Dawn of Worlds

A friend of mine told me about this little gem on our private forums. When he first posted it, my eyes glazed over as the term "shared world-building" came to mind. I tend to associate that term with a bunch of artsy-fartsy types sitting around discussing the intricacies of things I don't care about, much in the same manner that my brain disengages when people are talking about armor outside of the context of, "this gives me AC 5, so it's harder for that skeleton to punch me than if I was naked."

Today I actually took the time to look at the PDF he linked, which can be found HERE.

Basically, this is a simple game where a few people sit around a table with a big blank sheet of paper, perhaps with continental outlines on it, perhaps not. They take turns playing god, and rolling 2d6 and spending points to bring the world to life. The first phase, or "age" is mostly about defining the geographic features. The second age is about peopling the world with various races of the players' design. The third and final age focuses on politics, war, and learning.

All of these activities can be done in any phase, but it costs more to make geographical changes in the third phase than in the first, for example.

This looks to have been around for quite some time (copyright is dated 2005), so perhaps this isn't news to some of you, but if you haven't seen it yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. The best thing about it is that the "rules" only take up 7 pages of the slim 12-page PDF.