Bonus Review - Wolves Upon the Coast
Hah, I bet you thought I was done with reviews! I am, mostly, but here's a little bonus. Over this past year I've been running an open-table game of Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast, the grand hexcrawl campaign inspired by early dark-ages Europe and stories like Beowulf. Obviously I can't hope to do a full and in-depth review of such a massive work, but I still wanted to share my thoughts as sort of a post-mortem of one of the longer recent campaigns I've run.
This is a truly open-ended sandbox campaign with no overarching story or plot to speak of. The PCs start in the boat that they were until recently enslaved in, the body of their captor cooling on the deck with a dagger in his gut. After that moment, they are free to pursue whatever path they wish to take. The game runs on its own bespoke system which is essentially an OD&D hack at its core. The unique aspect of it is the method of character progression-- heroic boasts. In order to grow in power mechanically, a player must declare a boast for their PC which should be related to the current situation. For example, when facing a group of bandits, a PC could boast "I will take three of their heads". If the other players agree that this is a worthy boast, the PC will immediately gain a bonus to attack rolls or an additional hit die; when the boast is successfully completed, this bonus becomes permanent. Boasts can be one-upped by the other players if they wish-- they can add additional conditions to the boast to increase the bonus, and if the original boaster refuses the condition, the other player may take it on. Boasts should also grow in magnitude over time, surpassing your previous achievements.
The other notable thing about the system is the way that magic works. In essence, Luke has taken the list of spells from OD&D and ripped its guts out and replaced it with something truly special. There are no spell slots or magic points or anything else like that-- magic is entirely diegetic in execution; it's all about finding rare and unique components in the fiction rather than just being a game mechanic. This is one of the points where we see the true beauty of the whole of this game, because all of these rare and obscure components can be found in the various hexes throughout the map. It really becomes a matter of talking to those weird old ladies living out in the woods to learn their secrets, and exploring in order to find the materials.
Getting it to the Table
As much as I love this campaign, it's not something to be undertaken lightly. There are about 540 keyed hexes as well as "wandering islands", which are entire locations that can be found through random encounters. With something of this scale, you obviously cannot expect to be able to read and internalize all of these locations and the various factions that live in them, but to a certain extent you need to have at least a high-level awareness of them and how they could influence the contents of a hex in their vicinity.
Compounding this complexity is the fact that many of the hex descriptions are very sparse, which is probably by necessity. Including the wandering isles and sea monsters PDF, there's a total of about 300 pages of hex descriptions, the longest of which are only a couple of pages including maps for dungeons and such. The terse descriptions are in Luke's very evocative style which can be a great source of inspiration for any GM running this, but it definitely does not hold your hand.
My recommendation for anyone hoping to run this some day is to approach it piecemeal. You don't need to read through every hex description in order to run the game, but I think you will find it more rewarding if you do. There are so many connections between the hexes, with mysteries posed in one answered in another. So my approach was to read all of the hexes in a given area when the players got to it, to try to assimilate the connections and understand how the factions might behave, taking notes about things to remember when the PCs are traveling around.
There is also an excellent third-party resource written by a couple of GMs who spent over a year running an open table game-- the Reavers zine. This includes commentary on the hexes they explored, some new procedures and mechanics for wilderness survival and such, and general advice that I found very useful when planning to tackle this.
Over the course of my campaign, we started in Ruislip (the island detailed in the "free preview" version of the game, which could easily provide a month or two of gaming) and steadily moved east exploring the southern reaches of Albann and the Mid-Isles before moving north into the Hwicce region of Albann and interacting with the Norse kingdom there. This was less than half of the entire map, and we played from January to December with nearly weekly games. I will definitely be revisiting this game again in the future, and I might have the action start in a different part of the world so we can see more of what's happening in Faroe, Noos, or Pyorra.
What Worked?
- Astounding, yet approachable scale. Had this been published as a collection of hardcover books, I might not have attempted to run it. As it was, I have PDF copies of everything that are searchable in my browser, so looking up hexes or mentions of specific NPCs or items was actually quite easy. This would be a lot more difficult to run in a physical setting.
- The fucking magic system. My god, it's perfect.
- So much beneath the surface. This is a setting that absolutely rewards exploration. There are fantastic secrets to find, places to uncover, people to meet, and legendary items to acquire. On the surface, it looks like standard "fantasy Europe", but there is so much more if you dig for it.
What Didn't Work?
- Not enough sea voyaging. As the map is currently laid out, it's possible to get just about everywhere by hugging the coast. I guess that makes the name make more sense, but I feel that having some risk of getting lost would add a great deal to the game, especially when there are so many great wandering islands to find.
- If you need all of the details of monsters and encounters explained in depth for you, this is not the game for you. There is lot of work that needs to be done on the GM's side of things, and while that part was most of the fun for me, I can see it not being appealing for many others.
Final Thoughts
This is one of the most fascinating campaigns I've ever run across, and the fact that it is so open ended and player-driven was really a benefit as it allowed me to be almost passive in my presentation of the world. It also resulted in my creation of a rules-light skirmish system that came out of a Seven Samurai type situation from one of the game sessions. All in all, this was one of my favorite systems that I've tried, and I'll be returning to it again some day.
You can get Wolves Upon the Coast (including the "preview" version for free) at Luke Gearing's itch page. Thanks for reading!