The Son of Profiling Comments

I was curious about Worldtree and managed to get into a game at Gencon being run by the game's creator and his wife.

The game runs on a mix of a deck of cards and dice. It's an odd mix at first but you get used to it. We played the servants of a noble woman hosting a dinner in an effort to moderate a dispute between several other nobles. Of course the dinner went awry and it was up to us to investigate and keep a war from breaking out.

A trail of magic was followed and since our patron tended to hire those with shady pasts, we had the skills to follow the trail. We ran afoul of evil forces disguised as bandits, battled an elemental and cleared a mage falsely accused while gaining enough evidence to allow our patron to blackmail the involved parties into keeping the peace. :)

My impressions of the game:

Magic is highly prevalent but not overwhelming. There are a lot of minor useful, non-fireball magics. Magic is common enough to affect every day events, like cooking, but it takes a lot of dedication to become a powerful force.

Though an anthropomorphic game, the races do not overwhelm each other. They do have enough flavor to distinguish themselves.

Combat keeps an element of unpredictability by drawing cards for initiative.

The setting is unusual (the limbs of an enormous tree) and is designed to encourage finding non-combat answers to problems. As land on the limbs are limited there is a great deal of political intrigue and diplomacy. Society is structured and keeps wandering groups of armed miscreants from being playable.

The system, after playing and reading, does take a few times to get used to but it seems to work well.

Even if you're not an anthro fan you might like it. My wife hates anthro games (which makes playing games like Ironclaw hard) and picked up Worldtree after the session ended.