I find myself with a bit of time and I'm not quite ready to settle in to playing Spider-Man for the rest of the evening, so here we are.
The Game: Wilderness of Mirrors
The Publisher: John Wick Presents
Degree of Familiarity: None. I've read it. Since it doesn't seem to have been playtested, that's probably enough.
Books Required: Just the one (this is collected in the Big Book of Little Games)
Wilderness of Mirrors, like a lot of JWP games, seems to have sprung from folks asking John to make a game about [thing] and John doing that. I don't have any idea when this game came out originally, so I don't know if it predates games like Night's Black Agents or Blowback, both of which take on the spy genre in different ways.
Although, to be fair, Wilderness is taking on a very particular couple of facets of the spy genre - to wit, spies are hyper-competent experts who betray each other. As such, Leverage is probably the closest cousin it has in the RPG, at least as far as I'm aware, though maybe Cold City is in there, too.
In any case, character creation is dirt simple so I'm gonna blather a little bit more, because there are things about this game I find interesting (not good or bad, just interesting).
A big part of the game is centered around planning. Like, the way the game works is that the GM ("Operations") gives the players a one-sentence premise ("SOMEBODY'S POISONED THE WATER HOLE!" no, that's not in-genre, but like, that level of detail) and the players then come up with the details. As they supply details, the GM gives them mission points that they can spend to add dice to rolls later. This kinda crosses the line from "collaborative" to "players do most of the heavy lifting," but again, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And the other thing is, it's really funny to me to see the difference in attitude towards planning between this and Blades in the Dark. Blades assumes that planning is going to go round in circles, and it's better to take the plan as read and jump to the action. Wilderness assumes that planning is a large chunk of the fun, and it's drawing on its genre inspirations pretty directly for that, but I want to note that most of the time in RPGs when planning happens, the narrative load is on the GM. Here, it's on the players, which means they aren't planning the mission so much as creating it whole cloth. I wonder if that would obviate the big issue with planning that I've seen (to wit, players' tendency to overthink everything).
Anyway, the text of the game spends a lot of time in the meta and not enough time in the meat, but like, meat is an anagram of meta, so who's the real monster, here?
Moving along.
Characters have five areas of Expertise, and 35 points to split up, but the costs aren't one-to-one. That is, you can generalize (starting with 3 in everything), but don't you want to be badass in a particular area?
The Expertise(s) are Fixer, Grifter, Gunman, Heavy, and Shade. "Fixer" here is basically "gadget/tech spy," which isn't the way I'd use the word "fixer," but whatever.
(I note, too, that the only information on character creation is about spending the points. At no point are we told to name or describe our characters, and there's a lot of "you want to be James Bond, right?" kind of talk.)
Anyway, I don't want to be James Bond because I don't want to die of hyper-space-gonorrhea. There's no setting for the game as such (there's a sample uber-agency called Olympus 7, though, but it's made of agents from a bunch of different branches around the world). So I'm gonna assume my character is working for Olympus 7, just because it gives me a place to start.
I want my character to be Colombian. In 2011, the president of Colombia dissolved the existing intelligence agency due to scandals involving spy on politicians and judges. Sounds good to me! We'll say that my character was doing some of that spying, and Olympus 7 picked him up and faked his death. His name is Gabriél Marco Dominguez Rojas, but of course he doesn't use that name anymore. His code name is El Dogal (the Noose).
Now for Expertise. I think I want Dogal to be best at Shade and Grifter; while his code name implies violence, it's more about giving someone enough to rope to hang themselves (I have no idea if that particular idiom translates to Colombian Spanish, but I've already done more research for this character than I really needed to). I want to be best at Shade, I think, so I'll put that at 5. That costs me 10 points. 25 left.
I'll put Grifter at 4, which costs me 9 (14 left). I'm fine with Heavy being left low, so I'll leave it at 1, how about. I'll put Gunman at 3 (7 points, down to 7) and that leaves Fixer at 3 as well. Groovy.
And that's it, actually. Everything else is game-play related, so it doesn't go on the sheet. I could do a little description, though.
Dogal is about six feet tall, black hair, brown eyes, dark skin, lean and not much in the way of muscle. He's just shy of 40 (assuming this game is set now-ish, he was just 30 when his agency got dissolved). He knows that if you push someone just the right way, they'll put the noose around their own neck and jump out into the nothing. It's just a matter of knowing where to push.
And that's done, then!
