Grasping Nettles

Grasping Nettles is a GMless worldbuilding game for 1-6 players about a community and its story over the course of generations.

Players take turns creating aspects of the world. On your turn, you roll a die to move one of the factions on the Wheel and perform the action you land on. Actions include defining new factions, describing locations, discovering issues, creating characters, starting projects, catching glimpses of other communities, and framing scenes to roleplay.

Once all faction pieces move to the Generation space, you look at everything created so far and describe how it changes over a time skip. You can then continue to play to explore the next generation of the world. By the end of the game, you have a whole history of a community brimming with factions, characters both living and dead, and locations where everything has happened.

Playing a generation in Grasping Nettles typically takes about 1-2 hours depending on your play style. You can string together multiple generations of play in one session, or even come back to your world for multi-session play.