Review: Worlds In Peril

Worlds in Peril is a new game coming out later this year using the Apocalypse World system adapted to super hero stories. I backed it on Kickstarter and recently ran a short game of it for some of my friends using the preview documents.

The game comes from the minds of Adam Bosarge, Kyle Simons, and Jason Faulk who derived the system starting from Dungeon World. Some signs of this linger as you'll see later in my criticisms of the game.

Overall though I really like this game.

The book is (in most places) easy to read and the system is well honed for the superhero genre. I appreciate the nods in the text to established super hero fiction such as the character example based on the title character from Arrow.

That also shows the breadth of abilities the game can encompass from high energy, Superman-like heroes, to peak mortals like Arrow. All of whom can carry the same amount of narrative weight in the game.

This comes in part from Apocalypse World's great mechanics. Every action with an element of risk boils down to a single roll against a stat. In Worlds in Peril these attributes are Smash, Maneuver, Protect, Influence, and Investigate. More method based than traditional attributes, they allow players to pick their style. So a brick character might use Smash to beat up a bunch thugs while a Robert Downey style Sherlock Holmes character might wield Investigate to take them apart. A character's powers matter less than how they use them.

Powers instead define the stakes of any action. The consequences of the Arrow punching someone differs from those of someone who can lift a tank. Someone who has steel skin will take less damage from the same attack than someone who relies on leather armor.

The game allows players to define their characters' powers however they like. Instead of trying to balance flight against super strength, the designers let the characters define the broad scope of their powers. They get to set a number of specific abilities that they can rely on and then let them push (via a move) for more options in play. Characters are defined in what is and isn't possible (and easy vs. difficult) for their powers thus creating boundaries to work within. If you want more starting powers you can trade your connection to others for more options.

The game doesn't use a countdown clock or hit points but instead tracks damage via Conditions with flavorful descriptions. So an attack may leave you dazed or with a broken arm and have a clear narrative effect. Conditions are ranked by level of severity from minor conditions (like trapped or dazed) which can be dealt with quickly to critical conditions (like a broken arm or worse) which might lead a character to die (as much as anyone dies in the comic books). The conditions also have a mechanical effect with moderate and critical conditions inflicting a -1 to rolls affected by them (limited to the specific effect for Moderate but effecting all rolls for Critical). Dying has its own move which can result in a character vanishing for several 'issues' (to be decided in-game) or returning with altered abilities.

Another interesting aspect of the game is that several of the moves are unmodified by any stat. It makes those rolls more dangerous. A PC can always burn a bond however to increase the result.

Bonds are another item I like in this game. Basically representing the character's connection to specific people, places or organizations, they can be burned (narratively worsening the relationship between the character and the subject) to boost rolls by one category. A failure becomes a partial successes and partial successes become full successes. Then in that scene or the one afterwards the PC describes how the decline in the relationship plays out.PCs have several options for restoring lost bonds and gaining new ones, encouraging them to burn bonds frequently, adding interesting complications to their relationships both in and out of costume.

A final innovation I want to point out is how they have handled playbooks. Instead of some sort of archetype based concept as you would expect, each character has two playbooks: an Origin and a Drive. Origin covers how the character chose to become a superhero (though not necessarily how they gained their powers) while Drive is more fluid and shows what motivates the character at the current time. This nicely dodges problems of categorizing superheroes and focuses more on their personalities.

Cons

Now just to point out what I think are the game's (few) flaws.

First off I think there is a missing move or two. We lack Apocalypse World's catchall of Acting Under Fire. There is a move called Defy Danger but it seems less useful for noncombat actions. More glaring is the lack of real social moves. We have nothing like Read a person or Manipulate a person, features I feel is necessary for the melodrama that most comic book tales follow.

Another omission is a lack of explanation of some features of the game. I think a basic primer on how villains and minions work is necessary for the PCs to make the best use of the combat moves. Knowing that a villain requires X conditions (where X can be unknown) of any type (Minor, Moderate, or Critical) to be taken out of commission is useful to know. Similarly knowing what size means for minions would be helpful for determine how to deal with them. I think a discussion of this might be good in the early (player) sections of the book.

My players also felt that Drive books, while fun, felt less like a character arc than a number of hoops to jump through to get more moves.

We didn't get far into character advancement but a quick look at it suggests it would be very hard for a player to get more than a single bump to a stat or otherwise improve without going through a number of Drive books. As it stands in the preview, only by unlocking moves and Drive books can PCs earn Advancements to purchase stat increases and other improvements. I know it is not faithful to the comics for characters to grow in power quickly but it feels forced here. I think another source Advancements such as defeating a villain's master plan or shrinking the cost of improvements would help.

Finally the guidelines for building super villains seem to favor the long slog rather than the speedy combat of Apocalypse World. Essentially the advice is to set a Condition Threshold, a number of conditions on a foe sufficient to cause them to be defeated, equal to the number of players (and for more powerful foes at a multiple of that value). Since the Take Down Move only inflicts a single Condition and minor conditions can be shaken off in combat, this requires any battle to include a large number of rolls. I think this needs some fine tuning to regain the elegance of Apocalypse World's one and done combats (big boss fights can be long but not every super villain is worthy of that many rolls, 2 or 3 might suffice for many of them).

Overall

As I stated at the beginning I like this game. If you want a rules light/narrative heavy superhero game that lets you to make the character you want with minimal fuss, this may be the game for you. Its few flaws could easily patched by a moderately experienced game master and its active community should answer any questions. So look forward to the final version in a few months.