Better World building At The Table Is Easy - Quinn’s Quest Reviews Stonetop

By JimmiWazEre

Opinionated tabletop gaming chap

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TL;DR:

Quinn's Quest season two covered Stonetop, a fantasy TTRPG that tackles the classic lore-gap problem where GMs know everything and players know nothing by baking collaborative world-building directly into its rules. Rather than slowly feeding players lore over many sessions, it prompts them to co-invent the world as they play. Nifty like a fox.

The Juice

Sad times, Quinn's Quest season two has just wrapped up and now I've got to wait even longer than the amount of time between his regular episodes before season three is released, piecemeal.

Anyway, this episode's review was for a game called Stonetop. I'd never heard of it before and the impression that I got was that it was in the vein of a classic fantasy OSR game. That's fine, I have enough of those already, but if it weren't for the hefty price tag, I'd have probably picked it up for the sake of doing a review here.

What did catch my attention though was a section where Quinns talked about how a classic failing of fantasy TTRPGs plays out: the GM reads a book consisting of hundreds of pages worth of lore and, ideally, knows the world inside and out. The players however do not, and yet they're the people expected to make interesting decisions about how their characters would behave. This creates an awkward dissonance.

Quinns went on to say that this is typically resolved over the course of many many sessions whereby the players' cups are gradually filled with GM-fed lore snippets to the extent that they have a competent grasp of the in-game universe. But this takes time, and is therefore an imperfect solution.

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It seems that Stonetop has a special design philosophy to address this though. Within its lorebook, for each area Stonetop presents the GM with some questions to ask of the players about the thing that they're experiencing. This of course is not a new idea, but rarely have I seen it put so overtly and baked into the rules.

For instance, one striking feature is that when players run out of hit points, they're told that they see a magical doorway, and beyond – the Lady of Crows. The player is then asked to describe exactly what they see – thus co-inventing some of the game lore about the afterworld alongside the GM. This idea extends to everything, from locations, to NPCs and monsters, and crucially, the lorebook itself provides GMs with these question prompts – no need to rack your tired brain to come up with an interesting turn of phrase in the moment!

There's something genuinely refreshing about a game that treats lore not as a fixed canon to be downloaded into players' heads, but as something to be discovered and shaped collaboratively at the table. It sidesteps the usual slow drip of world-building entirely, and replaces it with something more immediate and personal. When your character glimpses the afterlife and you get to decide what it looks like, you’re also helping to build the world and getting a stake in it from an angle you don’t normally get to see. That's a powerful thing to put in the hands of players, and I'd love to see more games take a leaf out of Stonetop's book.

Conclusion

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