Dawn of Worlds

[tacticslion]

So. Red Mage Black has made a convert. Two, actually, both me and my wife. No, not to some religion or lack of it - in fact I recently preached at him (he was cool with it) - but rather, to a fun, fun game.

What game?

I direct you to the thread title: Dawn of Worlds.

Now, this link to a Gnome Stew article covers most of the information about it. A few things he says are a bit off - for example, we know that it's supposed to be larger than a simple 8.5x11, for example, simply from the description of "a very large piece of paper" (complete with quotation marks in the instructions!), and can infer some things from the example of play they give - but over all, it's an excellent review. The game is completely free of charge, and it's only twelve pages long - that's the sum total of rules for it. It also only requires 2d6 - that's two, six-sided (aka "normal") dice, like you'd find in virtually any non-RPG board game.

So, why don't I post a link to this wondrous thing?

Well, even though this google search provides a link to the PDF version first thing, I can't find a site that Norton Antivirus trusts that claims to have a link (I received it directly from Red Mage Black via WLM), and I don't know how (or even if I can) post my copy here on the forums. The article above has a link, but I've not been to it, and don't necessarily trust it. (I'm notoriously suspicious about the internet! It's out to eat me! ... right. Back on topic...)

The idea is for you and your friends to create your own world together, establishing a shared and collective history, by being the very gods (completely non-specified, unless you want to) of the world you're creating. The game stretches for three ages spread across a little more than 3,000 to 6,000 years of history in roughly fifteen to thirty rounds: around 5,000 for world-building (ten rounds of roughly 5 centuries each); around 1,000 for race-creation and propagation (ten rounds of roughly 1 century each); and around ten years to five hundred years of racial interaction (ten rounds of "a few years" each). At each round starting after five rounds into a game (after five are done, but before the sixth starts), you can vote. If the majority of players wish to advance to the next age, than you do. After round ten, before the eleventh round starts, you vote again; at that point, and before each subsequent round of a given age (if any) if only one player wishes to advance to the next age, you do so. In practice, this makes a game normally thirty rounds long (minimum fifteen), although, of course, your mileage may vary* (On a mostly unrelated note, it seems like tv tropes is becoming more studious? Whaaaaaat?).

One of the great things about this, is my wife and I - having just finished a game - are already thinking of fun and variants on it. The rules are... simplistic. Sometimes too much so. But that's actually a boon in this case - the rules are more like guidelines than actual rules, in many cases.

For example: in the game we just finished, the first deity to create an avatar was Gnote (a neutral god of testing, division, and depths and deep places) - he created an avatar called the Beast of Gnote, which was a living hot zone. Wherever the beast went, the climate changed from it's normal state (temperate, cold, warm, cool, etc) to hot, remaining so for the duration of the Beast's stay, and returning to normal when the Beast left; the god did so by paying both for an avatar and a climate change. We discussed it a bit, found no reason not to, and let it pass; even though the rules don't explicitly say it can be done, they don't deny it either. Avatars have very little rules to them, other than they can be created and they allow for some unusual and sometimes cheap extra actions or effects. Since the effect was temporary (and the Beast mostly slept under the deepest lake in the world, frozen on top because that area was frozen) we decided it would be fine.

And really, that's what it's all about. Cooperative gameplay to create a world.

I'll probably edit and/or post more details of our game later - I already put some up in Nik's thread just as a random aside - but for now I'll leave you with this: it's a great game, tons of fun, and a fascinating stab at a collaborative world-creation game.

So, have any of you tried it? Anyone interested? Anyone have a safe, trustworthy site online that we can point to for people to get it for free? Any thoughts on your experiments or interests or ideas?

Minor Edit Update (the part of the post I put in Nik's thread that's relevant):

Originally Posted by tacticslion

Unrelated: everyone should play Dawn of Worlds, at least once. It's a free PnP world-builder game in which an unlimited number of players take on rolls of undefined "gods" who work together, or not, to create, destroy, build, tear asunder, etc, a world from the ground up, including creating races, waging war, altering the terrain, and the like. It's really fun. The end-game purpose is to have a new game-world, like a campaign setting, that everyone knows equally well ('cause they all made it). Alternatively... you can just play the game. Good times, so far. Full disclosure: I'm still in my first game, in the beginning of the third (and final) age. I'm playing an (effectively) lawful good earth goddess (the personification of the world itself) and a (effectively) true neutral god of division, testing, and deep places; my wife is playing a (neutral) good sun goddess, and an (effectively) chaotic neutral trickster god of the sea, wine, and revelry. So far nobody trusts my neutral guy - and with good reason! - as he's the only one that has created and corrupted a race of evil-ish things so far (although he's also created a race of more-or-less good things too, and purified one of his evil cities to neutral, so, you know...). Fun times.

Note: we played two each because it would be too slow to only do one each, as well as to give us a variety of sometimes conflicting alignments and the like. Normally, however, it's just one "god" per player.

[Lady Fire Dove]

So, Tactics and I finished our first game of Dawn of Worlds. It was really fun! We played several hours on both of two consecutive days, so, yes, it can be a long game, but much less than the time commitment for getting involved with most RPG campaigns. And now we have a complex continent with various interesting races, and a history with which we are both equally familiar, so either of us could easily GM an adventure or full campaign in that setting, and the other would be playing a character in a familiar world with known deities and history. I'm already mentally playing with exactly how the races and classes would work ... Fun stuff!