In Wilderfeast players take the roles of "wilders," heroic monster hunters who are more than human. In the lore of Wilderfeast giant kaiju-like monsters dominate the world. It's not quite clear how, but at some point (a few thousand years ago) humanity arrived in this world. Giant monsters continue to rule this world, but humans struggle to make a life here in the One Land. The wilders help.
A great plague called the "frenzy" is consuming the monster populations of this world, driving them crazy and dangerous. Wilders bring them down in combat and then as a mercy or out of respect they eat them. Yeah, I said, "eat them."
Wilderfeast is a sort of mix between Monster Hunter and Delicious In Dungeon. The cool thing is that this entire game and its systems are built around "the feast." As wilder characters consume the monsters that they defeat, they gain their powers. This is the only way characters "level up."
Wilderfeast's tagline is, "You are what you eat." I backed this RPG project by Horrible Guild on Kickstarter and recently was able to download the PDF. The core book is over 300 pages long. Normally, I'd balk at Wilderfeast's girth, but this is really three books in one. This tome contains the core rules, a bestiary, and a gazetteer between its covers.
I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I am enjoying what's here so far, and I thought that a first impressions review was in order. Firstly, the book is gorgeous to look at. The artwork is beautiful, and the presentation is accessible, welcoming and easy to read. That's so important. I might not have gotten past the massive 500+ page count if the book didn't plead, "read me" with such warmth.
The tight integration of theme with the characters and their world really grabbed me as did the quirkiness of the premise. Wilderfeast understands what it is and has its heart in the right place. Consider this quote.
From the book:
One thing to keep in mind as you explore your take of this world is that it's both serious and silly.
… as wilders, you grapple with the deterioration of the natural world and the human systems responsible for that decline, but at the end of the day you're also wielding oversized cooking utensils to turn kaiju into dinner. The aim is for its two sides to enhance rather than undermine each other …
Oversized cooking utensils? Oh, yeah!
One of the first things players do to create a character for Wilderfeast is select their tool. A character's tool defines their starting role in the game, much like (if not exactly like) a character class. Tools are like weapons in other games, but more useful and far more powerful. They are ancient artifacts forged from arksteel.
From the book:
Arksteel is a regenerating silver metal made by humanity’s lost ancestors. In ages past, the greenkings fashioned enormous arksteel kitchen implements to produce mind-boggling amounts of food. After the greenking civilization fell, the wilders repurposed those artifacts as weapons, though they still come in handy as cooking aids.
The game lists the following tool options. There are six TOOLS in total:
- Choose a CLEAVER if you want to make every strike count.
- Choose MITTS if you want to get up close and personal.
- Choose a PAN if you want to shield your packmates from harm.
- Choose a SPIT if you want to always be moving.
- Choose a TORCH if you want to control the situation from a distance.
- Choose TWINE if you want to invent creative solutions.
That's six character classes. Your choice of tool also determines the starting values of your character's styles and gives them a few starting skills.
Styles are an interesting alternative to ability scores in other games. They speak to "how" a character approaches a problem and they combine with skills to form a sort of action statement. A character's four styles are: mighty, precise, swift and tricky. The book describes them like this:
- MIGHTY - Being strong, tough, firm, or blunt
- PRECISE - Being calm, methodical, focused, or accurate
- SWIFT - Being quick, energetic, alert, or dexterous
- TRICKY - Being subtle, deceitful, technical, or shrewd
Your style determines how many dice you can roll when attempting to perform an action. Wilderfeast uses a simple d6 dice pool system where 5's and 6's indicate success. Skills add a bonus that can be applied to dice one at a time. So if you rolled a 3, 4 and 5 on 3 dice and had a skill that gave you a +1, you'd want to add that to the 4 to bring it up to a 5. That would give you two successes for the action.
The use of tool (weapon) to define character class, and the way that bonuses are applied to individual dice in the dice pool reminds me of A+ Fantasy. I'd love to imagine that my game had some influence on the design of Wilderfeast (but nah.)
The list of skills is pretty concise but every skill combines with two different styles to produce unique results. For example, consider these two applications of the "craft" skill.
From the book:
Make a MIGHTY CRAFT (roll) to hammer the fence of a monster enclosure into place. Make a PRECISE CRAFT (roll) to tinker with a delicate, fiddly mechanism.
If you have advantage on a roll, you can treat 4, 5, and 6 as a success. If you have disadvantage on a roll, only 6 is a success.
You also have an "Action die" that measures the degree of your success (like weapon damage for example). By default players roll a d8 as their action die, but if they are tapping into their monstrous natures this changes to a d20!
If you decide to use a d20 as your action die, you must give up 1d6 from your dice pool when rolling your style dice to succeed at the action. So, the action becomes more difficult, but the rewards are greater!
That's a super quick overview of what I have read so far. I'll talk more about the game as I get further through the rules.
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