Naming The Faceless: Worlds Without Number
Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article. You can find all of the posts in this series here.
Today I’m taking a look at Kevin Crawford’s Worlds Without Number. This is one of those games I’ve been vaguely aware of for a very long time but have never actually looked into and don’t know anything about. I’m using the free edition and I don’t know what the differences are between this and the full priced version. Hopefully there’s nothing that will meaningfully impact character creation, but as I can’t currently afford to buy books this is the version we’re going with!
Here’s what the marketing copy has to say about what this game is:
My initial thought here is that maybe I should have started with Stars Without Number, since WWN is based on it, but I prefer fantasy to sci-fi in general and this is the one I chose. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this to be an OSR-style game, which is a pleasant surprise. Everything about the book – the size of it, the cover art, the marketing copy right up to the final paragraph – made me expect a modern trad game with fairly in-depth “paper dolls”-style character creation that was going to take me an hour or more. I’ll be interested to see how wrong that expectation was.
The Character Creation section opens with quite a lot of information about who your character is and how they fit into the world. Honestly it’s the kind of thing that often makes me eyes glaze over (this is a me problem, really), but I’m interested in the idea that this fantasy world isn’t some weird version of the past but is instead the ruins of a far-distant future. It’s an interesting choice to (presumably) take the world of Stars Without Number and ruin it to build the world for this game, rather than dialling the clock back, and it’s a choice that I like. In theory, at least. I hope that it means we aren’t about to be looking at your typical fantasy classes and races, but maybe that’s where we’ll end up. Let’s see.
The next page is a summary of character creation, which I always like to see, but it’s split over two pages and has 19 steps. The character sheet shown on page 7 has a big look of modern trad to it (though smaller than most of those character sheets), so maybe this isn’t quite as OSR as it claims to be. I’m very pleased to find that the character sheet is form fillable, though. One point to WWN.
Step 1 is a classic – roll your attributes in order and assign them to Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. It’s 3d6 down the line, which is my favourite. There’s an option to use an array (14, 12, 11, 10, 9, 7) but I always pick rolling when it’s an option because rolling dice is fun and I like seeing what sort of character presents itself out of randomness.
My attributes are STR 7, DEX 12, CON 6, INT 12, WIS 12, and CHA 8. Once we’ve rolled we can pick one attribute to change to a score of 14. I’m tempted to pick Strength, which I expect will dramatically change what sort of character I decide to build, but I’m instead going to take the obvious option and increase my lowest score (Constitution) to 14.
Step two is attribute modifiers. Mine are -1, 0, +1, 0, 0, 0.
Step three is to pick a background from a list on page 11. We’ll have to pick some options, and gain a free skill at level 0. The first time we roll or pick a skill it starts at level 0, and the second time it becomes level 1. The third time we can instead pick any other skill that’s less than level 1, because we’re a novice hero and our skills can’t exceed level 1.
Weirdly the skill list comes before the background list so I’ve had to flip past it to get to the backgrounds. I can already envision there might be a lot of jumping back and forward in this book to make a character, and I do wish that the sections we need were ordered in the same sequence as we need to refer to them.
Backgrounds are described as a “thumbnail description of the kind of life your hero led before becoming an adventurer”. We have the option of rolling from the list, which I will absolutely take. There are 20 backgrounds, and I roll a 13, giving me “Physician”. The backgrounds also have suggestions for what this might mean for your character in the reality of the game world, with suggestions of village healer and healer-monk. I quite like village healer.
We grab our free skills (Heal-0) and then there are a few options for how we pick skills from our background:
- Take the background’s “quick skills”, which are the generic skills of the roll
- Pick two skills from the background’s “Learning” table, except for the “Any Skill” choice. This is the way to go if we have a specific idea of what our character looks like
- Roll three times, splitting the rolls between the “Growth” and “Learning” tables.
I’m of course going to roll. As is obvious from that last option each background has two tables, “Growth” and “Learning”. “Growth” is a d6 table and “Learning” is a d8 table. I assume that when we’re told to roll three times we pick which table we’re going to roll on for each roll first, since they use different dice. That’s how I’m going to do it anyway. I get +2 Mental from the Growth table, Connect from the Learning table, and Know from the Learning table.
Looking at the skill list, Connect lets me find or know people who are useful to my purposes, and Know is a generalised knowledge skill.
I assume that “+2 Mental” refers to Saves, so I’ve added that modifier to the Saves box on my character sheet. The book hasn’t actually explained this yet, though, so I hope I’m right.
Back to the summary of character creation. The next two steps explain what I’ve already done – that is, decide whether to choose skills or roll for them, and explaining how to do those things. This is also where it explains what +2 Mental means, and I was wrong about it being for Saves. Instead I get to add two points to either Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma, or else divide the bonus between two of them. I’m going to add +2 to my Wisdom, bumping my bonus there up to +1.
I think it’s interesting that if you pick skills (either the quick skills or from the tables) you only get 2, but if you roll you get 3. That’s a nice little reward for the possibility of ending up with a character whose skills might not work brilliantly together or make much sense.
The next step is to pick a class. From this summary page it sounds like there was classes of Warrior, Expert, and Mage – very traditional – but that if you don’t like the sound of them you can instead pick Adventurer and mix classes. I like that multi-classing is a default option, and I’ve always loved Adventurer as a cover-all class (which is why it’s the only class in A Dungeon Game). My instinct is to pick Adventurer because I like the sound of it but also because it lets me get a bit deeper into the much with character creation, but I’m going to read them and see what sounds good. Away to page 18.
Based on my background as a Physician I’m very tempted by Expert. I’d expected this to be a classic Thief-type class but it sounds like much more than that. Experts are described as “masters of non-combat skills, such as stealth, medicine, diplomacy, and other practical talents”. It is still a Thief/Rogue class but it’s rolling in some Cleric-type stuff as well, and sounds a bit more like a 2e-style Bard to me. Because I don’t really have a character concept in mind I’m going to go with Expert rather than picking Adventurer, as I think Adventurer is better for people who know exactly what they want to pick.
The first ability the Expert gets is being able to reroll a failed non-combat skill check once per scene. I also gain an extra skill point every time I level up that’s explicitly for use on non-combat skills or raising attributes, and these can be saved up to be spent later.
(While filling in these details and things like Hit Dice on my character sheet I spotted the term “Base Attack Bonus” and my brain has immediately decided that WWN is based on 3rd Edition D&D. Is that true? I have no idea. It’s certainly got some similarities so far, but I have no idea how the system actually works.)
The table that shows us the level progression and benefits for the Expert has a final column that reads “Focus Picks”. I don’t know what this means yet, but I assume it’s going to be covered in the next step. I’ll make a note of what I get (“1 Any + 1 Expert”) and flip back to page 6 and the summary. (Side note, does anybody else read the words “Page 6” and immediately think of the lyric “Collecting page six lovers” from Fall Out Boy’s Thanks fr th Mmrs or is it just me?)
Our next step is to choose “foci”, which represent side talents or particular specialisations. Most characters get one level of a Focus of their choice but Experts (as well as Adventurers) get one level of a non-combat Focus for free as well. The next step here also says that we can spend a Focus pick on an “origin” focus, which is how WWN handles non-human characters. That’s very tempting. I wish there was a page reference here, though, because I have no idea where to find Foci. Time to start flipping pages.
Foci are located immediately after the Classes chapter. As with Skills, Foci come in two levels. The first time you pick one you get the first level, and then you pick it again to get the second level. (Now that I’ve mentioned 3.x I’m reminded of buying skill ranks in that game, which this is a little similar to).
This is where I get a little confused. I’ve got +1 Any and +1 Expert. I thought initially that this meant I got a Foci that’s called “Expert”, but I can’t see one in the text. Then I thought that maybe some are Expert-specific, and that there would be a list of Warrior, Expert, and Mage Foci. But I can’t see that anywhere, either, so I don’t know what this means. I know that it has to be a non-combat Focus, so I’m just going to choose one of them and hope that I’ve got it right.
This is where I wish more games had a tag system like Pathfinder 2, so I could quickly find all the non-combat Foci without having to read each one individually. It would also be helpful for a few edge cases. For example, “Gifted Chirurgeon” lets me attempt to stabilize one Mortally Wounded adjacent person per round as an On Turn action. Since this sounds like it’s something that takes place in combat, does that make it a combat action? Or because it’s not something that directly benefits me when making attacks and doing general combat stuff, is it a non-combat action? I don’t know. Similarly, is Poisoner a non-combat focus? The actions you take to actually make your poisons occur out of combat, but they’re mostly going to be used in combat.
I’m going to pick Gifted Chururgeon anyway, with my +1 Any focus. I gain Heal as a bonus skill, but I already have Heal so it goes to level-1. For my non-combat Expert skill I decide to go with Polymath, which lets me gain any one bonus skill. I treat all non-combat skills as if they were at least level-0 for skill checks. I decide to take Know again as my bonus skill, giving me a +1 there as well. (Again I have questions about what constitutes a non-combat skill, specifically around Sneak).
Back to page 6, and now we pick another skill. At this point I still don’t really have much of a picture of who this character is beyond “village healer” so I’m not sure what to take, but I think Notice sort of makes sense so I’ll pick that.
The next two steps are to do with mages and I sort of wish I’d built a caster so I could play with that section, but I didn’t so I won’t. Instead I’ll skip those sections and move straight to rolling my maximum hit points. I already wrote down that my Hit Dice is 1d6 (it was on the table when I picked my Class), so I roll that and add my Con modifier of +1 to get 2 max hit points. I’d best not get hit.
The next step is to note down the Base Attack Bonus, which I already did (it’s +0), and then I can either pick an equipment package or roll for silver and go shopping. Normally I’d roll for this but since I’ve not been blessed by the dice today I am instead going to pick the “Mage, Healer, or Scholar” pack, which gives me:
- Daggers, 2
- Staff
- Backpack
- Lantern, tinderbox, 2 flasks of oil
- Writing kit & 20 sheets of paper
- Rations, 1 week
- Waterskin
- Healer’s pouch
- 80 silver pieces in cash
The weapon attributes are interesting and make me want to take a look at what they actually do. What does “Shock 1/AC 15” mean? For some reason this one short tag has made me more interested in the rest of the system than any other part of the book so far, and I’m now adding this game to my list for a future Long Read post.
Each item on that list has a number under a heading that reads “Enc”, which I assume is short for Encumberance. The character sheet also says that my maximum stowed items are equal to my STR score, above which I assume I’m encumbered. The lantern, tinder box, and 2 pints of oil are listed on one line but their Enc is “3 total”, and the week of rations has an Enc of 4. This is hilarious because my STR is 7, which means I can’t actually carry everything I’m starting with. I should have rolled for it.
Regardless, I’ll simply dump some stuff. I drop the lantern, tinder box, and oil, and I’ll just have to hope that my companions (those imaginary companions who are definitely also rolling characters right now) bring some sort of light source along with them.
Now we’ve basically reached the “fill out the rest of your character sheet” stage. I fill in my hit bonus (-2 because haven’t taken any level-0 combat skills), weapon damage, armour class (10, because I also don’t have any armour and my DEX modifier is +0), and my saving throws. Physical saves against poison, disease, or exhaustion are 15 minus the best of my STR or CON modifiers, and I’m now very glad I chose to raise my CON to 14 earlier. Evasion is 15 minus the best of INT or DEX (15, as both are +0), and Mental is 15 minus the best of WIS or CHA (14). Luck is a flat 15. The character sheet expresses these as “16 – level – Modifiers”, so I assume these Saves will be improving as we adventure for longer.
The last thing we have to do is give the character a name and a goal. There doesn’t appear to be a name list in the book (and there isn’t actually a table of contents in this free version for me to check against), so I’m just going to call my guy Joe. Why Joe? I’m sitting next to an empty jar of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and “Joe” was the first name I saw as I looked around my office. His goal is going to be to very simple to begin with – to earn enough money to buy some armour so that he doesn’t get stabbed to death.
And that’s the character built. Here’s how my character sheet wound up.
This process, alongside blogging through it, took a little shy of 90 minutes. That’s roughly what I expected based on the marketing material and size of the books, and not at all what I’d expect of the type of OSR-style game that it claims to be. I’m definitely interested in Worlds Without Number as a system, though, and I’ll be reading the full game as soon as I can afford to pick it up.