Worlds Without Number

by Kevin Crawford

The stars gutter and the skies fade and the earth grows weary with years. Ages of men and of Outsiders have ascended and been forgotten, and only the bones of their cities and the dust of their dreams remain upon this tired world. The Legacy of their laws is woven deep now, the edicts of dead gods and fallen sorcerer-kings made to trace patterns of power we no longer understand. We are heirs to their unseen empires, and our lives are built upon their ashes.

Worlds Without Number is a fantasy role-playing game, one fully compatible with the hit sci-fi game Stars Without Number. It's built from the ground up to provide gritty, hard-edged adventure in the fathomless future of the Latter Earth, a fantastic realm of time-lost sorcery, savage foes, and barbaric splendor. The cold steel in the fists of your heroes and the half-understood sorcery in their tomes must suffice to overcome the monstrous remnants of ancient alien rulers and the present depredations of ruthless lords and hideous beasts alike. The riches of lost ages await in the subterranean Deeps that once held their kingdoms, and even the heavens above are not beyond the reach of the recklessly daring.

Worlds Without Number isn't just a savage game of steel and sorcery. It's packed solid with system-neutral GM tools and worldbuilding support, with hundreds of pages of useful tools, tags, tables, and practical advice usable by any GM, regardless of their favorite setting or system. The well-loved sci-fi tools of Stars Without Number are reworked here to support fantasy gaming, whether in the provided setting of the Latter Earth or in your own carefully-crafted homebrew world. Even GMs who don't prefer the OSR-compatible game system of WWN will find more than half the book dedicated to tools they can use in the systems they like best.

So what do you get in this book?

Sword and sorcery heroes of blade, cunning, and spell. The proven OSR-compatible character creation system of Stars Without Number is redone here for a fantasy world of blade and black magic.
OSR-compatible rules, allowing you to plunder decades of existing adventure material for your play. You can even pull in Stars Without Number content, as it's fully compatible.
The Gyre region of the far-future Latter Earth, a premade sandbox for quick play. Venture forth to clash with the sinister powers that gather in the shadow of the waning rule of the Reaping King.
Worldbuilding tools crafted to the renowned Sine Nomine standard. Did you like the hundred different world tags in SWN? Then have two hundred inspirational tags to help you build ruins, courts, communities, and wilderness points of interest. Grab a wealth of tools for building histories, societies, governments, religions, and geography, all written with a keen eye toward producing good, playable content for your adventuring group.
Adventure creation tools to soothe the pangs of a working GM, with guides for building adventures out of combat, exploration, social, and investigative challenges. Use the tags you picked in the worldbuilding section to speed up your creation of a good night's gaming.
Faction rules for fantasy worlds, with dark cults, fierce lords, grasping abbots, and greedy merchants all serving to keep your world in motion even when the PCs aren't on the scene.
And those contents are in the free edition of the game! If you dare to lay hands on this deluxe, for-pay version, you'll get even more.

Heroic characters, ones fired with the prowess of high fantasy heroes and epic Chosen Ones. Don't care for gritty sword and sorcery? Use these rules to turn even novice adventurers into the protagonists of mighty deeds.
Legates, those heroes touched with the power of the Legacy itself. Reach beyond the limits of mortal prowess to embrace superhuman abilities and impossible might, and dare adventures that will live for an age in legend.
Bonus character classes, including the Adunic Invoker, Darian Skinshifter, Llaigisan Beastmaster, Sarulite Blood Priest, Kistian Duelist, and Vothite Thought Noble. Each one is built to help support a broad character concept, such as shapeshifting, mind control, animal companions, divine blessings, or swashbuckling fighters- concepts you can import to any setting.
Additional GM tools, including a hundred fractal adventure seeds, help with extradimensional Iterums, and a sheaf of bonus GM tables for fleshing out architecture, NPC relationships, and random adventure NPCs.
Seize your chance, bold adventurer! Earnest souls have been waiting for years for a fantasy counterpart to Stars Without Number; now it awaits your daring grasp to help you forge your own mighty deeds!

Genres: Role Playing Games, Games, Gaming, Fantasy, Reference

397 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Benjamin]

How? A Bundle of Holding collection of Sine Nomine games (that's Kevin Crawford's company).

What? This bundle included

* Stars Without Number (reviewed elsewhere)
* Worlds Without Number, his fantasy/Dying Earth game
* Cities Without Number, his cyberpunk game
* Other Dust, his post-apocalyptic game (and some adventures for that)
* Spears of the Dawn, his fantasy Africa setting
* Scarlet Heroes, his rules for 1-on-1 fantasy play in the Red Tide world
* Silent Legions, his modern-day Lovecraftian horror game
* Wolves of God, his AD 710 England fantasy game

Yeah, so? I've said it before, but Kevin Crawford's idea of sandbox play and random tables is so electric and exciting.

What struck me when reading all these books back to back -- besides the random tables -- is how certain ideas/topics keep coming up, like the notion of a pocket domain or dimension: Silent Legions has it (monsters or sorcerers or dream realms might exist there); Wolves of God has it (the Roman magicians may have left them behind); Worlds Without Number has it.

A couple of one-off comments:
* For his Cyberpunk game, the default setting is only about 20 pages, but there's reams and reams of tables for creating your own dystopia, missions, contacts, etc. (I'm very fond of the one-roll tables he makes, where you roll one each of the typical RPG dice, and each has a meaning on a different table that you can then assemble into a coherent portrait of a location, person, etc.)
* Other Dust has some of the gonzo elements of Gamma World, but not a lot of the humor.
* Scarlet Heroes is so interesting, with its rules for 1-on-1 play, which include: special damage dice, low HP for the enemies, a Defying Death move that will hurt but can get you out of an impossible situation. (There's even a few pages at the back for oracle-style solo play
* Wolves of God, jokingly written as if it were an original source from the 8th century; special rules for feasting and cattle raiding; character advancement is through gaining glory / avoiding shame (with per-class definitions of both).
* Worlds without Number, I love the random tables for culture/history (since this takes place in a fat future, Dying Earth-style setting), but this was the first book where some of the stock art stuck out as not quite fitting. (Like there's a picture of Crusader knights on one page, which gives the flavor of medievalism, but not particularly Dying Earth fantasy.)

Here's another thing, less about this book than about the context: when I was young, scrimping and saving for a copy of the D&D World Builder's Guidebook or the Alternity guide to alternate dimensions, I would spend hours and hours using the random tables there, coming up with worlds. Now here's a ton of books with hundreds of fascinating and great random tables -- but I don't have the time/energy (or interest? or need?) to go through and play with them. So as much as a I like having these bundles to go through, I have to say that the quantity really drives down how much quality time I spend with any book.

[Pádraic]

There's plenty of major stuff in this book that I'll never use. The actual game system, for instance, which lost me very early on when it rolled out its "quick summary of the character creation process" that had 19 steps. Plus I got a pretty low tolerance for fantasy RPG settings generally, and this Dying Earth inspired one didn't change any of that.

But god in heaven, the random tables. Some of the best random tables I've ever seen, an absolutely incredible worldbuilding and campaign-building resource. In seconds you could have a dungeon, give yourself half an hour and you'll have most of what you need to run a sandbox game.

Tables for everything, tables for terrain features, tables for nations and their ties to other nations and what they're all up to lately, tables for recent historical events, combat complication tables, tables for malevolent cults, extremely thorough location tables, NPC tables, monster tables for monster motivations and augments and aesthetics and context, tables for wilderness travel (how to do wilderness travel is a common question, and reading the section here opened my wilderness travel third eye).

The dungeon generating tables, as well as the custom magic weapon stuff, are perhaps the only sections of the book that aren't as thorough or compelling as the stuff in the (unfairly maligned, in my opinion) 5e Dungeon Master's Guide. Worth noting as well that maybe five per cent of the table entries here are specific to the book's own settings, but they'd be easy enough to reflavour, or else you could just roll again. Roll forever.

I read this because the internet recommended it as an incredible resource and it pains me to admit that the internet was right. If you want tables, here be tables. A fast and interesting and surprising way to construct and flesh out your game that takes a lot of the labour off your shoulders.

[Malum · Rating 4 out of 5]

A BX hack that is barely recognizable from its source. I'm a bit torn on this game, but I think I like more about it than I don't like.

I'm not a huge fan of how Crawford changed how magic works in his game. He obviously doesn't like the army disintegrating, "solve any problem with the right spell" type wizard and that's fair enough, but his fix was to make spell casters almost too bland and limited in my opinion (it takes 2 years to create level 5 spells. Do most people's in-world campaigns even last that long?). I also don't know if the Traveller-style skill system was really necessary.

I do, however, like that you can build your own class by mixing and matching archetypes and foci, I like how he de-emphasized weapon and armor restrictions for magic users (with the right selection of foci) and eliminated race/class restrictions, and, like most of Crawford's work, the random charts are top notch.

If nothing else, this is a good product because it's more clever than the "mostly BX or OD&D with slight changes here and there" clones that seems to be flooding the market these days and it might spur others on to create things that are a bit more imaginative, too.

[Mattie · Rating 4 out of 5]

No matter what system you’re running, if you’re creating a fantasy world to play old school adventure games in, this book is a treasure trove.

I think the base game outlined here is interesting, but it’s similar enough to other OSR games that I wasn’t compelled to adopt it. At the same time, there’s plenty of innovation that could be grabbed to homebrew another system, and all of his explanations of why these system pieces are here make learning any old school game make so much more sense.

The artwork is sparse and layout looks a bit like a textbook, but otherwise this feels like the ideal for a game system overview book.

[Aventinus · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Stars Without Number you will love Worlds Without Number.

I think that this is a great system with a very cool world setting. The selling point of this book, however, is that even if you're not interested in the world itself or even playing this particular system, the book includes guidelines on how to create believable worlds and NPCs. So it's an amazing tool for every Game Master out there.

[Hannu Kokko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book for world and adventure building in RPGs

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely storyteller OS hex crawling rules.

[Hans Otterson]

Peerless GMing tools for a Dying Earth tabletop rpg in the traditional adventuring mode. I've built a world and the beginning of a campaign - very excited to run this.

[Adeen Ellicott · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're interested in this game, read it cover-to-cover. If you're interested in GMing in *any* system, read pages 114-280.