Judge Toast has given me a copy of Wasteland Without Epithet to review. Sorry it took so long, Toast.
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The Joys of Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is one of the great joys of RPGs. For many of us, it's the thing that drew us toward RPGs. As a kid, I used to doodle maps of islands and mark where there were monsters and treasure. I had no idea RPGs existed, it was just something I liked doing. I never really stopped.
As the DM/referee/judge, the joy of worldbuilding can be a lonely one. That isn't entirely a bad thing - it's nice to have that outlet and be able to "play" solo in a way that will eventually come to fruition at the table. On the flip side, it often doesn't come to fruition. It's something that is difficult to share with the players in a way that they can enjoy it too. Nobody enjoys a lore dump, so you usually have to give them the juicy details the long way around by making them matter to the game. This can take weeks or months and sometimes the players never discover the things you've invested yourself in.
Wasteland Without Epithet gives you a process to do it the other way around; make the players a part of the setting's creation and then build the game within the world they want. I first learned of this concept from players of Dungeon World, which is presented as almost being more narrative than game, so the players being invested in the narrative is far more important there. It's a powerful concept. Your players go into the game already attached to the world and any detail you add automatically becomes an interesting twist.
How to Play
The introductory section says that you can run through the activity with anyone, jokingly suggesting that you "accost strangers on the bus". I decided to use this tactic, and the people I accosted were a colleague, my wife (not the same person) and two friends. I ran into a roadblock toward the latter end of the activity when one step asks you to "go around the table" and to have discussions about each answer in turn. I did not have a table to go around, so this took me a long time to do as I asked people one by one individually and had to relay answers along to the next person. It technically still worked, but I suggest that if you're going to use Wasteland Without Epithet you do it in a session-0-like setting, with the players you intend to play with.
The Questions Within
There are a few questions in there that ask you to assign points to categories - one of those is the classic Law, Good, Evil and Chaos, which I initially wasn't a huge fan of because of my preference for three-point Alignment but it doesn't necessitate actually using Good or Evil in your game, so it still works as a way to develop a world's cultures. The other question had 7 categories to do with aspects of culture, but what I really liked about these was the use of numbers that aren't easily divisible so my victims players were forced to think a little harder about how they wanted their points divvied out. Oddly, all of these seven categories are positive other than "Paranoia". This doesn't really matter either, it just seemed strange to me, but I see what Toast was going for.
In the above sections, my players all assumed you needed to place at least 1 point in all categories. This doesn't seem intended, because all that really does is give you less points to spend while making the baseline 1 instead of 0. Wasteland Without Epithet doesn't explicitly mention whether or not you can leave a category at zero, which seems to be an oversight because it does give examples that are impossible otherwise - but those examples aren't visible to the players.
A few of the questions are a bit difficult for players who aren't used to building worlds of their own, but everyone came up with interesting answers. Occasionally, later questions were already answered by previous questions - in those cases we chose to simply expand further on the concept or shuffle the answers around. By the end of it we had a world with unique twists on Drow, Centaurs, Goblins, and some sort of primitive society of madly religious geese (thank my wife for that one - she hasn't much experience with RPGs but she certainly got into the spirit of it!), on top of at least as many adventure hooks and plenty of room to create more.
Closing Thoughts
You can just about guarantee that if you run a group of prospective players through this, you'll end up with an interesting world that they are all attached to. This might even be the thing that convinces my wife to try my hobby, though she insists she'll only play if she can be a goose. Perhaps I'll have to give her the Invincible Chicken class.
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