Dawn of Worlds - a worldbuilding game for the table top

Dawn of Worlds is a worldbuilding game usually played with a group of friends gathered around a tabletop.

You start with the outline of a map drawn on a large sheet of paper and shape the land and world as Gods. The creator's website publishes the full rules for how to play.

This page is where I'll document my experience with Dawn of Worlds.

My first game - Summer 2018

Having never run a game like this before I asked r/worldbuilding for advice on running a Dawn of Worlds game.

A user called Shadowstrike155 came back with a couple of good recommendations

1. Make sure all of the players are on the same page for the type of world you’re building.
2. Pick a scale for the map - this helps you to plan how big the world is.
3. Keep in check how many races are created - there is a trick with Avatars that means you could spam races early on.
4. Agree beforehand on what exists in the world as standard. I.e. do players need to create every single monster race just to be able to fight them in our RPG later?

My group was able to agree on these things quick quickly.

1. We were aiming for a typical fantasy world as presented in standard DnD, but with original races.
2. We chose 100 miles per hex, but it will be a very loose metric if the GM later needs to fudge distance.
3. For races we agreed to only create sentient/player races and aimed for 2-3 per player (there are 6 people in my group).
4. As mentioned in point 3 we only created player races and have assumed monsters, creatures and other baddies exist.

I drew two maps, printed on A3 and let the group pick which one they preferred to build on.

The other thing I read was Matthew J. Neagley’s Dawn of Worlds review over on Gnomestew. Again, I took a couple of great pointers from the article, a lot of which backed up Shadowstrikes suggestions.

However, the one thing that stood out in Matthew’s article is that tensions grew between his players when they kept meddling with each others races.

Thankfully this wasn’t an issue for the group I played with. Everyone was engrossed in the narrative and collaborative aspects of the game. We even had one player faction wipe out another players and there was laughing all around when it happened (you had to be in the room, retelling the story here could be a little dry).

So the only conclusion I can draw from that is that the quality of the game rests heavily on the players in the group.

I’ll update this page in due course with details of the world we created and a review of the worldbuilding and game mechanics.