A Review: Wolves Upon the Coast as a Setting
See Earlier Post for Wolves Upon the Coast as a System.
I played a multi year long campaign of Wolves Upon the Coast both as a player and as a GM and have enjoyed this setting enough to agree to be a player in a second campaign of it. I wrote a zine of this game because it so absorbed my TTRPG hobby for a while. Everything written after this should bare that in mind that I absolutely would endorse this setting to anyone pros and cons all included.
This Review will necessarily have some spoilers. Though I hope to avoid the big mysteries.
Wolves is a massive setting. The free starter area had enough content to fill some 30 sessions worth of game play for us. Ruislip was masterfully done and it was actually the only region without an included mapped dungeon (there are several lairs that could be mapped if you wanted to). I played for 2 years of high rate of play games (often 2-3 sessions a week) and we never ran out of interesting things to do or explore. In fact in this new campaign I am in a region I have little idea what is around here. You would think this massive amount of content comes with a rather generic fantasy setting but in fact it very expertly dodges those allegations at pretty much every turn. Wolves has its own assumptions of how magic and monsters work and its own world history that is in display consistently through play.
I do enjoy that Wolves is agnostic in design. In a literal sense. The existence of God/gods/etc is open to conjecture. There is real power in faith but outside things that may or may not be gods (depending on your interpretation of beings of great immortal power) there is no definitive proof in one way or another. It is a fine line to walk and Luke Gearing did an excellent job of writing it that way throughout the entirety of the setting without faltering in one way or another that most settings that try for this fail toward.
This is especially important in a setting that is set in a pseudo historical setting with references to real faiths such as Catholicism, Islam, Druidism, and other various historical and ahistorical faiths. It was done in a very tasteful way when so many seek to make hard statements based on personal belief.
History without info dumps. Wolves is incredible at this. There is no boxed text to read to give a run down of the worlds history yet the world is full of it. Every place your players will encounter is full of it. You can feel it everything is shrouded in mysticism and history but feels natural and part of the world as cruel as it may be.
The tied in system feels relevant throughout the setting. It was designed with its own laws of magic and what is important and that is evident in the world. If there is a reference to a spell in the system there is somewhere in the world to find that material in the world and someone or something that will teach it to you. Knowledge is valuable and this game does a great job of rewarding you for pursuing it.
Wolves uses a restricted monster list and does it masterfully. Luke limited himself to just the 50 monsters that appear in Monsters& (from his modern adaption of Monsters & Treasure) but with that he fully managed to make a wide variety of interesting different encounters even when using the same basic premise such as Ogres that all are products of a desire to possess everything of a specific type. I never found myself going "oh these again?" despite a long campaign as both GM and player. That is a pretty good accomplishment. There are a few specific exemptions of individual named monsters
an example of a merfolk in a hex description
a separate example you can see how these two examples each could play out very differently.
Luke is pretty good at avoiding overly verbose descriptions while also giving enough to give good play opportunities. He keeps the descriptions short but also descriptive enough to make them feel unique and interesting to explore. Good footwork for making launching points for story telling. GMs will find themselves making twists on the same hexes that others ran and no two tables will remember the same hex quite the same as another.
an example hex that built 4 sessions worth of adventures and I saw many more opportunities that the players never engaged with. It was enough to build a session on the fly when players went off the beaten path away from preprepped material but not so much as to leave me spending 20 minutes in session reading and trying to figure out what was happening.
This is not to say I do not have any gripes with the setting. I do often find that Luke is prone to writing hexes where many of them feel like there isn't much adventure beyond "you need to kill x number enemies" which isn't uncommon in fantasy RPGs but I usually don't like it in those games either. My favorite hexes that Luke wrote are ones where fights may happen but at the same time there is clear ways around them or opportunities for great non-combat encounters. Brychdyn with its horse races but is also home to illegal activity, Contin with its cult of psychos but the opportunity to earn acceptance with the sacrifice of a tooth. Things like this help push the setting up into a higher tier rather then many settings which do "a village of horse ranchers" that appear in some settings.
The biggest drawback for most people is easily the cost. Last I checked the Wolves Upon the Coast grand Campaign was running a full 50 USD and if I remember right you have to also purchase the Monsters & and &&&Treasure in order to have everything you need to run. It is the most expensive TTRPG product that isn't a box set with massive amounts of art (which these pdfs have little to none) and a physical copy. Of course this is a setting and a massive one vs often quite small but it still feels heavy for something that only appears in a pdf.
There is a bigger conversation to be had around if other OSR products are being sold at a realistic price to justify doing it as a career and I will not fault Luke for charging a price that makes him a livelihood in his career as a TTRPG author.
A small issue for me is that the water ways are too narrow. I think that one of the coolest things in this setting is the wandering isles and sea monsters and the encounter rate on those is small enough that one may pop up for one or two sessions every twenty or so sessions. This is rare enough to make them almost nonexistent for the most part and I feel like in my play experience they are some of the best written and most iconic play experiences.
The Screaming Rock is probably the most plain of the Wandering Islands it boils down to essentially a lair of like 50 ogres but it turned into about a dozen sessions of us tracking and silencing this rock and reclaiming its victims. The sessions on it and surrounding it where the culmination of a year of campaign play. I would like to see them pop up more and the only guaranteed way for players to get to a wandering isle is to become lost at sea.
Personally my biggest gripe of Wolves is how difficult it is to reference one hex to another. They often drop a name in one hex and then it completely avoids mentioning again for 30 hexes in any direction. Months or a year of gameplay often pass before it could realistically pop up again without the Game Master adding clues to link them. Luke did this intentionally to reward the flipping back and forth through a book and cross referencing and figuring out how things fit together but it mostly just makes it a bit more difficult to run.
an example of this. Maebh is in fact not in Albann at all. There is 0 references or leads to her in Albann. She is currently a prisoner in a third region with only a single reference to her in a difficult to reach location. I spent 6 months of my campaign dropping hints and clues to her whereabouts and ways to figure it out and my players still never found her. The PCs that cared died before being able to pursue these leads. Much work on my end could have been avoided by simply writing (Hex 13.13) next to her name.
Of course these are the flaws found when having played a thousand hours and I likely would not have these complaints seriously if I had not played so much of this game and keep coming back to it.
In total I would say that Wolves is probably my favorite published setting of all time. My complaints of it are fairly small and are generally more personal preference then anything. If you don't absolutely require large amounts of art and a physical copy and you can spare the money to buy this it is a must have for every digital library in my opinion.