The World Wide Wrestling RPG

Welcome to World Wide Wrestling: Second Edition! This award-winning game of professional wrestling action enables you to create your own professional wrestling franchise through play, showcasing satisfying and surprising storylines. It’s about feuds, championships, betrayal, and righteous victory. It’s about the clash of good and evil on the grandest stage. It’s about whether you’ve got what it takes. And, in the end, it’s about what the audience thinks of your efforts. 

GAME FEATURES

This Second Edition combines and refines all of the material published for the original game into one action-packed package! 

Supports in-ring action, backstage drama and the development of pro wrestling storylines that tie them together.

Rules that create classic pro wrestling storylines while also allowing you room to subvert and invent your own.

Provides all the tools for players unfamiliar with the genre to participate, while supporting fans in playing out their favorite wrestling tropes.

Episodic play that accommodates irregular attendance and fluctuating group sizes.

Powered by the Apocalypse

World Wide Wrestling shared the Indie RPG Awards Indie Game of the Year 2015 award with Night Witches. It also won the Best Support 2015 award. 

ABOUT THE SECOND EDITION

World Wide Wrestling: Second Edition combines all of the material from the original World Wide Wrestling RPG and the International Incident supplement into one streamlined, updated game that supports both quickly getting to the action and long-term dynamic exploration of the promotion around the wrestlers.

If you enjoyed the first edition, this is an evolution of everything you're already familiar with. If you're new to the game, this is the perfect time to check it out, with additional focus on onboarding new players and more support for the wrestling-curious to dive into what makes professional wrestling such an enduring art form.

What's New:

The set of 15 core Gimmicks consolidates the most popular and interesting playbooks released for the first edition into one diverse roster of wrestling archetypes.

More support for in-ring storytelling, from revised Match Stipulations to visual play aids to more focused deep dives into wrestling psychology and how to bring that into your games.

Living Promotions add the Promotion as a character in your game, growing and changing along with the wrestlers.

12 example Living Promotions, giving pick-up-play settings from the bar-room to the international jet-set, along with over 60 wrestlers and staff to use for your own games.

Going on the road is now fully integrated into the rest of the game, adding support for playing out scenes between arena shows to explore the people behind the masks.

2 brand new essays, along with 7 revised essays from game designers and wrestling aficionados about wrestling, roleplaying and how the two work together.

... and more!

More Information

World Wide Wrestling: Second Edition is a game of narrative professional wrestling excitement, action and drama. It scales well from 3-9 players. One player is Creative, tasked with booking the shows, introducing antagonists and coming up with basic storylines. The other players take on pro wrestling archetypes, called Gimmicks, and play their wrestlers through feuds, partnerships and betrayals. Everyone at the table is competing for that "top spot," but they're also working together to entertain their viewing audience!

This game is accessible to both wrestling fans curious about roleplaying, and experienced roleplayers who want to see what professional wrestling is all about. 

Creative (the Game Master role) comes up with basic storylines and literally books each Episode of play, deciding who's on screen when, who's in what match and, most importantly, who's going to win. The players play out their wrestlers as they participate in these segments, but they have agency to pursue their own agendas and "swerve" what Creative has in mind. Creative has to roll with the punches and make it look like that’s what they had in mind all along!

Wrestling matches are handled by back-and-forth dramatic narration, mediated by the character’s in-ring abilities and how the dice fall. Whether a quick squash or an epic full-roster Battle Royal, wrestling matches are exciting affairs that both build character and drive the ongoing storylines.