Reflections on Wolves Upon the Coast and Faux-Historical Settings
Introduction
I've been playing in a Wolves Upon the Coast Game run by NBateman alongside Jenx, Havoc, Ags), Zygocact, Kirko and Cellar Gelatin who have no blogs (make a blog!). It's been a lot of fun (underscoring the importance of experienced players and experienced referees) but there are a few oddities that exist in Wolves specifically that I felt were worth talking about.
I should disclose just for the purposes of documenting my perspective that I have read the Wolves hexfill before playing in this game and so have a much better working knowledge of it than my fellow players who may not have any exposure to the contents of the hexes. I'll return to this later on, since it cuts to the quick of what I'm trying to say here.
Classless Dungeon Exploration (The Minor Quibble)
I don't usually care about the various class discussions people have. For the most part, I think a lot of the conversation around "X class is weak" or "X class doesn't have a purpose" is based entirely on reading and ignores the act of play entirely. That being said, I do think dungeon-crawling suffers a bit from not having bespoke classes for the purposes of delineating dungeon obligations out. Since everyone is a Fighter, it can occasionally be a bit awkward separating tasks. You can sort of go by Hit Dice, but sometimes this feels awkward and not as obvious as I'd like. I like the assumptions you can make about player characters based on their class and find it helpful when playing/running dungeons especially.
I haven't felt this way about any other part of the game, though, and dungeon-crawling generally isn't my favorite part of the game at all, so it's not an issue.
World Familiarity (The thing I actually wanted to talk about)
There's a familiarity that you don't get in most adventure game worlds until you play in them for quite a while, years for most, that I think Wolves manages to achieve via its "vaguely Europe" setting. There are certain key differences (geography, for one, but also the location and relative strength of the polities) that separate the setting from Europe far enough to avoid any trivial mistakes or additional burdens from the Referee ("Well actually, Britain didn't have this many people in this town, it was much bigger" sort of complaints aren't feasible due to the setting) but a solid knowledge of religion or culture for certain groups can still be leveraged by the players to do cool things and for the most part a lot of assumptions about the people in the setting hold true.
This shared understanding is something that helps with the (as of Jan. 2025) disparate nature of the Wolves hexfills. They're deeply connected and not cross-referenced at all, so having to answer questions like "What are the religious practices of the Not-Christians" in addition to parsing the hexfills would require an unreasonable burden from the Referee (at least one of my cognitive ability).
As sessions and game-time get shorter across the board and people aren't able to put as many hours into tabletop stuff, I think these "almost" settings hold a good deal of promise in getting to an actionable level of world knowledge as players and as a referee. No one has the time to learn about your Not-Elves; could you get by with putting in Christianity or the Norse pantheon (IN A RESPECTFUL WAY) instead of their fantasy substitutes?