Wildermyth

"Something in the woods is very strange

Birds have started singing songs of change"

 

Umm, not to nitpick, but your logo reads "saggyboobildermyth" and unless I see a helluva lot more battering ram action, that is falsely advertising a whole different fantasy subgenre!

 

Anyway, I've been putting off a Wildermyth summary due to conflicting impressions. Initially annoyed at its tabletop fetish elements, I quickly grew to love its core storytelling principle of taking heroes from humble beginnings as farmers with pitchforks and gradually building them up through chance events, avoiding the by now incredibly tedious Chosen One narratives of the Fantasy genre, fixating not on the foregone conclusion of an end-game power fantasy but various characters' tales of becoming. And really, Wildermyth appeals primarily as an RPG fan's RPG, addressing many such old complaints, my own included in the case of its magic system.

Almost entirely dependent on environment, your casters use various landscape objects to fuel their attacks. While they can be powerful in sheer damage, these more aptly fill in the offensive support elements of rooting or debuffing, and magical or not, skills often show useful, situational applications. You can bounce a stone discus to an otherwise out of range target, knock an enemy back into range of a guarding warrior who didn't have enough move to reach, use splash or quick-action token damage to burn an enemy's defense, use fire to herd enemies into an archer's ambush. The tactical combat may not look deep at first glance but its elements interact for a great deal of unexpected complexity. Fights are well-varied with some requiring a bull-rush, others a gradual phalanx advance, other times forcing you to retrench.

If you can't tell, my fighter was nearly dead (and enemies will rather ruthlessly take advantage of that) but backing into a room with traps on the floor and an ambush on the doorway pretty much guaranteed the last mob would never get a shot off. 

 

But... Wildermyth retains D&D's reliance on over-randomization. High damage ratios encourage save-scumming, especially as your characters can very easily get killed/maimed in a single round based on an unavoidable roll of the dice. The opening fights of campaigns are quite apt to place you in nearly impossible fights before you've had a chance to level up any skills. Not exactly an increase in meaningful difficulty so much as "rocks fall, everyone dies" frustration. Also, your five-man band will plateau in their tactics sometime around the middle of longer campaigns, and as it's unwise to swap younger, lower-XP heroes in, you'll likely find the last ten or twenty combats quite repetitive. And almost all XP is combat XP. Forcing older heroes to retire may partly address this problem, but once you get a feel for the system you'll likely end up swapping them out even earlier to set up a fivesome for the end-game, which counterintuitively means that latter group will spend even more time together, running the same strat to soak up enough level-ups for the boss fight.

 

That "legacy" system for recruiting your old campaigns' heroes to a new one also sounds better on paper than in execution.

Recruiting old heroes makes them young again, or even revives them. It gets a bit goofy when a young sprat who learned at the old witch's knee one campaign ends up as her suddenly younger self's grizzled old mentor in the next, and it precludes any greater family tree development. Unlike for example the gut-worm quest, this harms internal consistency, not just "realism" and saps that long-term relationship building promised by their character sheets. After only the third campaign of six I found myself trying in vain to ratchet back my "legacy's" clutter of randos. For how ambiguously this plays out, let me tell you the story of Flamena the fuck-up.

When I recruited her in the second campaign she managed to get wounded in her very first fight, then lose a leg in another. At the end I "forgot" her from the legacy, only to have her inexplicably show up again... and again... and always just when I needed another huntress. So I gritted my teeth and made do with her lackluster performance. I laughed out loud when her daughter Flinena joined the band in the fifth campaign only to... you guessed it, get knocked out out in her very first fight and acquire exactly the same face-wound as her idiot mother. Which idiot then, in the climactic boss battle, one round away from near-certain defeat, ended up landing the winning hit on the big boss.

 

Well, y'ol flop-winged bat, what can I say, you were due. All golf-clap for the mighty dragonslayer. Is that a good RPG story? I guess... but too little of it was player input and too much a bug in the legacy system and comically repetitive randomization. I can't recommend all that heartily a game system more entertaining in its screw-ups.

 

That sort of wishy-washiness taints most everything else as well. There's no way to pass down artifacts as clan heirlooms, family relationships have little or no impact, and in fact you're explicitly building a new clan every time. Map locations are utterly forgettable. The cardboard cutout graphics aren't too ugly (hell I didn't complain about them in Shelter and I won't here) but the figurines' limited gamut of poses, animations and components gets, again counterintuitively, more repetitive than if they'd used simpler, more stylized pawns a la Rimworld.

I always loved that face.

But Wildermyth's biggest bugaboo comes in the form of writing. When I asked what can change the nature of a game, actively generating text was one of my stated options. But whatever LLMs are making of that now a few years after the fact, it's clear Wildermyth's approach, of swapping single words into the same sentence, or altering pre-written replies according to character personality flags, didn't get very far. The single word swaps forced very stiff dialogue which could accommodate any [FRUIT] while not being able to comment on its fruitiness, while the characters' personalized replies created non-sequiturs or jarring mood shifts. Repeating the same mini-quest is not made any fresher by one guy talking about apples instead of pears while the other randomly hates/loves them, especially since these are not allowed to impact decisions. Moreover, spotting such changes feels more like spotting the zippers on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' suits back when I was ten. Aaaand, channel change. 

 

Sadly, this last complaint cuts to the very heart of Wildermyth's appeal in recreating the old fairytale spirit of adventure. Though less than in Sunless Skies, the florid prose tends to crawl up its own ass as often as not in attempting to imitate old-timey jawin' and simply lacks a coherent concept of the world it's describing. Folklore, writ large, is simply too wide a category to have attempted to imitate even in a game with ten times Wildermyth's staff, scrambling in vain to rebuild half a dozen different boogeyman myths from universal principles. It's too inchoate to sound authentic or immersive. Occasionally the ridiculous turns successfully to heart-wrenching melancholy (Shy and the Shadow, When Dreams Were Young, both lovely pieces) but this tends to happen with vignettes written as single contiguous narratives.

 

Even then, it's hit or miss. The writers simply lacked either the practical experience or historical research to adequately portray a pre-information-age social milieu, and if that sounds familiar, it's a complaint I've leveraged constantly against more recent authors, whether in comics or in games like Solasta, Sacred Fire or The Necromancer's Tale where characters sound like nothing else but twenty-something, 21st-century yuppies babbling around the game table. Even with the best of intentions and a solid core concept, generations raised incapable of gazing beyond their own navels prove incapable of describing any other society but their own immediate clique. Anachronistic, politically correct, unaware of class interplay except to spout a few interest group slogans by rote, needlessly florid or innocently crass, it's the modern perversion of storytelling into soapboxing and fan service that seems to harm recent cRPGs more than their interactions or aesthetics. 

 

And I would have expected better based on first impressions. The core atmosphere, the mood music, the attention to descriptive sensory details, the heroic trajectories, are solid. The Austin clan seems to have some connections too. I had certainly not expected to see Ursula Vernon's name among the writing credits, unless the name's a complete coincidence. Disappointed that this only seems to reflect one short credited interlude about a turtle, still her more coherent example of such modernized folklore in Digger should not have been ignored. A worse and more pervasive influence likely came from Shae Rossi, who if I'm not mistaken is the feminist cretin largely responsible for ruining LotRO from the pandemic onward. Though (I'll admit it) her ignorant, vandalist approach to folklore works better in Wildermyth's looser, happy-go-lucky interpretation of adventuring than in deliberately shitting on Tolkien for her own gratification.

 

Sad, because though it does not quite reach its ambitions as interactive storytelling, Wildermyth hits its mark quite often. I have begun every time with a sense of wonder and ended with a sense of accomplishment than no bombastic trailer or achievement list can duplicate. Several of my characters have acquired personalities in my mind, the boisterous shock troopers, the reliable one-eagle-eyed sniper and soft-spoken support caster, the versatile mid-range combatant, the grim-faced brick wall. Some events here and there are spot-on calculated to make for a satisfying narrative and strategic payoff.

At least it wasn't a bible in his breast pocket.

It's well worth playing, and serves as positive example in many respects, but also disappointing in how often it gratuitously undercuts its own strongest features. Sometimes you just wanna smack the good ones upside their heads for their fewer mistakes, y'know?

I faff in the face of danger!