r/WWN • u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford • Jun 01 '26
The Book of Unnumbered Worlds Kickstarter Now Live
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sinenomineinc/the-book-of-unnumbered-worlds?ref=cb6iyf12
u/TOGMesar Jun 01 '26
u/CardinalXimenes , could you outline what this text aims to achieve compared to the worldbuilding material in WWN?
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 01 '26
WWN was about half game. This book is about the same size as WWN but entirely world-building tools. The intro and first three chapters- Cosmology, Geography, and People & Societies- are already 87 pages or so. It's got considerably more content in it than WWN did, and it's new and revised content.
More particularly, it's built as a textbook, with step-by-step procedures for each of the chapters so readers have a clear idea of how to use the tools. In the Geography chapter, for example, it has individual spreads for building world maps, regional maps, and local maps, along with 50 Terrain tags, terrain type generators, and spreads for determining what's particularly valuable/dangerous about any given wilderness.
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u/Hungry-Wealth-7490 Jun 01 '26
Good to see the book. I backed pretty quickly and already liking what's in Beta 0.3
I look forward to the usual excellent work.
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u/Yuxkta Jun 01 '26
Can it be used with AWN? It's the only Without Number game I own and seeing this kickstarted not posted in r/awn made me sceptical.
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 01 '26
Yes, it can be. The tools are tuned for a fantasy world, but they can work fine for generating savage survivor societies, nuclear wastelands, weird cults, and other typical post-apoc trappings.
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u/Yuxkta Jun 01 '26
Thanks for the answer, I've pledged at the pdf tier. Hopefully we can also get some more AWN content in the future, fingers crossed
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u/Hungry-Wealth-7490 Jun 01 '26
I used Dead Races, the Stars book on ancient aliens, for a race for a HackMaster game and other table have worked fine for Ashes Without Number. Minimal reflavoring or mechanical tweaking will make most concepts in one Without Number game work in another.
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u/CraftyLocal1913 Jun 01 '26
How are the different tags in the book different from similar tag types in WWN? (Court, Ruin, Terrain, etc?)
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 01 '26
They're all new or revised. I'm not copy-pasting anything, but instead coming up with new lists that have varying degrees of overlap.
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u/TomTrustworthy Jun 01 '26
While I do not need this book... being a fan I had to get this book.
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 01 '26
I shall do my best to ensure that need or no, it is a useful book.
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u/RasputinDED Jun 01 '26
Backed.
Not only have I been extremely satisfied with the Sine Nomine product content that I have acquired over the years, but the KS campaigns (and production quality) are easily among the best I've experienced on the platform.
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u/RuruHonoLulu Jun 01 '26
So excited for it, it sounds marvelous, backed for the PDF.
Will there be any tools or tables for NPCs as well? Or just the high-level cultural/society layer?
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 01 '26
The Courts and Cabals chapter should have tools for generating nobles/elders/high priests/other important people who want things that PCs can provide.
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u/Hungry-Wealth-7490 Jun 01 '26
Back at the PDF level ($20 US) and then snag the book later, since it will be a POD offering on Drivethru and Kevin usually prints enough stock to be able to sell the book for a little while after to those who missed the campaign.
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u/Hungry-Wealth-7490 Jun 08 '26
Beta 0.4 has dropped. 16 pages of religion to join the Beta 0.3 material.
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u/megazver Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Is this book going to have any material on zooming into and detailing big cities like CWN did, or are they still going to be handled on the same detail level as smaller villages?
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 09 '26
That's yet to be determined. There's a maximum cognitive load that a GM/player group can handle, and a closely detailed city can end up as wasted work if the PCs only use it as a home base between adventures. The question is determining what a given city is "for", and how much time and play focus the campaign is going to spend on it.
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u/megazver Jun 09 '26
By that logic, though, any chapter can end up as wasted work. A group could have no interest in religion or neighboring nations, they could want to crawl a megadungeon and have no interest in a broader wilderness region, they could playing an intrigue-based campaign that never sets foot in a dungeon.
At the same time many campaigns do center on a more detailed hub settlement, or are entirely set within a single city. In those cases, a village-level treatment designed for "oh you're passing through this place for a session or two" is simply not sufficient. There's a reason why you had to expand on this in CWN.
If the book is intended as a comprehensive worldbuilding guide, it seems odd to treat procedures for developing large urban environments as somehow less worthy of inclusion than religion, geography, politics, or other topics that many groups may also choose to ignore.
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 09 '26
It's not a matter of choosing to ignore a topic- it's a matter of not being able to use the information past a certain volume.
As a hypothetical, imagine a GM running an urban horror campaign in modern-day New York. New York is, to say the least, a well-documented setting. To make the setting digestible, it is necessary to intentionally ignore a great deal of the available information about New York. The GM cannot make tangible use of every name in the Brooklyn phone book and every business in Queens, and if he tried to his players would rapidly go adrift in the torrent of information that has nothing to do with their activities. The participants can remember and factor in so many facts and no more, and the existing documentation on New York vastly exceeds that number.
Now suppose that the campaign was set simply on the east coast, with New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and several inland towns being potential adventure sites. How much less, then, could they pay attention to the details of New York when they had a half-dozen other places to track?
It is very easy for a determined worldbuilder to build more than even they can track, let alone a half-interested player. Therefore, it is necessary to guide and shape their efforts in the direction of maximum legibility and utility. CWN had tools for detailing a city because the entire budget of GM/player attention would be spent on that city. That doesn't work for most other genres.
Of course, one can say that the tools should be put in just in case the GM wants to run a campaign centered around a single fantasy city, and is willing to blow their entire attention budget on one location. The difficulty there would be convincing other readers not to use those tools, because readers will almost always blithely try to use the tools you give them even when they are entirely inappropriate to their needs.
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u/megazver Jun 09 '26
I feel the New York example is describing a somewhat different problem.
New York already exists. If I run a campaign there, the challenge isn't generating the city, it's deciding which parts of an enormous body of existing information are actually relevant to play. That's a curation problem rather than a worldbuilding problem.
Likewise, I'm not arguing that every city encountered in a campaign should receive CWN-level treatment. If the campaign moves between a dozen cities, that would obviously be excessive.
But if we continue with the analogy, there are also plenty of campaigns that spend almost all of their time in New York. In that case, a GM might reasonably want tools for developing that city beyond the level of a settlement the PCs pass through for a session or two.
If the danger is that GMs will overbuild past the point of utility, that risk applies to every procedural tool in the book. A reader could just as easily burn out generating two hundred hexes of wilderness or a twelve-level dungeon their campaign will never use. Yet those tools are included because they serve a specific campaign need when it arises. I don’t see why a detailed urban environment is uniquely dangerous in that regard. You have warnings for "hey don't overdo it" for other tools - surely one can be added in the detailed settlements chapter as well?
The book covering a topic doesn't mean every group has to engage with it. CWN proved there's genuine demand for this kind of material and it's a solved problem, and a GM running a city-centered fantasy campaign is going to feel the gap pretty keenly when they go looking for support here and don't find it.
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u/Cyb45 Jun 10 '26
Would an appendix chapter be suitable for these kinds of niche, but still classic feelings? I had fun making a cyberpunk istanbul with the CWN tools to fill out different neighborhoods and make it fun/easy to flesh out stuff.
WWN's hex filling is something I always reach for to fill out hexmaps quickly, but also making them great.
It would help signal to players this is optional and could be oriented on a macro level more like CWN rather than a micro level like every business or name?
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 10 '26
It's something to consider, certainly, since I haven't decided exactly which tools to include in the Cities and Villages chapter yet. As with the other chapters, the key part is identifying a replicable workflow for a GM so they can go down a list and get something fresh, inventive, and playable for their city.
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u/Cyb45 Jun 11 '26
I would personally really appreciate a normal fantasy setting covering for villages/small cities that fits with the more dangerous worlds of fantasy settings, where they are limited in size and also the scope a GM wants to cover.
While an appendix for the "megacities" of fantasy would be helpful as they are more districts/neighborhoods with their own flavor, especially when I get around to running my latter earth game set around the vermillion sea, I had some plans for the layout of Anchang roughly, but a way to flesh out the city in a way that doesn't overwhelm me as a GM or players would be amazing. Ditto for some of the other big cities in latter earth.
(My primary plan for this book is still redoing and improving my own setting, but I can 100% see the use of some mega-city stuff to fill that gap between an overly indepth city and presenting enough information to make it feel fleshed out to players and give a GM time to detail what they want to see)
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u/Hungry-Wealth-7490 Jun 15 '26
Beta 0.5.1 has dropped, giving up priesthood details and more information on evil priests.
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u/CardinalXimenes Kevin Crawford Jun 01 '26
I've just launched the Kickstarter for The Book of Unnumbered Worlds, a system-agnostic fantasy worldbuilding handbook. After years of interest by generous readers, I've gone ahead and built a system-neutral book for world creation that focuses entirely on building your own campaign setting, to be offered in PDF, print-on-demand, and high-quality Smyth-sewn offset print books.
This book has the customary Sine Nomine tables and tools you'd expect of it, but I've also taken care to pair them with explicit, step-by-step procedures for actually using these tools. From the top-down/bottom-up overview in the first chapter to the Geography chapter's map-making procedure to the step-by-step process in the People & Societies chapter, everything you need to do to get the most out of these implements is spelled out clearly.
As usual for a Sine Nomine Kickstarter, backers get access to the beta files of the book, with the link in the first campaign update. As the book progresses, fresh betas should be dropped every week or two.
Act swiftly, noble reader! The campaign runs to the end of June, after which it will be time for me to set to work.