Features

Wildermyth Wednesday, Part 2

And we’re back! For those of you who missed part one, Wildermyth Wednesday is a regular series involving screenshots collected from the Worldwalker Games 2021 release. Wildermyth is an RPG with turn-based combat that does an amazing job of making the story focus on the characters which you, the player, recruit/create. It’s fun! You might consider trying it sometime!

Without further adieu:

The Adventures of Zanbert

There are plenty of opportunities to transform characters in Wildermyth. And often, in my playthroughs, I won’t end up deciding to have a character undergo a transformation–sometimes it doesn’t fit with my previous idea of who that character is or what role they’re playing, etc.

Zanbert Gravetether, however, is an example of how transformation–he’s become a wolfman, as you can see–sometimes can enhance the personality of a character and make them more memorable within one’s Wildermyth canon. Above, he’s offering to bite someone on behalf of his mystic friend, Telthaia Truffleworth.

And in this one, he’s delivering a devastating zinger group of bandits that he and the other party members have encountered. Note that this is from a different campaign, and he’s younger, which is why his coat is gray rather than white. But wow, “Maybe that should inform your decisions?” That’s cold, Zanbert.

Annnnd the less said about this one, the better! We’ll move on to a different set of characters now:

Deepists Or Cheesemongers?

In the first one, above, two of our heroes, Ebbriana Sherbert (right) and Gretchen Greatwasp, are hearing testimony from a helpful mouse regarding the location of enemy forces. Grady Day (who somewhat escaped having as silly a name as the others in this campaign) is in the background.

And here we see that Grady is somewhat skeptical of Gretchen taking the mouse’s word. Suggesting that rather than the Deepist cult that they’re fighting, the mouse might have just gotten excited about a cheesemonger being located nearby.

…but then the party–including the previously unseen Cobb Vas Sky (second from right)–charges in, to discover that, well, it’s NOT a cheesemonger. It was the Deepists after all. Rodents are right more often than you’d think.

“Library Lochsley”

Each character in Wildermyth possesses personality traits, measured on a scale from 1-99. The two strongest traits go a long way towards determining their reactions to certain situations and their dialogue in certain interactions. To use an example from last Wildermyth Wednesday, Domino Wildelance–the mystic who threw himself down into an underground cavern to protect his daughter–is referred to as a “Goofish Leader” because his strongest personality trait is “leader,” and his second strongest is “goofball.”

Lochsley Kynestrange? Well, he’s a Bookish Poet.

A real man of mystery. It’s hard to tell what he’s passionate about.

We’ll return next week!

Features

It’s Wildermyth Wednesday!

Wildermyth, a 2021 Worldwalker Games release, is a game I’ve played a lot over the last couple years. It’s a party-based fantasy RPG with turn-based combat, seamlessly woven into a story structure that shines the spotlight on the characters the player has created and recruited. While other squad management games (the rebooted XCOM and the first Darkest Dungeon, to name a couple) allow you to customize your charges but don’t do much to establish them as three-dimensional characters, Wildermyth takes the ball and runs in a character-focused direction. The game possesses a pretty impressive array of campaign options, but the characters you create and how they interact with each other are the meat of the story. And if you play enough if it, you may very well end up with your own cast of thousands.

So! Wildermyth Wednesday is a weekly feature that I hope to keep publishing as part of updating this blog more often again. As kindly suggested by one of the other contributors, this feature will include a handful of screenshots from the many I’ve collected, and a short explanation for why I picked each. Along the way, maybe this’ll spark your interest, dear reader, in playing the game. Or maybe you’ll just like observing the large cast of characters who’ve accumulated over umpteen playthroughs. Either way, without further adieu, below is the first of this week’s shots:

Skinny’s Battlecry

Wildermyth multiplayer is a joyful, if sometimes the slightest bit buggy, experience. The above is from the latest campaign that one of my siblings and I played which centered around fighting back a tide of the robots-with-bones creatures known as the Morthagi. We created these three as our starting characters: Aisling Starchaser is the blue-haired mystic on the right, Prim Weedwater is the hunter in the middle (my sister’s creation), and Skinny Conlock is the warrior who is struggling with the assignment of yelling something impressive as a battle cry.

The Freaky Freecairn Freedom Fighters, Years Later

And this one is from later in that same campaign. In fact, several years later. Aisling, Prim, and Skinny have all been at the fight for years, and have been joined by Prim’s son, Cabbage, and another warrior (left of Aisling) named Pip Rust. The five of them are accompanied by two allies whose names I won’t mention due to spoilers.

And yes, the name of the group for this campaign was, in fact, the Freaky Freecairn Freedom Fighters. And yes, we did pick the name.

Two Unfortunate Rivalries

The two screenshots below show two different rivalries forming during a custom campaign. The campaign set-up is designed to take a couple of your existing Legacy Heroes and generate each of them a younger sibling. I did this for Stornbaron and Kika because they were both older characters in my legacy who still didn’t have any family members. I thought it would be nice.

…and then they both formed rivalries with each other’s younger siblings. I was a little miffed over this happening. It wound up being a fun playthrough, nonetheless.

Domino Dives In, Daddily

This last one is also one where our characters are fighting the Morthagi. In this event, Lirielle Wildelance fell through the ground into the Morthagi workshop, and is now hiding under the table while she waits for back-up. One of the options I had at this point was to allow her father, Domino Wildelance, to jump in after her. I decided to have him do that, since it’s in character with him being protective of the other members of the group. That’d be why there’s an old mystic and his shadow cat flying downwards towards a bone-and-metal monster. Domino’s not about to let his daughter fight the bad guys off alone.

Pink is one of their family colors according to my head canon.

Next!

We’ll return next Wednesday with a new set. In the meantime, maybe I’ll actually finish one of these reviews that’s been on the backburner for awhile now.