Group-Worldbuilding with the OSR and DoW

So recently in the OSR discord server, Throne of Salt setup a community worldbuilding game with a system called Dawn of Worlds. You can see the rules used here, though some slight modifications were made to work with a hex-map.

I really love the setting that we created and will probably cover it semi-extensively in future posts.
The game was called out as strictly being drop-in drop-out. There was no need for commitment, and the theme for the world was set to "OSR as Fuck".

Here's a map preview.

Overall the experience was super fun and I found myself pretty invested in the process despite coming a little late to the game.
Some quick thoughts I have about the game process itself:

• It was really neat to play/"work" with some of the best OSR bloggers I've been reading for some time now- and it was incredibly fun to see so many very creative minds bounce around and build ideas off of one another

• Since everyone could do what they want, there was a nice mashup of "genres", but everyone was in general largely respectful of each others creations. A dash of sci-fi, a smidge of grossness, and a good bit of new hot-takes on classic fantasy races all made it in to the game in what I felt was a very satisfying way.

• Unfortunately as the game approached the end of December, several of the "regular" players including myself had to take a break from posting and the game ground to a halt. I'd be curious to see how long a creative game like this would have continued were it not for a holiday interruption.

• As fun as the game is/was, with many people who dropped out during the holidays not returning, I find the "end-state" of the game as it is at the time of writing somewhat..unsatisfying? Which is not to say that I dislike any of the content that us few remaining players have added in these last few turns as the game winds down, but rather I'm not sure what a satisfying end to the game would actually look like. This also may be just because I myself was feeling a little fatigued coming up with new and interesting things to add to the world every day. 

• I like that the setting is weird and also has quite a bit of "whatever the GM makes of it". I'll explore this a bit more, but basically there are SO many questions left unanswered due to the style of play, and paradoxically they are probably some of the first things a player in an RPG set in this world would have to know. Things like magic, gods, technology, and other "things that help build fantasy settings" are left as an open question mark for the reader. In many ways it reminds me of the crowdsourced hexmaps you can find on save vs. totalparty kill, though this setting ended up with a much longer, if incomplete, history.

• While we have a timeline of events, several of the events are short enough in their descriptions that they could easily be interpreted in a large variety of meaningful ways. Just because something "happened" in the game doesn't mean I know "how" it happened or even what the popular reaction to that thing was. I'm starting to look at this and the other informational gaps as a "feature" rather than a "bug" 

• I really did have a fantastic time. I think the blank hex-map worked well for this format, and I would absolutely leap at the opportunity to do it again sometime. 

The setting is called The Land of Stone and Shell

Here's a few of my favorite things about the world:

• Guns exist, but the secret to making Gunpowder is closely guarded by monastic Angels. One of the main ingredients is goblin poop.

• Bugbears are big humanoid sea-scorpions that, despite their horrifying appearance, have actually been friendly to the human civilizations for most of their history. They have a very old and skilled spy network, two souls, alcohol for blood, and can never play music due to an ancestral curse.

• There's a large, war-hungry roaming army led by a super magical, sentient UTTERSWORD

• Mimics are the best at brewing alcohol and have one of the oldest dungeon-delving organizations in existence

• Demons are Deep-Sea monstrosities. They were also pushed to the brink of extinction after a failed surface invasion led to an underwater counter-assault by an invincible golem army