Review: Ex Novo by Sharkbomb Games
I was originally going to save this review for a longer series on town-building and city-building, but given how many months I have been plugging this game on my socials and in my monthly roundup newsletters, I've been remiss on not just writing up my official review. Maybe I'll make this still be part of a series if and when I eventually decide to create the full city-building series.
Ex Novo, by Martin Nerurkar and Konstantinos Dimopoulos, is a journalling RPG meant for use either solo or as part of a group. You work through various social and historical forces that impact and build your city over time, chronicling and mapping the growth of your town. You can pick it up on DriveThruRPG. You can also back a print version on Kickstarter soon (you can sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live here).
Ex Novo is a fantastic worldbuilding tool, and it has brought so much extra life and detail into the cities of my world. I've mostly played it solo, rather than in groups, because I absolutely love solo journalling-based games, as longtime readers of the blog will know (I recently organized all of this solo RPG content into a series, so check out the whole series!). Still, because of its utility as a worldbuilding tool, beyond just the fun of playing, this is definitely my most played solo game.
Because I mostly play the game solo, that is the playstyle that I'm going to be reviewing. I don't feel qualified to discuss how it plays with a group.
Mechanics Overview
Ex Novo is dirt simple to play. You have a map and some dice, essentially, and some mode of recording information. In each round of the game, you roll 3d6 to determine which event transpires to your city, giving you a prompt. Many also have a direct action to take on the map, as well--such as a disaster that removes a district or a wave of immigration that adds density to existing districts. You record the details of the event for flavor, you make any specified modifications to the map or to the factions at play in the town, and then you move on.
The second phase after this is to decide if your town experiences natural growth or not. It's a way for your town to grow over time even if you aren't rolling growth events, which helps make sure that your town doesn't completely stagnate forever. Often, I'll base this decision on the event that I rolled--a war might destroy a district, and so I decide not to also grow by a district. Or, I do, and that new district is filled with refugees from the hinterlands fleeing to the city.
Then, you move on to the next round, and the cycle repeats. The variety of prompts is really where the game shines, and despite building at least a dozen cities with it by now, the game plays out differently every time.
What I Love
The thing that I love most about the game is the emergent storytelling. Just based on the series of events that transpire, my cities have taken on vastly different cultures. I have a corrupt, New Orleans or Las Vegas-esque den of gambling that was founded on the same initial conditions as an authoritarian, hyper-religious, military town. This has given me and my homebrew world so much more color to it, as even nearby towns assume different characters in a way that is far more realistic to the patchwork and highly local culture of the Medieval and Renaissance worlds than the sort of vague nation-state level of cultural development that modern worldbuilders (including myself) tend to operate on.
Second, it builds maps that have meaning. Not just my cities, but my neighborhoods are varied and have character. While the neighborhood or district is the smallest level that Ex Novo operates on--we're not drawing out every building or city block--that is still a granular enough level that you can get far more interesting maps than I used to generate. I use Wonderdraft to make my maps for my world, and not having to go through and place buildings also made these maps a lot easier. And for most city maps for a TTRPG, all you need is neighborhoods.
Ex Novo tracks the density of each district, which I turned into the shading of my map (with denser neighborhoods being darker shading). However, there are also important locations that can be built, which are worth noting on the map, including city walls and temples. Places can become ruins. And each of these has a history that is tied directly into the history of your city, rather than having your players wonder why an ancient ruin was never cannibalized for building material.
Ex Novo is also very flexible. You can scale it for different timescales and village sizes, letting you build metropolises just as much as a small farming hamlet. You can have ancient cities and new outposts. In terms of genre, it's mostly operating in a sort of D&D, medieval-Renaissance blend; there are some fantasy-adjacent elements, but you're largely not dealing with monster invasions unless you choose to flavor your "wild beasts outside the walls" as dragons instead of wolves.
This flexibility also allows me to link my world together. There's a drought mentioned in another city that would be nearby? Well, that's going to impact the natural growth phase for this town, even if I didn't roll the same event at the same time in history.
A Few Gripes
My gripes with Ex Novo are few, and they are mostly based on my particular worldbuilding use case.
The first is that the town scales, if you want to convert Ex Novo's vague densities to an actual population size, are out of line with real, historical populations. They're also not linear growth, which for me was hard to visualize. How do some events split a neighborhood and its population, but the combined new districts are significantly less populated than they were before the divide? So I tweaked those numbers for my own play.
The second is that I love the political intrigues of my cities as factions try to take power. But there are not quite enough events for me that focus on power shifts, meaning that for me to have as many shifts in the internal power dynamics as I'd like, I need to add a sort of "political shifts" part to my natural growth phase as well.
I also like thinking through the governmental system that sets up these factional combats. Do they have a mayor? A lord? A city council? Something else and more fantastic entirely? I wish that there was more support for that.
Still, these are all pretty particular to MY use case for MY worldbuilding, and they're incredibly minor gripes. Because Ex Novo is a fantastic tool for worldbuilding and a fun solo game, and so my few issues with it are very small.
Conclusion
As people who are subscribed to the monthly roundup newsletter or my followers on social media who have seen me rave about this game in posts know: I love this game and I play it a lot. While this game is likely not for everyone because not everyone enjoys worldbuilding, journalling games, I do unreservedly endorse this game for its target audience. If you have a worldbuilding medieval-esque project, if you like solo games, if you need neighborhood-scale maps for a city, then this game is the tool for you.
You absolutely should pick up Ex Novo on DriveThruRPG–I love it. Buying through my link helps support this website and offset my web hosting fees, which lets me keep writing reviews and advice and all the content you've come to enjoy.
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