Introduction
1. Introduction
Worlds That Remember is a cooperative, GMless roleplaying game about survival under pressure, where the world’s response is procedural and lasting.
This game is built on three commitments:
• No hidden information economy: no blind draws for gear, no secret deck order, no “digging for” answers.
• Consequence is explicit: dice do not create drama; they measure cost, fallout, escalation, and change.
• The world persists: Tags, Locations, Factions, Attention, and Doom record what happened and shape what comes next.
You are not optimizing a character sheet. You are managing survival, identity, and the weight of what the world now knows about you.
1.1 What This Game Is About
Play focuses on:
• hard choices about safety, travel, and exposure
• fragile capability built through gear, allies, and places
• escalation that arrives on world time (not player time)
• legacy: what remains when someone falls
1.2 What This Game Is Not
This game does not assume:
• balanced encounters
• “combat as sport”
• leveling as a reward schedule
• a GM to soften outcomes
Creativity is expressed through:
• what you attempt
• which Tags you invoke
• which dice you choose to risk
• what you sacrifice to contain collapse
1.3 Core Objects (Quick Glossary)
• Tags (Section 6): the descriptive/mechanical language of characters, gear, locations, factions, ruins, and the world.
• Action Cards (Section 7): what you can do cleanly right now; preparedness is your “action economy.”
• Conditions (Section 11): harmful cards that enter your deck and reduce clean options over time.
• Locations (Section 15): the network of places you negotiate into safety, upgrade, defend, and lose.
• Exposure (Section 17): the world pressing in when shelter fails.
• Attention (Section 18): how visible and patterned your actions have become.
• Doom (Section 19): campaign-scale escalation when containment fails.
• Catastrophes (Section 20): irreversible breaks in the world state.
• Legacy (Section 21): what persists after death.
1.4 How to Use This Document
The minimum onboarding path is:
• Section 2 (Resolution)
• Section 3 (Aspect Dice)
• Section 4–5 (Pool + Reading)
• Section 6–8 (Tags + Cards + Support)
• Section 14–15 (Cycle + Locations)
• Section 17–20 (Exposure + Attention + Doom + Catastrophes)
Everything else deepens and stabilizes play.