-6.

Another idea might be to use it as a penalty to a luck saving throw. That would roughly simulate that higher HD creatures are better at avoiding danger, and it buffs traps a bit.


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## kenada (Sep 8, 2021)

The-Magic-Sword said:


> Fair enough! Ultimately the intentionality of what you're trying to get out of it is most important-- so in terms of event frequency and timing, if the numbers make sense for the kinds of output you want, then that's what really matters. Personally then, I think it sounds like its in the phase where its very ready for playtesting at your table!



I appreciate the feedback. It forced me to look at the math of events. I agree it feels a little weird to have events happening all the time when you look at longer spans of time. I’m probably going to switch to a d16 table (and I even have a d16!), but I’m not 100% certain yet.

I also wonder if this approach could be adapted to event checks in dungeons. The only complication is that the chance can vary depending on what the PCs are doing. You could have separate tables for that, but it seems like it would be a lot of work too. More to think about.


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## Yora (Sep 10, 2021)

I just realized today that I never got the revised edition of Stars Without Number and still had the original 2010 pdf. (I never underatood why SWN was so praised.) Looking over it now, this all seems really familiar after having dug deeply into WWN. Anyone familiar with both of them and knows what the major similarities and differences are mechanically?


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## kenada (Sep 12, 2021)

I wish I could answer the question, but I’m not all that familiar with SWN. I’ve heard that the revised edition is supposed to be fairly compatible. Speaking of SWN, there’s a Kickstarter for an offset print version. It’s not going to make revisions to the rules, but it will include some errata. It’ll also be nice and high quality like the offset print WWN book.

⁂​
So my point isn’t to say “I don’t know” or to link the SWN Kickstarter. I came across a small snag while updating the B/X waterborne adventuring rules for my wilderness exploration procedure. For river travel, going with or against the current modifies how fast you travel. Rather than be a multiplier, it’s adds or subtracts from your movement rate. That doesn’t play nicely with my time-based approach.

It’s easy to derive a formula [48 ÷ (48 ÷ _t_ ± (1d6 + 6))], but that’s pretty ugly. It’s an edge case, but it annoys me. What I’m thinking of doing instead is have you track the affect of the river separately.

For example, suppose traveling downstream has a time cost of 4. That means, if you do nothing, the river will move you a hex in four hours. If your mode of movement has a time cost of 2, then you travel a hex in two hours. To determine how many hexes you have traveled, you add the progresses together. For example, after 2 hours you would be 1.5 hexes away. After 4 hours, 3 hexes.

This is all equivalent to plugging everything into the formula, but it should be way easier to run at the table. I just need to devise a nice table of time costs for going upstream and downstream.

I’d like to say this is a theoretical concern, but my PCs have been traveling upriver quite a bit lately. I’ve been winging it, but now that I have put together a system, I want to actually use it.


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## Yora (Sep 12, 2021)

I looked at it some more, and SWN revised seems to be basically the same system as WWN. And quite a number of things I found peculiar about WWN turn out to be directly copied over from SWNr, where they seem much more fitting.
I mentioned how having a Healer in the party makes the interesting rules for nonmagical recovery seem somewhat pointless, but it makes a lot more sense in a game where psychic powers are not a default assumption for all campaigns. In fantasy, healing magic is basically always assumed to be part of the game. Or the henchkeeper focus, which seems hugely underwhelming compared to retainers in B/X. Spotted quite a number of small things like those.


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## kenada (Sep 12, 2021)

I found a post on reddit by Kevin Crawford comparing characters between the two systems. It’s a default assumption that characters are healed at full before an encounter, and the two systems do it differently. Healer is meant to replace easy access to pharmaceuticals (and psionics).

Honestly, it feels weird. After our first big fight, the healer was able to patch everyone up without problem. Actually, she got the barbarian up straight away during the fight. It felt very similar to Pathfinder 2e, which is a system focused on tactical combat. I’m not sure how the death rules would ever come into play except when the Healer goes down.

I know that System Strain (rather than hit points) is supposed to be the limiter that provides attrition. Along with the resting rules, it’s not exactly easy to get it back. That should encourage the PCs to be careful, but I don’t know yet. We’re still pretty early into the campaign, and the PCs haven’t really set off out into the wilds fully yet.

Regarding Henchkeeper, I still don’t think it’s a replacement for retainers. The henchmen you acquire requires less attention to keep loyal — they’re loyal by default unless you abuse them or put them in dangerous situations. The intro to the focus even says as much. You can still acquire henchmen normally, but you have to pay them and make it worth their while.

Of course, there are no rules for that. I’ve been working on a mod of OSE for my group that adapts it into WWN, and I’ve stumbled across a few things that are missing or minimally specified. WWN spends a pages discussing all the different types of armor and weapons, but it tells you nothing about adventuring gear. What’s the capacity of a cart? Where are the stats for the ships (it mentions ship speed in the exploration section, but only for one kind)?

The wilderness adventuring procedure is anemic. Waterborne adventuring is an afterthought. There are no rules for splash weapons (and the grenade rules in SWN seem to specialized for flasks of acid or burning oil). There aren’t even rules for traps. It discusses small traps in the Trapmaker focus but never defines what a small trap is.

I suppose I’m being nitpicky, but it feels like WWN is designed for a particular kind of sandbox (one that is adventure-driven rather than exploration-driven). I’m managing to fill in the gaps, but it’d be nice if I could use it as-is. It says something about the system that I’m willing to do as much hacking as I am when I basically wasn’t with PF2 in spite of having more investment with that system as a group.


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## Yora (Sep 16, 2021)

Even with WWN looking like a great fantasy game the system is looking even more fun for space campaigns.

The Snap Attack action in WWN looks interesting, but moving your attack to a point earlier in the round for a -4 penalty doesn't seem to useful in a fantasy campaign where weapons deal 1d6 or 1d8 damage, and many monsters they encounter have 4 hit dice and more.
But in a space game, where ranged weapons with 2d8 or more damage are common, and most enemies will be expected to be average soldiers or criminals, the ability to skip the initiative order for a -4 attack roll penalty sounds like a really fun option.

Imagine you are going to meet a small criminal for information, and as you approch him a bounty hounter steps out on the street, gets highest initiative, and raises his rifle.
Snap Attack! You skip ahead and quick draw your pistol (part of the Main Action to attack) to shot the bounty hunter or at least distract him while the criminal gets to cover. The criminal could easily get killed in one hit, and you might also be able to kill the bounty hunter in one hit.
Now for extra fun, the GM can also shout Snap Attack! Instead of you shoting first before the bounty hunter, he turns around to shot at you, and you both shoot at each other similtaneously.
Also remember, warriors have the ability to turn a miss into a hit once per scene. (Both in Stars and in Worlds.) Combined with Snap Attack, that makes pure Warrior a really interesting choice compared to partial Warrior, who doesn't get it.

A moderately interesting option in fantasy, but something I'd try to use all the time in a space game.

Shock damage now also seems much more worthwhile. Melee weapons are no longer the default attack that often deals more damage than the ranged weapons. It's now the unusual way to fight that also deals much less damage. Knowing that an ene,y charing you with a blade will hurt you no matter what makes it a lot more threatening. And a more interesting option than to keep shoting at an enemy who shots from behind cover. Cause a distraction and then one guy charges him with a sword.


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## kenada (Sep 16, 2021)

How are crafting difficulties supposed to work? You can make the item without having to roll if it relates to your background, but you have to roll for it otherwise. For example, an item that would be made by a specialist is a difficulty 11. If you try to make a masterwork version of that, what’s the difficulty? Is it 10, and if you fail you get a normal version (at 20× the cost of making a normal one)?

My inclination is to require you to beat the base difficulty and treat it as 10 or +3 (whichever is higher). Anyone else have ideas?


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## kenada (Oct 30, 2021)

Wow. It’s been quite a while since I last got to run. Schedules have been a mess, but we finally got to play today. We got to try my exploration rules at the very end of the session. There was some confusion regarding exploration activities (because we have tried so many different approaches), but the costs were very intuitive. I was able to figure out quickly that they were about six hours out from town. They asked about trying to Avoid Monsters, but that would make it twice as long. They didn’t want to take more than a day, so they headed straight back. They found a deed this session, so they’re going to go looking for it next session, which should engage more of the exploration stuff I did.

As for WWN itself, I’m really happy with the adventure that the tools generated. In spite of generating “just” a twenty room dungeon, it provided three sessions of play for us. There were some interesting factions, and the problems they had to solve weren’t things I would have devised normally. For example, the only way to get into the mage’s sanctum (an iterum) was to be “part of her story”, so they wrote themselves into the diary they found. I had no planned solution, but I loved that. The strange treasure I generated also proved highly entertaining, and a decent reaction roll (which I am doing as the PC’s rolling Cha/Connect rather than my rolling 2d6 plus their Charisma) resulted in a very entertaining encounter with the mage’s remnant (a flesh golem converted and tweaked from OSE).

We also had a very funny moment at the end of the session when the barbarian leveled up and tried rolling for her hit points. She got 1, 1, 2 on 3d6. Her hit points went up by 1.


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## Liminal Syzygy (Nov 6, 2021)

Yora said:


> I wrote down some notes to give players an idea what they can expect of WWN as a game when I start looking for players. Maybe this might be useful to some.




This link seems to be broken and I couldn’t find the article with a quick search. Possible to get an updated link?


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## TaranTheWanderer (Nov 6, 2021)

I’ve played WWN and we are 5th level now. I absolutely love this system.  I’m not playing a magic user but I love how they handle magic.  Maybe it’s the DM or maybe it’s the character I have or maybe it’s the system, I’m not sure what it is but I’m having lots of fun with it.


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## Yora (Nov 6, 2021)

Liminal Syzygy said:


> This link seems to be broken and I couldn’t find the article with a quick search. Possible to get an updated link?



I forgot that I had linked the file when I cleaned up my online files.
I think it would be this one. I wrote that at a note for players in a specific campaign as a quick heads up for notable differences. There might be some changes to the actual rules that I forgot I made, and I id leave out some things I don't plan on using, but I think it's still a decent summary.


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## kenada (Nov 7, 2021)

Had an interesting conversation with a couple of my players after this week’s board-gaming session. They mentioned being a bit apprehensive about the town ruins “dungeon” we just wrapped up because they thought it was going to have a ton of political stuff, and they just wanted to kill some monsters. I’d put multiple challenges in there though (combat, exploration, investigation, social), and that gave it enough depth that they didn’t feel like that was something they had to deal with if they didn’t want to do that.

They also commented on the adventure itself. They were taken completely by surprise when they learned that only those who were narratively important to the creator’s story could enter the iterum. I don’t even remember which table I rolled on to generate that, but the advice to embrace incongruous results is probably some of the best the book has to offer. Anyway, one of the players mentioned being a bit exasperated after they learned that, but then he’s like: her diary (which they had) is her story (and then they wrote themselves into it).

Next session, they’re going to start investigating the deed, which will takes them towards where I plan to drop _Halls of the Blood King_. I’m really looking forward to seeing how WWN handles a converted OSE adventure. Given how things have gone so far, I’m expecting it to go pretty well (meaning getting to experience very interesting and entertaining PC antics as they deal with the strange situations and people in the adventure).


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## Yora (Nov 8, 2021)

I think the biggest difference between WWN and OSE would be in the rate at which characters level up. OSE has a pretty clear system while WWN does not. But since adventures for these games generally don't assume that characters will gain several levels between the start and the end like a good number of larger d20 adventures, that really shouldn't ever become an issue.

The main difference in character abilities are the skills in WWN. But I think they only provide an alternative way to do certain things. They don't give characters new powers to do things that OSE characters couldn't.


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## kenada (Nov 8, 2021)

Yora said:


> I think the biggest difference between WWN and OSE would be in the rate at which characters level up. OSE has a pretty clear system while WWN does not. But since adventures for these games generally don't assume that characters will gain several levels between the start and the end like a good number of larger d20 adventures, that really shouldn't ever become an issue.



I think it’d be more tricky if I were trying to run a modern D&D adventure rather than something targeted at a B/X-compatible system. My expectation is converting the creatures over will be easy. I expect most of the work will be fixing the adventure itself, which I’d need regardless.

_Halls of the Blood King_ is time-limited, but it’s written and keyed like it’s a site-based adventure. It uses the events table to help move NPCs around, but it feels like it will be too rigid. I’m thinking of adding schedules and using a party planning structure for the events in the Great Hall.

This is an area where I find WWN is actually pretty lacking. I like the stuff for creating exploration challenges, but the investigation and social challenge sections are pretty lacking or just bad (or at least antithetical to sandbox play).



Yora said:


> The main difference in character abilities are the skills in WWN. But I think they only provide an alternative way to do certain things. They don't give characters new powers to do things that OSE characters couldn't.



WWN characters are generally more capable their B/X counterparts, or so WWN claims. I’m hoping (and expect) that’s true, though _Halls of the Blood King_ doesn’t seem like an adventure where you can be successful by trying to kill everything or everyone you meet.

No one is the party even has a magic weapon. They did find some *ancient salvage* last session, but I don’t think a modified weapon would count as “magical”. If it were necessary, the priest could use her magic, but they wouldn’t be able to rest and recover (because of the adventure’s time limit).


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## Yora (Nov 8, 2021)

That might all be true. But I was only talking about the comparison between WWN and OSE.


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## kenada (Nov 8, 2021)

Yora said:


> That might all be true. But I was only talking about the comparison between WWN and OSE.



Ah. Maybe I misunderstood your post. I think your assessment is fair. I’m going to go a bit more into my thoughts on differences since I’m actually running a version of OSE I hacked into WWN. This isn’t necessarily in response to your post (more like prompted by it).

What I’ve found hacking OSE into WWN is that WWN is pretty lacking as an exploration-based game. Stuff’s just missing to make that work, or it’s incomplete. For example, I’d expect the Dolmenwood hex crawl to run worse under WWN because WWN’s exploration rules are incomplete to missing. I’d expect adventures with a strong exploration component to suffer problems to varying degrees. That’s also why I’ve been referring to it a story-driven sandbox game.

Aside from that, the equipment chapter is also pretty lacking. It wastes a lot of space discussing different armors, but it says nothing about what various bits of adventuring gear do. Can you light oil and throw it? How does splash damage work? I know SWN has rules for grenades, but I ended pulling from 3e on splash damage. I want splash damage to feel like D&D, so no saving throws after attacking a spot.

The biggest place where I deviated was using my exploration procedure, but I also changed how XP works. I use both individual and group goals. Individual goals are decided at the start of the session. Group goals are decided at the end. You gain 3 XP at the end of the session if you complete an individual goal (player decides), 1 XP each other Pc’s goal you help complete (player decides), and 3 XP for completing the group goal (group decides). To gain a new level, spend XP equal to six times the next level. This can be done only at the end of a session.

I also replaced reaction rolls with a Cha/Convince skill check against the reaction table, and I based retainers on Cha/Lead instead of having a Charisma-based table. The retainer’s reaction to your offer is based on a Cha/Convince skill check versus the reaction table from OSE. As a rule of thumb, I want players making these rolls instead of having me roll stuff behind the screen that’s modified by their stats. That also helps keep them engaged and gives added value to their skills, and it helps reduce the number of similar but arbitrarily different mechanics.

Anyway, going through the process of hacking OSE is what prompted my questions over the last few pages. I kept running into stuff that was missing bits or lacked clarity once one dialed down the verbosity.


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## Campbell (Nov 8, 2021)

I think the Expert as a character class and defining a number of skills that are very much useful within society, but not adventuring says stuff about what SWN/WWN expect play to entail. That adventuring and exploration are important, but not nearly intended to be the whole game.


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## kenada (Nov 8, 2021)

Campbell said:


> I think the Expert as a character class and defining a number of skills that are very much useful within society, but not adventuring says stuff about what SWN/WWN expect play to entail. That adventuring and exploration are important, but not nearly intended to be the whole game.



Which makes the investigation and social challenges sections all the more disappointing. For social challenges in particular, it could use some advice on designing factions _in the adventure_ (versus those that are part of the faction mini-game) and how to make their presence interesting. That can include the usual factions in the dungeon setup in OSR games, but it should also extend to the peoples and groups that are created while rolling up tags and synthesizing them into e.g., court intrigue. All it really gives is some questions to ask yourself when designing NPCs. The investigation stuff is a pure railroad, which I feel has no place in an otherwise sandbox-oriented game.

I’d also argue that social skills should always be rolled against the reaction table (or the PbtA result ladder of 6−, 7–9, 10+) and never against a fixed difficulty. That gives the GM easily guidelines for how to respond. If your advice is, “The difficulty is privately set by you based on the quality of their offering versus the magnitude of their demand,” but then you go on to say, “A failed social negotiation should almost never end in a simple flat refusal. There should always be some way forward for the PCs, and some evident means of improving their case,” then making the roll is almost pointless. It’s framed as task resolution, but it’s not. At least with rolling against the reaction table, you’re transparently treating it as a prompt.


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## Yora (Nov 8, 2021)

I am finding myself in the position that I got an idea for a campaign element that will require some custom content for characters. Which I think might be interesting to discuss as a genreral topic here.

In my specific case now, I got an idea to make it that all spellcasters belong to a single tradition inspired by the warlock (the one really cool thing in D&D 5th). That seems fairly easy to do with the WWN mage. Arts and spells already use a similar format for spells (might be more than a coincidence), and the new Sorcerer tradition can simply be a comnination of various High Magic and Necromancy arts and spells. This is really quick and dirty and can be done in an hour. Nice.

But the idea also really invites the existence of demon hunters to fight demons and sorcerers, and they would have to do so without making use of spells. In OSE for example, making a simple custom variant of fighter with four anti-magic abilities would be enough to do the job.But for WWN, this is a bit more involved.
I think a good starting point would be to make it a spell-less mage tradition, like the healer or vowed. This would allow for both Warrior/DH and Expert/DH, which I think is quite cool. Two character archetypes for the price of one.
Healers get one fixed art plus seven customizable ones, and vowed get three fixed arts and seven customizable ones at 10th level. Probably a good idea to keep it at that, and go with 1+7 as well. But here it gets challenging. If you have 8 arts to customize your character, how many arts does the tradition need in total? I guess 12 would be good, but if you can freely choose when to take them, and it's really just for one or two campaigns, maybe 10 would also work. But then the next question. Even if I can come up with 10 arts that are counter-magic without looking like casting spells, how strong should each one be?

Magic Resitance: Character gets a bonus to all Magic saves. How much? +1? +2? Should it increase with level?
Break Spell: Character can make another save against a spell. A Main, On Turn, or Instant action? Commit effort for the scene or day? Limited to once per scene or not?

There's a lot of variables, but unlike d20 games, there's not a great amount of existing abilities that you can slightly tweak and reskin to have something comparable.

Do you have any thoughts on how to approach this?


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## kenada (Nov 8, 2021)

Yora said:


> Do you have any thoughts on how to approach this?



Do you have the Deluxe edition? It has an additional chapter, “Arts of the Gyre”, with several partial classes that use arts for customization. I’d look there for inspiration as well as in the user-created content post on r/wwn. In particular, Kevin Crawford has posted a prototype alchemist, which I believe will be included in some form in an upcoming supplement for WWN.

It seems like partial classes choose between ten and fifteen arts (without a relationship between how many picks they get and how big their pool is). You can look at existing partial classes as benchmarks for arts, but the “Uncanny Powers and Abilities” section of “Creatures of a Far Age” chapter might also be useful. Arts seem to be equivalent to a 1 or 2 point power. If your idea for an art seems too much better or worse than that, it might need tweaking.


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## Yora (Nov 9, 2021)

I ended up going with a Focus instead of a mage tradition.

At level 1, you get Magic as a bonus skill, an Effort pool (Magic + Wis), and the Sense Magic art to sense magic effects when committing ongoing Effort.
At level 2, you get the Counter Magic art, that lets you commit Effort for the day to make an opposed Magic skill check to interrupt another character's spell casting, and the Suppress Magic art, which lets you commit Effort for the day to suppress an ongoing magical effect for 1d6+character level rounds, unless it was cast by a higher level character.

You do get quite a lot, but it does take up two of your five Any foci, and you get much less use out of the Magic skill than a Mage does, so your Effort pool is probably quite low. If you have 3 Effort, that's one for sensing magic, and it lets you counter and suppress magic once per day. That's nice, but I don't think that amazing. And it's primarily meant for worldbuilding, not necessarily a great option for Player Characters.


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## kenada (Nov 18, 2021)

Saw this on reddit, the designer of the official sheet posted a clean version (without the auto calculations).


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## Eyes of Nine (Nov 18, 2021)

Just popping in to say glad to find this thread. I ran a 3-shot of SWN earlier this year, and the players want to jump back in for a short 2-3 session adventure between chapters of the D&D 5e campaign another player is running.

Anyone want to share their SWN 2-3 session adventure concepts? Homebrew or published adventures are cool - well really anything is good for inspiration.

My 3-shotter was about a hidden school of psionic students (so all PCs are psionic) where their school has been found and burning down - but everyone seems to have been captured. So the PCs have to go find who did it and end up taking over a ship after freeing the teachers and students. So now they've got a ship - but haven't really tracked down who was behind the kidnapping.


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## kenada (Nov 20, 2021)

I haven’t run SWN, but I’ve had good luck with the adventure generators in WWN. Roll an adventure seed, roll some tags for the world where the person behind the kidnapping resides, and synthesize it into something interesting. Unlike WWN, you don’t even need to worry about a map and key.


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## kenada (Nov 22, 2021)

Session three is down. We got to do some in-town stuff. I used my new rule for social roles where you roll against the reaction table. I feel like that went really well. The thief had stolen something and was looking for a fence, so I had him roll Cha/Connect. He got neutral, so he found a fence who was willing to deal with him but not particularly willing to bargain (especially since he had partially destroyed his loot in the process of stealing it).

I was also able to get the town prepped for this session, so I was able to use the tags and plots I had generated to make things interesting. I’d generated community tags plus a few organizations. That gave me enough NPCs to use the tavern time technique from the Alexandrian to have people show up the PCs could meet.

I also got to exercise the exploration procedure a bit more. It’s a bit of an adjustment to just thinking about things in terms of time, but it ends up feeling pretty natural. We had a conversation when they wanted to leave, and I was like: when _do_ you want to leave? The system doesn’t assume anything, so they could just do what felt natural. That was also the case for exploring to look for the place they wanted to find (it increases the time it takes to “move through a hex” by 4×).

We ended with starting _Halls of the Blood King_. For the conversion, I kept most things pretty much identical. I tweaked some of the math because WWN does do some things differently (such as having the attack bonus usually be equal to the creature’s HD). The biggest change was vampires. Doing level drain feels too harsh, but the suggested ability for undead in the book (“draining”) is too mild.

I ended up making their touch “draining” but also had it cause the target to gain System Strain. If that maxes you out, you turn into a vampire in three days. That should keep vampires as a scary foe you don’t want to fight while not being so punishing that they drain two levels just by successfully attacking you. As a rule of thumb, I try to tweak non-damaging abilities when I convert them over from OSE to bring them closer to how WWN does things (e.g., ghoul paralysis only requires one saving throw per turn per ghoul).

After four sessions or so (including the one-shot), I’d say I’m pretty happy with WWN. I did hack a bunch of OSE stuff into it, but the core is still very WWN. The system gives us enough structure while staying out of our way, which seems to be the sweet spot for my group. Everything is very OSR, but there’s fun stuff for players, and it’s not quite as brutal (but still very dangerous, especially since the most hit points anyone has at 3rd level is 13).


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## Liminal Syzygy (Nov 27, 2021)

Yora said:


> I forgot that I had linked the file when I cleaned up my online files.
> I think it would be this one. I wrote that at a note for players in a specific campaign as a quick heads up for notable differences. There might be some changes to the actual rules that I forgot I made, and I id leave out some things I don't plan on using, but I think it's still a decent summary.



Thank you!


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Dec 7, 2021)

TwoSix said:


> I'm planning on doing my Dark Sun WWN game with the 7 player group.



A bit of some thread excavation digging this back up. I’m guessing you did a straight import of the SWN psychic, true? Any other significant adjustments you put in for a Dark Sun vibe?


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## kenada (Jan 9, 2022)

Finally finished up running _Halls of the Blood King_ using WWN. All I can say is it went pretty darn well. In spite of the power differential between WWN and B/X characters, the adventure still felt scary. There actually wasn’t any combat at all, but it still felt rewarding due to the way XP works in WWN.

I feel like it’s actually blown open the campaign a bit now because the PCs made several new friends during the adventure (both Seleana and the Princess of Blood returned back with the PCs). They also saved the guards, so got even more Renown than usual, which will be handy since they want to improve their property now (yay domain rules). Of course, there’s also the wonderful tools for keeping the adventure going.

I have my quibbles with WWN, but I have to say it’s quite impressive that we’ve played six sessions with only a couple of combats, and it it still feels like we’ve accomplished a ton. That’s not something I’d usually say for a D&D-like system. You’d think you need combat to keep things exciting, but you don’t.

Edit: I replaced the _sun ray pistol_ with a laser pistol from SWN. My players love the idea that vampires take double damage from lasers. I also converted Seleana over to an SWN character. Really digging the compatibility between systems for injecting a bit of extra weird into things.


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## Malmuria (Jan 9, 2022)

kenada said:


> Finally finished up running _Halls of the Blood King_ using WWN. All I can say is it went pretty darn well. In spite of the power differential between WWN and B/X characters, the adventure still felt scary. There actually wasn’t any combat at all, but it still felt rewarding due to the way XP works in WWN.
> 
> I feel like it’s actually blown open the campaign a bit now because the PCs made several new friends during the adventure (both Seleana and the Princess of Blood returned back with the PCs). They also saved the guards, so got even more Renown than usual, which will be handy since they want to improve their property now (yay domain rules). Of course, there’s also the wonderful tools for keeping the adventure going.
> 
> ...



Do you feel that WWN combat is more fun than b/x combat?  And what makes WWN good out of combat?


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## kenada (Jan 9, 2022)

Malmuria said:


> Do you feel that WWN combat is more fun than b/x combat?



My players bounced off OSE pretty hard, so our B/X combat experience is pretty limited. I think the way WWN does side-based combat, especially with actions like Make a Snap Attack, feels a bit more fair. The characters are also (individually) more powerful. For my players, that translates into feeling more fun. I’d put it somewhere between B/X and 3e in that things are still pretty simple, but it has a familiar action economy with special abilities.



Malmuria said:


> And what makes WWN good out of combat?



Two things really stick out: XP and skill checks. WWN offers several options for handling XP, which I’ve combined together. Players each decide on several individual goals at the start of the session. If the complete one, they get 3 XP (they decide). If they help someone, they 1 XP (they decide). At the end of the session, the group decides on a group goal (keep or change the current one). They also get 3 XP if they completed the current group goal. Those two things allow for a reward loop that isn’t just killing monsters or finding treasure. The latter in particular didn’t feel good to my players because it turned the game into something different from what they wanted (more of a heist game than a fantasy adventure game where the characters might have other agendas).

The thing I like about the skill system is it’s pretty simple, but it’s not too simple. There’s a pretty nice variety of different skills, but you’re also encouraged to let the PCs succeed if it’s something their character should do. I text our thief the value of treasure throughout the session since I figure he’d just know what looks valuable. That makes for some fun interactions when he’s wants to take something weird, and no one has any idea why he would want to do that. While I’m not a fan of difficulty classes, I can use the default of 8, which I like. It makes skill checks go pretty quickly. (Except for social checks, which I have the PCs roll against the reaction table.)

It reminds me of games like Scum and Villainy where skills define what you do, but it’s not like you’re just rolling them procedurally. If you’re rolling, it’s usually (though admittedly not always) because it’s important. I’m not saying WWN is a Story Now game, but it gets out of my way and lets me improvise a lot as a GM, which lets me drift it that way without a lot friction. Our best sessions in other systems are when there’s a lot of chemistry between characters, and we’re just playing to see what happens, and WWN seems to do a good job of letting us do that while also providing the crunchy bits my players particularly like.


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## Aldarc (Feb 7, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> 6) Half-class system is a lot better than multiclass systems of 3E/5E and offers great options.



I have been re-reading WWN and making a few sample characters to get my feet wet into this game, and this aspect of the game continues to impress me. There are so many _viable archetypes_ made possible through the combination of partial classes. But this also makes the game easier to hack for new archetypes, as one really only needs to build a Partial Class that slots into the existing framework. 

I'm personally impressed with how Kevin Crawford managed to create a Necromancer much closer to the popular conception of the archetype than D&D has managed in all its years. Moreover, the fact that one can hypothetically make a partial Necromancer that "multiclasses" with a Warrior for a "Death Knight" or an Expert is also a huge boon in the game's favor.


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## gamerprinter (Feb 8, 2022)

While I actually picked up the basic rules (PDF), I've never actually played. I currently publish material for Starfinder RPG, but I post a lot in the Facebook Stars Without Numbers community, mostly illustrations, though I did plug a Starfinder product I made that isn't really Starfinder, so much as just third party rules, allowing you to create custom, entire star systems (stars, planets, moons, trojans, belts, etc.) and the stat block for them, as well as a point system to grow the technology in a given system overtime. That's my only connection to SWN/WWN.


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## kenada (Feb 8, 2022)

Last session we finally got to do some _actual_ exploration. The party headed back to town, then they returned back to their domain. Along the way, we used the exploration procedure I posted a few days ago. It worked really well. I had an event written out in my prep that came out of the story generation stuff that WWN provides. One of the NPCs in town was having a secret affair, and it turned out the shack on the back of the PCs’ property is a very popular place for illicit and illegal encounters.

So it’s a new month, and he caught up with them while they were traveling. The time-based approach made it very easy to see where everyone was in relationship to each other. He caught up with the PCs because they were traveling with a cart full of stuff back to their property. Their TC was about double of his, so he would move through two hexes in the time it took them to do one. They were out only a couple of days before he caught up. That should make for an entertaining next session when he goes into the shack to find it’s been taken over by the vampire princess.

The event system was also good, and I’ve extended it to working with dungeons. Having each day defined by “something happened, let’s find out” is much more interesting than just wandering around the wilderness with infrequent encounter checks. I expect the same should be true in dungeons. I posted the table I’m using as a starting point for dungeons over in the PF2 house rules thread.



Aldarc said:


> I have been re-reading WWN and making a few sample characters to get my feet wet into this game, and this aspect of the game continues to impress me. There are so many _viable archetypes_ made possible through the combination of partial classes. But this also makes the game easier to hack for new archetypes, as one really only needs to build a Partial Class that slots into the existing framework.
> 
> I'm personally impressed with how Kevin Crawford managed to create a Necromancer much closer to the popular conception of the archetype than D&D has managed in all its years. Moreover, the fact that one can hypothetically make a partial Necromancer that "multiclasses" with a Warrior for a "Death Knight" or an Expert is also a huge boon in the game's favor.



Someone posted this over on r/WWN recently. That’s a lot of combinations not even counting classes from other sources. It’s really impressive how so few mechanics make for such diverse characters. The priest in my game is a necromancer/healer. I didn’t quite want to do the blood priest for a cleric-like class. The player seems to really enjoy being good both at healing and blowing up undead.


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## kenada (Feb 9, 2022)

Kevin Crawford shared an update to the SWN offset print Kickstarter. Books are going out (got my shipping notice today), and the Kickstarter for the _Atlas of the Latter Earth_ is expected this summer. Kevin put a preview up on his Google Drive. There’s a bunch of stuff for low magic and no magic campaigns. The Wise is interesting. I wonder if we should expect to see more partial classes for the basic archetypes (like how there are a bunch of mage ones in the “Arts of the Gyre” chapter of the deluxe edition of _Worlds Without Number_).


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## Aldarc (Feb 9, 2022)

kenada said:


> Someone posted this over on r/WWN recently. That’s a lot of combinations not even counting classes from other sources. It’s really impressive how so few mechanics make for such diverse characters. The priest in my game is a necromancer/healer. I didn’t quite want to do the blood priest for a cleric-like class. The player seems to really enjoy being good both at healing and blowing up undead.



IMHO, that's the magic of the system. I appreciate the lack of a clear arcane/divine magic split. There is only "the mage," which itself may have a number of partial classes and traditions. For example, the fact that one can easily make a High Mage/Healer - the wizard healer that has elluded finding success in D&D - while being pretty balanced within the framework is impressive. 

Furthermore, consider how the partial class features are often not locked in; they are more like True 20 talents/feats or warlock invocations that the player can choose from to build their character. That also opens up a lot of additional build and play possibilities. 



kenada said:


> Kevin Crawford shared an update to the SWN offset print Kickstarter. Books are going out (got my shipping notice today), and the Kickstarter for the _Atlas of the Latter Earth_ is expected this summer. Kevin put a preview up on his Google Drive. There’s a bunch of stuff for low magic and no magic campaigns. The Wise is interesting. I wonder if we should expect to see more partial classes for the basic archetypes (like how there are a bunch of mage ones in the “Arts of the Gyre” chapter of the deluxe edition of _Worlds Without Number_).



I'm a fan of the Wise since it also covers the more subtle magic of witches, seers, or even a village priest. 

I wonder if he will design any partial warrior classes as well. I almost would not be surprised if a Bard partial mage shows up. I may have seen a fan version of the Bard for WWN somewhere on Reddit.


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## Eyes of Nine (Feb 9, 2022)

Feels like WWN is the system Numenera should have had all along 
Now I can use all my Numenera non-core books and play with a system that I like...


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## Fenris-77 (Feb 9, 2022)

I just realized I only have the free version of WWN (although I own everything for SWN). I'm going to go remedy that right now...


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## Aldarc (Feb 10, 2022)

Eyes of Nine said:


> Feels like WWN is the system Numenera should have had all along
> Now I can use all my Numenera non-core books and play with a system that I like...



I’m not sure about that. The player archetypes in Numenera fit its setting incredibly well. While there is a lot of fantasy in Numenera, the game also leans more into some of the science-fiction with its foci: e.g., Talks With Machines, Fuses Flesh and Steel, Dances with Dark Matter, etc. WWN has a lot of science-fantasy, but Numenera is more overt with its “sciency” aspects. 

Also, IME, I have seen so many different opinions - from my players and online - about what would have been a “better” system for Numenera than its native Cypher System: e.g., Fate, Cortex, WWN, PbtA, etc. I think that what one considers the “best” system for Numenera often says more about one’s expectations for what the Ninth World should be or what one wants it to be rather than what it is.  

That said, one could definitely run the Ninth World using WWN, but that would also move the game closer to D&D style fantasy than it already is.


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## kenada (Feb 10, 2022)

Anyone do anything with projects in WWN? My players have taken on a couple (first one is to rebuild the manor they acquired, and the second is to get people to come settle the area around it). There is some sort of help for costing this out, but the advice feels really hand-wavey when it comes to actually running the projects at the table.


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## kenada (Feb 10, 2022)

Amusing conversation with one of my players while I work on prepping for Saturday.


> *Me:* I’m working on factions. Finland Expeditionary Forces has the “Useful Idiots” asset. Can you guess what that is?
> *Player:* That better not be us lol
> *Me:* Not exactly, but it is “adventurers”.



Yeah, the local military leadership views adventurers as disposable. It just felt so right to give their faction that asset when I wrote them up.


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## Eyes of Nine (Feb 11, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> I’m not sure about that. The player archetypes in Numenera fit its setting incredibly well. While there is a lot of fantasy in Numenera, the game also leans more into some of the science-fiction with its foci: e.g., Talks With Machines, Fuses Flesh and Steel, Dances with Dark Matter, etc. WWN has a lot of science-fantasy, but Numenera is more overt with its “sciency” aspects.
> 
> Also, IME, I have seen so many different opinions - from my players and online - about what would have been a “better” system for Numenera than its native Cypher System: e.g., Fate, Cortex, WWN, PbtA, etc. I think that what one considers the “best” system for Numenera often says more about one’s expectations for what the Ninth World should be or what one wants it to be rather than what it is.
> 
> That said, one could definitely run the Ninth World using WWN, but that would also move the game closer to D&D style fantasy than it already is.



Fair.

Here's what I liked about Numenara. The setting. The description of the character "I am a robust Glaive who drives really fast cars" (not a real description). The art. The science/fantasy meld. The character advancement system.

Here's what I didn't really like. XP as currency to change role outcomes. The "tiers" of success based on 3 - just so we can continue to use a d20. Unnecessarily fiddly imo. Poor/No social rules.


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## Aldarc (Feb 11, 2022)

Eyes of Nine said:


> Fair.
> 
> Here's what I liked about Numenara. The setting. The description of the character "I am a robust Glaive who drives really fast cars" (not a real description). The art. The science/fantasy meld. The character advancement system.
> 
> Here's what I didn't really like. XP as currency to change role outcomes. The "tiers" of success based on 3 - just so we can continue to use a d20. Unnecessarily fiddly imo. Poor/No social rules.



I can sympathize with the dissatisfaction people may have for the Cypher System when it comes to playing the Numenera setting, as some of my own group have expressed similar issues. I have no desire to steer you towards or away from the Cypher System, or WWN for that matter. WWN is hackable enough that one should manage to fill in the gaps of more tone-appropriate abilities, spells, and options for the Ninth World. My own preference, however, is to build the world _from_ or _around _the options in the system and see where that takes me.


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## kenada (Feb 19, 2022)

Is the *Relocate Assets* action the same thing as a *Move Assets* action? There are several asset special abilities that refer to the former, but it’s not defined anywhere.


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## kenada (Feb 19, 2022)

After doing my first round of the faction game, I’m not sure. It feels super clunky, and the book’s explanation and organization of things is confusing.

A few observations:

It sucks to be a small faction. You start out with no assets, so your only option is to generate treasure for awhile and hope no one notices you or acts against you.
It’s probably a good idea to run a few turns prior to the start of the campaign. Otherwise, everyone starts out with no treasure and all their assets back at their base of influence. I guess? It’s not specified. (I did the latter.)
It’s not really clear how overt conflict is supposed to work. If I want to charge in and smash your base, I can’t just go hit it. I have to establish access to it. So I guess you really want something to infiltrate because there are no siege assets (Siege Experts just give you treasure).
I wish “in the same location” was better defined. The game uses a freaking hex map! Why not use it to simplify faction movement and position? SWN just assumes you can attack any world. This part feels really ill-defined and/or considered.
Why was asset type removed from SWN? Some assets don’t really make sense as something that can move. Why should Cooperative Businesses, which are subtle, be able to just mosey over to someone else’s cities and subvert them?
I also dropped one faction because none of the mechanics make any sense for it. The party brought a vampire back with them when they returned from the iterum where I ran _Halls of the Blood King_. She’s going to eventually want to create more of her kind and expand her influence. None of the assets really make sense though even though it seems like she should develop into a faction.


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## Aldarc (Feb 19, 2022)

kenada said:


> Is the *Relocate Assets* action the same thing as a *Move Assets* action? There are several asset special abilities that refer to the former, but it’s not defined anywhere.



I will look, but I think that for a lot more rule specific questions like this, I would almost recommend the WWN Subreddit more. You are likelier to even get an answer from Kevin Crawford (aka _Cardinal Ximenes_).

Edit: From what I can tell (pp. 324-326), yes, it's the same thing.


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## kenada (Feb 19, 2022)

Ran today’s game. Things went very well, though I ended up needing NPCs I hadn’t converted to the new format yet. I need to add an exploration activity for tracking, but I have an idea for how that should work. After mulling it over, I think I’m going to replace the faction game with something that’s more useful to my needed.

My current thinking is factions can engage in a number of Operations equal to their Wealth. Ops are tracked with a countdown clock and are typically related to one of their attributes. If they engage in more than that, they have to pay upkeep in Treasure. To help reduce the burden of having too many Ops, they can obtain Assets that allow them to engage in more Ops or perhaps in certain specialized Ops. Progression in an Operation would be determined by rolling at the start of the round in faction game (like the fortune roll in BitD). When the clock completes, the faction gains XP. The more difficult the Op, the bigger the clock, but the more XP they get for fulfilling it.

What I dislike about the faction game is it doesn’t fit my conceptual model of a faction. I have a cult, but it’s not some evil doomsday cult. On the other hand, people may not want its influence to spread. I feel like it doesn’t model that very well. If I want to infiltrate and subvert or scout things, the units available just don’t feel all that great. It’s hard to know what you “should” buy. I would rather just be able to state what my goal is and have some guidelines for costing it out and managing it. If you’re going to force me to rely on fictional positioning for things like permission and location, then just let me go all the way. It’s fiddly in a way that feels at odds with the rest of the system.


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## kenada (Feb 23, 2022)

Kevin Crawford posted a preview of the map from the upcoming Atlas of the Latter Earth supplement along with a nation writeup for Atlantis.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Feb 23, 2022)

The Zakathi sound like a nice candidate for use of an Athasian dwarf.


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## Aldarc (Feb 24, 2022)

kenada said:


> Kevin Crawford posted a preview of the map from the upcoming Atlas of the Latter Earth supplement along with a nation writeup for Atlantis.



A pre-Hyborian Atlantis style campaign actually does seem like a good fit for Worlds Without Number.


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## kenada (Feb 26, 2022)

Hmm. Interesting. I’ve been running an OSE/WWN hack that is focused mostly on restating WWN. I’m now working on a revision that shifts the game more strongly towards OSE. I think my eventual goal is to make it mostly OSE with the elements from WWN that I think are particularly strong. I started with classes, and it really struck me how little classes in WWN actually get. Let me explain.

My approach for classes is to treat the WWN classes as groups to which the OSE classes belongs. That means any class in the expert group gets Masterful Expertise and Quick Learner. On top of that, you get the class abilities defined in OSE. My impression of OSE classes had always been that they were pretty tepid (especially compared to newer editions). With the extra group chassis, they’re extra awesome. The part from WWN shores up their baseline competency, and then the abilities give them flavor. For example, thieves are really good at skills now, but they can also read almost any text and use scrolls.

Where I’m getting at with WWN is an expert with the thief background is basically like other classes except a bit better at skills. Even with foci (which I also plan to include in a limited form), you don’t get that kind of class distinction. I guess that’s one of the downsides of a generic class system. While you can represent a lot of concepts, they’re mechanically less distinct than a system that sets out concept-specific abilities. Is that a good or bad thing? I don’t know. I am curious however whether my players will want to convert early (rather than save this for our next campaign).

Edit: Fixed typo, not → now


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## Thomas Shey (Feb 26, 2022)

kenada said:


> Where I’m getting at with WWN is an expert with the thief background is basically like other classes except a bit better at skills. Even with foci (which I also plan to include in a limited form), you don’t get that kind of class distinction. I guess that’s one of the downsides of a generic class system. While you can represent a lot of concepts, they’re mechanically less distinct than a system that sets out concept-specific abilities. Is that a good or bad thing? I don’t know. I am curious however whether my players will want to convert early (rather than save this for our next campaign).




My own feeling in the OD&D days was having to do new classes to just represent a concept was not a virtue.  Its one reason I went over to heavy duty build systems for many years.


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## kenada (Feb 26, 2022)

Thomas Shey said:


> My own feeling in the OD&D days was having to do new classes to just represent a concept was not a virtue.  Its one reason I went over to heavy duty build systems for many years.



I’m not trying saying that needing different classes is a virtue or that OSE is doing it right. I was just surprised by how little you actually get in WWN (as well as how much classes in OSE got since it had been my perception they were pretty meager compared to their counterparts in newer editions). Aside from your class abilities, which are impactful, most customization is done through foci in WWN. That’s like only getting feats to customize your characters and few to no class abilities in 3e. The thief archetype character in our group is 4th level and has three foci that make him similar to traditional thief classes, but he still has fewer abilities and requires at least 2nd level to have all those foci.

Casters are a bit better in the customization department (gaining arts in addition to spells), but they’re pretty limited in what they can do. Arts aren’t a replacement for having utility spells, and your ability to cast spells per day goes up very slowly (especially if you have a partial mage class). The priest in our group is built as a healer/necromancer. The idea was that she would be good at healing and trashing undead, but killing undead competes with using her single spell slot for other things. Additionally, if the party avoids combat (which it has), her healer arts are basically useless.


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## Thomas Shey (Feb 26, 2022)

Well, don't get me wrong: as long as you're using conventional classes, having some of that attached is a virtue.  One of the things I've said is not a perfect feature of most BRP games is that they largely have no way for a character to represent anything that isn't an attribute or easily expressed as a skill.  Some things just _don't work that way_. Which doesn't mean you can express all concepts without them. You either do something feat-like (which is the PF2e approach) or you bake it into the class.


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## kenada (Feb 26, 2022)

Thomas Shey said:


> Well, don't get me wrong: as long as you're using conventional classes, having some of that attached is a virtue.  One of the things I've said is not a perfect feature of most BRP games is that they largely have no way for a character to represent anything that isn't an attribute or easily expressed as a skill.  Some things just _don't work that way_. Which doesn't mean you can express all concepts without them. You either do something feat-like (which is the PF2e approach) or you bake it into the class.



I guess I’m a bit confused. I’m not sure we disagree? WWN has classes, but there’s not much attached to them. You have two ways to customize: foci (feats) or mage partial classes. The former is like PF2 if you got a quarter as many feat picks. The latter is like PF1 archetypes where you replace half the class with something else. Notably, the latter is only available to magic-users. If you want to make a thief or knight or whatever concept, your options are really limited. Picking a few foci just doesn’t feel like enough, especially since you make half of your picks in the first two levels.


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## TwoSix (Feb 26, 2022)

kenada said:


> I’m not trying saying that needing different classes is a virtue or that OSE is doing it right. I was just surprised by how little you actually get in WWN (as well as how much classes in OSE got since it had been my perception they were pretty meager compared to their counterparts in newer editions). Aside from your class abilities, which are impactful, most customization is done through foci in WWN. That’s like only getting feats to customize your characters and few to no class abilities in 3e. The thief archetype character in our group is 4th level and has three foci that make him similar to traditional thief classes, but he still has fewer abilities and requires at least 2nd level to have all those foci.



I'll be honest, I'm pretty OK with that.  Simple classes allows more room for the character to be customized by narrative events giving custom rewards.  It takes away _player-facing_ build decisions, sure, but I think that's a feature for OSR style play.


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## kenada (Feb 27, 2022)

TwoSix said:


> I'll be honest, I'm pretty OK with that.  Simple classes allows more room for the character to be customized by narrative events giving custom rewards.  It takes away _player-facing_ build decisions, sure, but I think that's a feature for OSR style play.



That’s not WWN though. You have skills to pick, everyone gets 5–7 foci (from a list of 35 or so), and mages have arts to pick in addition to their spells. Other than a B/X-based chassis, WWN feels a lot closer in spirit to 3e than it does other OSR games. It certainly has more player-facing build decisions than OSE (and consequently B/X).


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## kenada (Feb 27, 2022)

And to clarify: I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I just found it surprising that OSE classes get more mechanical stuff than what you can build in WWN even with all its extra customization options. That’s not what I expected.


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## Thomas Shey (Feb 27, 2022)

kenada said:


> I guess I’m a bit confused. I’m not sure we disagree? WWN has classes, but there’s not much attached to them. You have two ways to customize: foci (feats) or mage partial classes. The former is like PF2 if you got a quarter as many feat picks. The latter is like PF1 archetypes where you replace half the class with something else. Notably, the latter is only available to magic-users. If you want to make a thief or knight or whatever concept, your options are really limited. Picking a few foci just doesn’t feel like enough, especially since you make half of your picks in the first two levels.




We don't, really.  I have some issues with both the class ability and the feat approach, but that's back to my whole thing about exception based design.  But if you're gonna do that (and after all, that's D&D derivatives all over), one or the other is the way to go.


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## Thomas Shey (Feb 27, 2022)

TwoSix said:


> I'll be honest, I'm pretty OK with that.  Simple classes allows more room for the character to be customized by narrative events giving custom rewards.  It takes away _player-facing_ build decisions, sure, but I think that's a feature for OSR style play.




I'm unable to be enthused about my character definition only meaning things at the discretion of the GM.


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## kenada (Mar 30, 2022)

Not sure why I’m still subscribed to r/wwn when I’m working on a switch to a homebrew system, but I saw today that Kevin Crawford posted several more countries from the upcoming _Atlas of the Latter Earth_.


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## Aldarc (Mar 30, 2022)

kenada said:


> Not sure why I’m still subscribed to r/wwn when I’m working on a switch to a homebrew system, but I saw today that Kevin Crawford posted several more countries from the upcoming _Atlas of the Latter Earth_.



Because it's still a good system whose writer produces quality content?


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## kenada (Mar 30, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> Because it's still a good system whose writer produces quality content?



While I wouldn’t call it _bad_, I wouldn’t call it _good_ either. When I first read the rules, my impression was very positive, but my opinion of the system has dropped the more I’ve run it. I think some of it is the kind of sandbox WWN offers is not actually the kind I am interested in running, and the system clashed with that, but there are a few things that I think are general problems.

The game is too verbose. It’s difficult to find things when you need to look them up (even if you know the right section), and it gets in the way of leaning and understanding the game;
The rules are incomplete. This seems to affect what I want to do than the story-driven sandbox style that WWN seems designed around. The game would be better if it picked one style and didn’t pretend it could do the other;
The GM tools kind of suck. The faction rules are heavily oriented towards factions that deploy assets as detailed in the book. Projects are basically GM fiat. I found myself wishing for a fiction-first approach and something more robust for projects.
There’s also an aesthetic issue. I think WWN has convinced me I really just don’t like generic systems. While WWN is class-based, most of your character is realized through customization. I would rather have archetypical classes with that reflected in their mechanics. I’ve also talked about problems with partial casters. For us, I think having fewer but (much) more effectful spells is the wrong tradeoff.

There are also some issues I have with the game’s attitude towards mining real world cultures for ideas and its depiction of the anakim and blighted. After seeing the way blighted played out the first time they were introduced in my game, I think I’m going to need to revisit their portrayal in my homebrew setting.

Update: To avoid derailing this thread, I’ll be bowing out unless someone responds directly or @-mentions me.


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## Aldarc (Apr 23, 2022)

Kevin Crawford has posted an preview of the upcoming *Bard* for WWN.


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## kenada (Apr 23, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> Kevin Crawford has posted an preview of the upcoming *Bard* for WWN.



It seems like it doesn’t get most of the benefits of being a partial expert class, but Kevin explained in the comments why he went that route (more hp, having more non-mage partial classes). I agree with one of the responses there that effort seems like a very mage-y thing. It’d be neat if it tied into something more expert-y feeling like their skills.


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## Aldarc (Apr 26, 2022)

kenada said:


> It seems like it doesn’t get most of the benefits of being a partial expert class, but Kevin explained in the comments why he went that route (more hp, having more non-mage partial classes). I agree with one of the responses there that effort seems like a very mage-y thing. It’d be neat if it tied into something more expert-y feeling like their skills.



One could probably make a good "warlord" with a Warrior/Bard.


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## Aldarc (Apr 27, 2022)

And now the *Illusionist* mage. Crawford is prodigious.


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## kenada (Jun 1, 2022)

_The Atlas of the Latter Earth_ Kickstarter is live.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Jun 1, 2022)

Glad I caught this in time to get the limited $70 level in time before it filled.


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## dbm (Jun 1, 2022)

They are currently about half pledged for, so definitely worth backing quickly for anyone wanting one. It’s the same printer as the main book, and the quality was excellent.


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## Aldarc (Jun 1, 2022)

kenada said:


> _The Atlas of the Latter Earth_ Kickstarter is live.



I also used the opportunity to get an offset print copy of WWN, since I didn't the first time around.


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## Aldarc (Jun 5, 2022)

According to the comments section of the Kickstarter, Crawford will be adding some nautical rules to the book.


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## Jaeger (Jun 13, 2022)

kenada said:


> ’m not trying saying that needing different classes is a virtue or that OSE is doing it right. I was just surprised by how little you actually get in WWN (as well a*s how much classes in OSE got since it had been my perception they were pretty meager compared to their counterparts in newer editions)*. Aside from your class abilities, which are impactful, most customization is done through foci in WWN. That’s like only getting feats to customize your characters and few to no class abilities in 3e.





kenada said:


> I just found it surprising that *OSE classes get more mechanical stuff than what you can build in WWN even with all its extra customization options. *That’s not what I expected.




In looking at my copy's of both, I think that there is a great game in there if you combined the class abilities of OSE + selected class ability and Foci from WWN...

On of my main complaints about 5e was that over 20 levels you made no meaningful choices after 3rd when it came to PC advancement. IMHO WWN solves this without crazy numbers of feats per PC 5-7. But lacks the solid niche protection of OSE class abilities.

But I also would prefer somethings to be more unified mechanically. Like with OSE - Do we really need thieves skills to be percentile, with turn undead 2d6, With a few abilities on a 1-6 d6 scale, scattered through the classes...  Uhh, no.

I like WWN take on a 2d6 skill system - and I think something similar can be carried into OSE classes to unify the disparate class ability rolls. I'd translate everything into a 1d12 scale (You could do 2d6 if you want more reliability).

For me this would be ideal as that scale would translate straight into how reaction rolls and Morale work. So I'd essentially have combat, saves, and magic using a d20, with everything else d12 or 2d6. Roll high for everything.

Kind of a more unified/modern version of OSE.

Not sure about the wide appeal of such a game though, as most seem to be for old school mechanics and aesthetics, or 3-5e systems only.


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## kenada (Jun 14, 2022)

Jaeger said:


> In looking at my copy's of both, I think that there is a great game in there if you combined the class abilities of OSE + selected class ability and Foci from WWN...
> 
> On of my main complaints about 5e was that over 20 levels you made no meaningful choices after 3rd when it came to PC advancement. IMHO WWN solves this without crazy numbers of feats per PC 5-7. But lacks the solid niche protection of OSE class abilities.
> 
> ...



That’s pretty close to where I started. I used the WWN classes as bases and then layered OSE on top of it. I was using 2d6-based skills (because I like non-uniform distribution for skill checks) and had unified mechanics similarly to how you described.

That didn’t really last. It worked okay, but I ended up finding myself wanting to go in a different direction after running a few sessions of it. Skills (currently 3d6 and likely staying that way) and customization are currently going through another big revision*, but you can see some of the classes and groups here.


* The current idea is to reduce the skill list to seven skills plus the three combat skills, and handle customization completely via specialties. Some specialities are combat-related (subsuming feats) while others are new skills you can acquire. One of the problems I found with trying to handle specialities informally as a something your character gets from their background and class or learned from someone is my players found it confusing.


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## Nikosandros (Jun 17, 2022)

AdmundfortGeographer said:


> Glad I caught this in time to get the limited $70 level in time before it filled.



I was late in backing the Kickstarter, but I just saw that someone dropped a pledge for the limited level and I switched to it.


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## Yora (Jun 24, 2022)

I've been using the sector generation tables and the planets I got are surprisingly mundane.

Of the 22 planets, 12 are Earth-like, 5 are breathable with no plant life, 1 has inedible plant life, 3 are airless rocks, and only a single one has corrosive atmosphere with inedible plants.
There's various cool and interesting things on the table, but rolling 2d6 for them and having only 25 planets, those don't come up a lot. Of course, SWN assumes that all these planets have a local civilization that's been living there for centuries. But for more adventurous explorations, I think those tables could use some tweaking to make the more extreme options more frequent.


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## Thomas Shey (Jun 24, 2022)

The tables that will in the new edition of Fragged Empire tend to be set up to more produce interesting situations, but of course they're also based around that setting and its quirks.


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## Yora (Jun 25, 2022)

Question about spaceship weapons: Getting an additional set of ammunition storage for a weapon always takes up 1 unit of mass, regardless of weapon or ship size?


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## Aldarc (Jun 30, 2022)

Ten more hours to go on the *Atlas of the Latter Earth Kickstarter*!


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## Eyes of Nine (Aug 7, 2022)

Anyone know if there's a Gauntlet style google sheets character keeper?
(A character keeper, made well known by the Gauntlet gaming community, is a shared document where everyone keeps their character. It's great because everyone can see everyone else's character on the various sheets in the google spreadsheet. It's not jus great for the judge/GM, but other players can see each other's character sheets, and maybe try to play to the interesting parts of the other PCs characters.

Anyway, anyone know of character keepers for SWN?


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## Fenris-77 (Aug 7, 2022)

If you find one I'd love to know about it. Character Keepers are the bomb.


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## Aldarc (Nov 29, 2022)

Atlas of the Latter Earth is out. Somehow over the past few months, I missed a snippet preview for a new partial class. So I was pleasantly surprised to see the warlock-like _Accursed_ while scanning the final book.


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