When Worlds Collide

Posted by Marc

I recently had the pleasure of attending Go Play Northwest, our beloved annual story and tabletop game convention in Seattle. Caroline and I have been regular attendees for over a decade now, making us seasoned veterans of the convention space. With that designation comes (in my mind) a solemn duty to run games and show others a good time. To that end, I pitched a game in all but one of the donuts we attended and ended up playing six different titles with seventeen unique players–not bad! I’d like to tell you about two of the games I ran and why they were, in a word, awesome.

World-building meets world-building

I came out swinging with my first pitch of the convention: we’ll play In This World, then we’ll take out our Microscope and explore one of the worlds we made. I wasn’t totally sure how it would all work out, but work out it did. Four intrepid players joined me for the grand experiment.

We started with a list of topics, narrowing down to “tattoos” (I promise I didn’t tip the scales, despite having gotten a new tattoo two days earlier). Following the rest of the game’s steps led to three amazing worlds: World of Resumé Tattoos, where tattoos are designed and mandated by the government; World of Tattoo.gif, where tattoos are made from bioluminescent algae and nanites that can shift and morph based on your body chemistry; and World of Emotional Tattoos, a fantasy setting where strong emotional experiences cause semi-prophetic tattoos to appear on your body. Which one did we decide to Microscope? Vote now on your phones!

After a break, we picked Tattoo.gif as our setting. All of us said we could’ve done any of the three, but this one drew us in because of its cyberpunk aesthetic and the fact that one of our world-building statements referred to history already (we stipulated that tattoos of the past were made from the algae alone, and the nanites came later). We put the world description to one side for reference and started the Microscope procedure. 

Did it work? Oh yeah. Having the world built for us put a lot of flavor into the timeline before we even started and gave us some easy targets for periods, but as soon as we got to the palette, we expanded the world in ways none of us expected beforehand. Our world gained another sentient race, ocean-dwelling people who first shared knowledge of the algae with humanity but later cut ties when we started developing nanotech. The key was letting the original world-build serve as a starting point, rather than a prophecy (don’t want to Farnsworth it, after all); we stayed flexible as we created periods and events rather than feeling locked to precisely what we’d said during In This World. We played a few rounds and had a blast. I declare the experiment a resounding success!

I choose you!

We sat down to play Grasping Nettles and started discussing the setting we wanted to create. The table was silent for a beat–everyone runs a little slow on Sunday morning. Then Caroline spoke up: “When in doubt, play Pokémon.” With these wise words, she kicked off a delightful session of the unique world-building experience Grasping Nettles brings, if you’ll pardon the pun, to the table. 

We set our Pokémon-esque story on an archipelago of islands with inexplicably diverse climates (“You’re looking for the beach island? It’s right over there, between the arctic island and the red rock badlands island!”). After picking a setting, the game asks you to create three factions, so we invented: Team Riptide, a group of washouts and thugs who couldn’t hack it in the official Pokémon tournaments; Island University and Hospital, a joint research and treatment operation where professors and doctors work together; and the Puddle League, an organization of scrappy kids headed out on their first Pokémon adventures and their counselors, who are students at the University.

The unique world-building mechanic of Grasping Nettles is the wheel. Each faction has a pawn on the wheel, and on your turn you pick a faction, roll 1d6, and move clockwise around the wheel to determine which action you take. Only one of the actions is a Scene; everything else is world-building, from making a single character, to introducing an issue, to starting a project. It’s perfect for convention play because it allows you to essentially choose your level of engagement (making a location is much less involved than creating a new faction, for example), and every little move adds up so your contributions are constantly important to the fun.  

Tabula rasa

I’ve highlighted these two games because they share a commonality: both required or were focused on world-building. There’s something uniquely magical about starting with a blank slate and creating an entire world from scratch. I’m drawn toward games that utilize a collaborative creative process to help players create something complex, individualized, and far more unique than what they’d come up with on their own or have come up with before. The moment when players’ minds click and start humming in harmony is what I’m always seeking–and much to my delight, I found those moments again and again at Go Play this year.