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The World Was Young

The best campaign settings aren’t written. They’re played.

Overview

The World Was Young is a collaborative, worldbuilding card game. By marking a shared map in response to prompts with different combinations of Tones and Verbs, you build the history of a game setting over three Ages, creating lands, peoples, conflicts, and legends together. The end result is a deep setting ready to play in your favorite TTRPG system. TWWY replaces the GM-generated, seldom-read background doc with a deck of cards and a table full of creative voices. Players and GM share the creative load, and the gap between player knowledge and character knowledge shrinks.

Session Negative One

Session Zero has improved TTRPGs by increasing communication between players and GMs. It helps ensure that everyone is on the same page about safety, the type of game being played, characters, and more. But it doesn’t solve a major pain point. Even if they’ve read the twenty-page setting background from the GM, players arrive at Session Zero as outsiders. The problem is that players need to create characters that are native to that world. How do we bridge that gap? How do we overcome that outsider status? The World Was Young brings players into the worldbuilding process from the beginning, increasing their investment and ownership of the setting before the game even begins. The twenty-page setting doc is replaced with an hour and a half of group worldbuilding. The result isn’t something that the players read. It’s something that they helped write. Players can weave their characters into threads they helped spin across the history of the world. Maybe their PC is the last of a civilization of Orcs destroyed hundreds of years ago. Or perhaps the descendant of a forgotten monarch. Whatever the choice, the table has an understanding of that character from the beginning. When the GM references the ancient civilization of sentient Axolotls that was destroyed a thousand years prior, she doesn’t have to lore-dump anything; the players already know about that civilization.

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