RPG Errata: Sunderwald, and Discovery

Sunderwald, made by Long Tail Games, is a Legacy RPG.

Legacy, as an RPG term, has come to mean a game that is focused less on individual characters. Legacy RPGs are generally about regions, families, factions, or generations. The stories develop over in-game years, rather than days or weeks. Players may find themselves playing multiple different individuals over the course of a single campaign, if not a single session.

This is not the kind of Legacy game Sunderwald is. Sunderwald is the kind of Legacy game that has pervaded board-games in recent years. It’s a game where your PC’s actions in one session can irrevocably change the world/setting/gamespace for future sessions.

Okay…aren’t all RPGs those kind of legacy games? I wrote a whole post on that before; raising levels, establishing relationships, making a real impact on the imagined world is pretty integral to the RPG process. RPGs were the first Legacy games, and designers tried to copy and adapt this design for boardgames.

Sunderwald, in turn, has taken the innovations in Legacy boardgame design and adapted them for RPGs.

See, when you read the Sunderwald rulebook, you’ll find that large sections of it are missing. This should be familiar to anyone who has played Legacy boardgames; more rules are introduced as the game progresses. The difference here is that Sunderwald doesn’t have pre-made stickers that develop the game on a pre-built path; it’s entirely the responsibility of the table.

Perhaps one player makes a Gristler — a centaur-worm like creature — as their PC. When they do, they get to fill in an empty part of the Gristler’s place in the world. A famous ancestor, perhaps, or a oft-repeated but false rumor about the species. If the player gets their PC out of the wilderness alive, they get to adjust the Gristler’s starting abilities, giving any future Gristler PC a bonus to a their stats.

It’s not just player races: as you play, classes will gain more and more detail, places will get explored and more facts will be discovered, monsters will grow in strength, god-like beings will reveal their secrets, and all of this — all of this — gets written in the book in pen.

Eventually, the book is full to bursting with your table’s additions, creating a Sunderwald that is uniquely yours. Compare any two books and you will find two different worlds with the similarities as off-putting as the differences.

On the one hand, it’s a cute little idea. Creating an RPG that utilizes the same “fill in the book” mechanic as legacy boardgames is a clever trick, and manages to support the ludo-narrative of exploration and discovery.

On the other hand, it’s a smack upside the head to every table that has ever played an RPG. It’s a reminder that the worlds we play in are not real places. Every action we take can affect them in some way, whether by establishing a trope or changing the landscape. No GM can create an entire setting out of nothing, and they shouldn’t. There is always whitespace, the places the GM decided not to bother with. These spaces are ripe for the filling with inspiration from play, or the table’s decisions.

Discovery is a fascinating aspect of RPGs. It’s a fascinating aspect of all games, really. It’s baked into our language surrounding the medium: “Play to find out,” dungeon delving, “what happens next,” the Iron Screen…We play in part to find something new. We don’t know how the story will turn out, what the dice will say, what the future holds. In the early days of RPGs, we didn’t even know that wraiths existed until we fought our first. Then we found out more about them, encounter after encounter, until we knew what dangerous threats they were.

We knew nothing of Elminster until we heard rumors, or became strong enough to meet him. We knew nothing of the Council of Waterdeep until they let their presence be felt. We didn’t know Dragons came in Blue, Green, Copper, or Brass until their scaly heads pointed in our direction.¹

There are different kinds of discovery. There’s the somewhat rote “what’s in the next room” kind of discovery, the “what happens next in the story” kind as well. Then there’s the far more open and frightening kind of discoveries: “what can happen next?” “What strange towers and topographies can exist in this world?” “Is this monster stronger than us?” “What lies in the head of this NPC?” “Am I prepared enough?”

As we adventure, we learn. We learn more about the world, the characters, the system, and the story. We meet new challenges, and try new tactics. It’s a natural process that comes from our ignorance. A new setting, a new region, or a new campaign will always bring secrets with it.

Sunderwald asks one very simple question, a question raised by the “Play to Find Out” school of gaming: What parts of a campaign have to be established beforehand? What parts can be created on the fly?

“Play to Find Out” explores creating the game-narrative through play. What NPCs are important, what secrets hide in locked drawers and in mysterious letters, who are the villains and who are the allies…none of them are planned out in advance. In most cases, this is supported through an extensive setting: Blades in the Dark, for example, has a rich setting with factions and characters ready to be tapped.

Sunderwald suggests that the setting itself can be created through the game. Hardly a groundbreaking idea: it’s really little more than a formalized method of note-taking. Once a folk-hero or regional history is invented in-game, it is canonized by virtue of its inclusion. Sunderwald, on the other hand, codifies exactly who gets to create what parts of the setting, and when. It turns the development of the setting into a collaborative effort that engages everyone equally.

According to Sunderwald, the discovery and creation of the world isn’t a natural by-product of adventures in the wilderness, it’s a direct part of it.