The Foot of Blue Mountain

A Useful Journaling Game

There are a lot of journaling games on Itch. So, so many. There might be, among the refuse, at least one good one, which I’ll showcase below.

Wanderer is a journaling game about a titular wanderer who travels around a setting, discovering places and listening to stories told by the residents.

The main gimmick of Wanderer is the theme/motif table (I am a big fan of themes and motifs, see Hex Creation and Dungeon Creation respectively) which is essentially a nested 2x3 grid of 3x3 tables. The game asks you to make one of these theme tables, full of themes or one-word descriptors of your chosen setting, and then roll some d6 to combine the themes and tell a story composed of a location, a character, and a story the character tells the wanderer.

But who cares about stories? We’re here to prep a setting for a tabletop game :P

The way I use this game is to generate locations, NPCs, and rumors relatively quickly.

Below are a few transcriptions of my many times playing Wanderer. They’ll be formatted like a sentence, with the themes that constructed it in parenthesis. A lot of these were the original inspiration for locations in At the Base of Blue Mountain. You’ll notice they’re all pretty formulaic (and massive run-on sentences besides); there are follow-up questions in Wanderer itself, but since I use it for worldbuilding the formulaic nature of it isn’t as important as the themes.

The wanderer sailed to Quochay’s Regret (regret + rain), a village built atop a large crying statue head, where they met Zennidarr, (Stability + Blue) Chuunti scholar obsessed with oceans, and thus heard about the Red Macaw, who lives in the Scholar’s Brain (Macaws + Miscommunication, for this one and the previous.)

Then, the wanderer sailed to The Macaw Andron (Macaws + legacy), the site of the last Corral of Feathers, where they met 6-Macaw (Lazy + Spray), and thus heard the story of The Downing (Regret + Miscommunication), in which the Macaws left this land for paradise beyond the Black Mist.

Then, the wanderer sailed to Aximal’s Bay, where they met Aximal, The Living Cave, who told them of the sickness within him and asked the Wanderer to cure him.