Reviewn June 3: Wanderhome, the basic playkit

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today I read Wanderhome: The Journey, by Possum Creek Games. Wanderhome’s been on my radar for a while, but I only have the 27-page basic playkit version, so that's what I read. As a Redwall reader growing up, but one for whom the series eventually lost their lustre, I didn’t know whether or not Wanderhome would tickle me. I'm pleased to report that it did!

What I found is a story game founded upon a huge number of options and creative potential. The short playkit book overflows with lists of possibilities and setting elements of all kinds, so that players will never be in wont of things to have in front of their characters.

Art from the Wanderhome Kickstarter

The game style and rules

On the spectrum of collaborative story-telling game to tabletop role-playing game, this is far on the CSTG end. I’m interested in both, but personally more of a TTRPG enthusiast. I found the Wanderhome playkit a tantalising read regardless, and I’d be interested in giving the complete game (with its wonderful artwork) a try at some point.

In particular, it's interesting to see a game that’s not fundamentally about problem-solving and in fact several times goes out of its way to disavow it. “Stories tend to involve groups of people who have gathered for a reason, who set forth on a quest with a purpose and a goal. Wanderhome is not like that.” Wanderhome also isn’t “preoccupied with failure”.

It’s all very wholesome. It's charming without quite veering into twee. It does feel like it’s going to need absolute player buy-in up front, to avoid the ‘but what if I try to do this thing that the game says it’s not about’ problem. Some of the 'journeying tools' seem like they might be geared to help, but without having played it, I can't say for sure.

Wanderhome is a game to be played collaboratively, with or without a guide (GM). The guide doesn't have any ‘special authority’, acting more as a character-less player than a referee.

All the game rules and terms are given in a conversational, in-world manner, as if discussing an actual story or journey that the speaker or their audience has been on or is going on. There are very few references to it being a game.

• This ties in well to the overall nice and wholesome vibe, but I also found it slightly frustrating when it veers into vagueness, and also when the plain language slightly obscures the gameplay elements.
  
• For example, the word ‘kith’, a key term in the game, isn’t defined until halfway through despite being mentioned numerous times. Sure, it’s nicer and more flavourful than ‘NPC’ or ‘temporary character’, but knowing the real-world meaning of the world is insufficient for understanding.
• There's only one really gamey term, ‘token’, which by design doesn't seem to represent anything within-setting. I wonder how it actually plays at the table when you can't help solve a problem or connect to someone “on a personal level” because you have insufficient tokens, or you declare that you’re attaining a token by doing something like “taking a moment to bask in the grandeur of the world”. (There’s definitely a meta-game wackiness to getting a token in return for “doing something kind without getting anything in return”.)
• These minor plaints might be resolved in the full game book, of course.
  

The content of the playbooks (character class exemplars, roughly) makes it seem like Wanderhome must play as a deeply performative game, with all the players ideally absorbed in their own and fascinated by each others’ characters, not just what they do but who they are and how they feel. This makes sense, given that many of the main avenues of more trad RPG play (goal-driven problem-solving, overcoming perilous obstacles, exploring an internally-consistent simulated world, etc) are, deliberately, absent from Wanderhome.

Setting:

• I love the giant-bugs-as-livestock trope in basically any setting. It works well here.
• I wonder if the full version of the book has more lore and guidance behind the animal-folk thing beyond “While a family might be all the same animal-folk, they might also have wildly different appearances. It’s frankly none of your business to inquire.”
• I wasn’t expecting animals as big as horses to be in the mix, maybe because I don't remember Redwall going bigger than badgers and this game had such a “Redwall” pigeonhole to me.
• Mighty people being the only candidates for evil, their souls ‘weighed down with power’, their goodness possibly ‘poisoned by struggle’, is an interesting element in such a pleasant and placid game. It’s hard not to read it as both political commentary and metaphysics.
• I like the emphasis on seasonality and the rhythms of the year, which I think most games in pre-industrial worlds don’t place anywhere near enough importance on.
• The character classes (‘playbooks’) are very content-rich and evocative, which is probably especially important for a relatively rules-light CSTG. I’m always a big fan of starting a character with a selection of class-specific equipment or clothing.
• I like the level advancement, which can result in things as disparate as magical powers, changes to friends, or realisations. I like that it happens on seasonal holidays – IMO vague ‘milestonesque’ level advancement works much better for games like this one: loose and low-stakes, without choices which revolve around challenges and costs and expectation of rewards.

Minor text quibbles:

• Part of Wanderhome’s strength is its big structured lists of content. Some of the emphasised adjectives have an additional symbol which is never defined, but makes it clear they are keywords. They’re basically magic powers, or things that are connected with magic powers, which might force the spending of tokens. I don't know whether this lacuna is due to the stripped-down nature of the playkit, or the text's commitment to never speaking in 'game terms'.
  
• The fact that the vagabond character is necessarily a criminal and/or moral failure seems at odds with the spirit of the game. It feels like they’re leaning heavily into the (secondary) negative connotations of the word ‘vagabond’. Really, all the characters are vagabonds! This is one of several cases where Wanderhome slightly redefines words or selects more archaic meanings, and it can trip you up because it's not like other games which sit you down and say e.g. there’s a game thing we call a hallow; it's not quite the same as the normal meanings of the word 'hallow'; here’s what it is and what its rules are.

My favourite bit:

The firelight character. For a game about the road and helping people, a ‘guide class’ works well. Their key feature is that they have a firefly companion and a light source. A close second place for me is the moth-tender, a little pigeon or rabbit or whatever who looks after the courier moths and their towers.

Where to get it:

The playkit is on itch.io
The full game is on the publisher's site or on DriveThruRPG