Dawn of Worlds is an independent collaborative worldbuilding game, first published in 2005. A great activity for a group; it is not only fun in itself but also useful for the setting creation necessary for roleplaying game design or novel writing. The system consists of a large sheet of paper, pencils (colored pencils are nice), six-sided dice, and a few simple, free instructions, available for download, here.
I’ve played several times in groups ranging from two to eight people. It’s always entertaining and sometimes downright hilarious. Players need to let go of any “I can’t draw” foolishness. Whatever you draw will be fine. No judgments.
Dawn of Worlds Concept
In Dawn of Worlds, the players are a group of powerful entities, creating a new world from a blank slate. That blank slate is the paper, and your tools are pencils, creative inspiration, and riffing off each other’s ideas. What does a world need? And what do you want for it? Solid land? Water? Weather? Animals? Sentient beings? It’s all up to you and your friends.
Every game, every attempt at writing the great American novel all began with the need to create a world…We wanted vast landscapes, epic races and civilizations, history, plots, rivalries, and all of the other things we see in the world around us.
N. Bob Pesall
Dawn of Worlds Game Play
Someone draws a rough land mass or two on the paper, and the game can commence. When I played Dawn of Worlds with one other person, we used a regular sheet of graph paper, but for a bigger group, a larger, tabletop-sized paper is best.
The game is played in rounds, and players use points they accrue (through dice rolls) as their power to make changes. The players take turns adding features to their new world. The Table of Power in the download shows how many points are needed to do things during the different stages (“ages”) of world development. Things like “Shape Land, 1 inch, 3 point in First Age.” In the First Age terrain development is the focus. Later stages bring on life forms, and eventually civilizations and cities can be added.
Once a player introduces a feature into the world, it’s open for other players to modify, so best don’t get too attached to anything! Players may describe events, cataclysmic and otherwise. These events leave their mark on the landscape as well as the psyches of the sentient beings you’ve invented.
The First Age
The First Age, which last from five to ten rounds, is focused on geography development. Terrain type changes are inexpensive, pointwise, in the First Age, while developing sentient races is expensive. The costs change later, encouraging the players to work on terrain first and save the people and animals for later.
The Second Age
The Second Age focuses on populating the world with all the fantasy races your group wants to include. There will be at least five rounds and can continue up to ten, at which point any player who’s ready to move on can call for the Third Age to begin.
The Third Age
Next, more advanced features of civilization arise—politics, industry, scholarship, and exploration. Through all these phases, the players accrue power each round via their dice role and spend or save it for later. The game download includes a tally sheet to keep track of each development the group creates in the order it occurs. And, of course, conflicts will arise. The game has a mechanics for combat.
Storytelling with Dawn of Worlds
I find Dawn of Worlds turns into storytelling about the newly created inhabitants. Named heroes and villains may arise and become legends. Superstitions and stories about topographical features weave their way into the culture. While you can use Dawn of Worlds to make a roleplaying game world or a setting for your next novel, it’s satisfying to just enjoy doodling on your map and spinning yarns.
If you found this review of Dawn of Worlds interesting, you might like to read my blog about Storytelling Games. Or think deeply about the relationship between storytelling and drawing with comic artist Lynda Barry.
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You’ll find my latest Sean Joye short story in the St. Louis Writers Guild’s new members anthology. Love Letters to St. Louis contains my first science fiction story, “Welcome to Earthport Prime: A Self-Guided Tour.”This adorable letter-shaped volume of short stories, poems, essays, and illustrations. Profits benefit the guild’s young writers’ program.