WHY I LOVE
The magic of Wildermyth’s heroes.
Ilove a fantasy RPG with a good story, but aside from one main dude, it’s difficult to give a party of five or more characters their own time in the spotlight. But after playing Wildermyth, I came away with loads of stories about my group of hearty adventurers—so many I could write a book. And only after playing a handful of hours, too.
It’s kind of incredible how a small games studio from Texas has managed to pull this off. Wildermyth uses both crafted tales and procedural stories spun from character-driven traits to create a truly dynamic RPG. Characters fall in love, create bitter rivalries, grow old, have children, make terrible decisions, leave behind legacies, and eventually die. Everything they go through is folded neatly into the major story, and it’s spectacular.
My Wildermyth squad is named the Northern Slayers, a rag-tag group of women who enjoy a good punch up and friendly banter. There are hundreds of scripted micro-stories your party will slip into, although conversations change drastically depending on your team’s personalities. One member of the crew, a loveable but snarky archer named Tess, had a luck feat and claimed that she could set off in a completely random direction and always come across some treasure. After a short adventure ending with a gorgon battle and zero loot, she didn’t half get an earful of playful jests from the rest of the party.
It’s these moments that make you feel like your group are actually good friends, not just a bunch of people thrown together for the sake of adventure. The vibe is very much like a D&D homebrew game. You don’t just want to get more loot, you want your characters to be challenged, find friendship, and grow as people. They can fall in love and have kids who then join the adventuring gang when they’re older. You can also have inter-party rivalries—two people who dislike one another will even gain critical hit buffs in battle as they try to one-up their rival.
The decisions you make in smaller stories will overlap into the larger one, and character developments can lead to some dramatic moments. When someone reaches zero health, you can decide if they die in a blaze of glory on the battlefield or retreat, losing a limb in the process. I made one of my characters withdraw in battle so she wouldn’t be slain, and after the fight was over the leader of the party, a buff fighter named Ariana, made a heartfelt apology to the group.
WILD AT HEART
Similar to games like Darkest Dungeon, the journey your crew ventures on takes a toll on the group and you start to see scars and permanent injuries on their avatars. Sometimes it’s because of a story beat, but more often than not, a character will get a permanent injury due to a bad decision you made on the battlefield.
In between chapters, the land you’re protecting goes through a handful of years of peace, meaning your characters get comic book-style panels showing what they got up to in those years of downtime. They can age and even retire—that’s until you miss them so much you bring them back as ‘legacy heroes’ for a new campaign to show the young un’s just how it’s done, like reviving an old D&D character sheet for fun.
Wildermyth is reminiscent of times playing tabletop RPGs with friends, each person carving their own story, but in Wildermyth you have a say in the stories of all the characters, the game working its procedural magic behind the scenes. I’ve just started on my second run but can already tell I’m going to be in this for the long haul. I can’t wait until all my heroes get old and I finally have a group of buff, badass grannies.
THE JOURNEY YOUR CREW VENTURES ON TAKES A TOLL ON THE GROUP
When the ocean swallows this place up, it’ll be doing it a favor