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Relationships play a big part in Wildermyth, allowing the characters you bring to each adventure to develop and grow together, ending in marriage or rivalries. This element can have lasting effects both inside and outside of combat, so it is essential to know beforehand how it works. This guide explains everything there is to know about relationships in Wildermyth, the benefits you get in combat, and how romance, marriage, and children work.
How do relationships and romance work?
This broad and rather existentialist question can be refined by speaking of Wildermyth. But the answer still has subtleties. In the game, each character has their own personality stats – some can be greedy, brash, or cowardly, among others. This will naturally give them major or lesser compatibility with party members, leading to three possible outcomes: friendship, rivalry, and romance.
Relationships can happen randomly over time or as a result of certain story events, and the character’s personality stats eventually adjust to those possibilities. As your team fights battles together, and takes part in missions, quests, and random events as a group, they are rewarded with relationship points. This all happens in the background, so don’t worry about that element intertwining with the experience in general. But it’s important to understand that while the odds are very arbitrary, there are factors involved that can lead to some results rather than others.
Romance, for example, has a few additional requirements, as it can trigger randomly if both characters are eligible beforehand. This includes personalities (a diagram in the wiki shows all permutations – blue is positive, orange is negative), but also love interests. Each character has a hidden aspect that defines whether they like men or women (this can only be seen via devmode), and yes, there can be same- relationships as well.
When it comes to relationships resulting from events in the story, it will depend on the choices you make throughout. If you are not in the random aspect, you can choose to turn off random romances and / or rivalries in the character sheet, in the Customize menu. This will ensure that these two types of relationships only occur after the events.
Also, if you want to have some agency in relationships that can happen in a new adventure, you can revive the characters as many times as you want, as well as change their stats to achieve specific results – a romantic hothead. , a greedy snark, and so on.
The agency can also be used to ensure the continuity of your characters in other adventures. Wildermyth allows you to “save” characters in the game and choose them again in future adventures (which work like campaigns). If you want certain characters to maintain their romances and rivalries, you can choose to “lock” them in the Relationships tab of the character sheet. Just be aware that while you are locking status, you will lose any levels you have earned for either.
List of relationship benefits and how they work
Relationships aren’t just for deepening your character’s story, as they also provide some handy bonuses in combat. Friendships, rivalries, and romances can have up to five levels, each increasing this bonus a bit more. This will happen at the same time that the aforementioned relationships are working, so again you will see the results as the game progresses, unless you participate in specific relationship-related events.
Friendship
The most common and neutral outcome of relationships in Wildermyth is friendship. The benefit of this occurs when your friendly characters wall out, which is a fancy term for when they are adjacent to each other in the battle grid.
- Buddy (level 1): +10 to block chances
- Confident (level 2): +15 to block
- Comrade (level 3): +20 to block chances
- Companion (level 4): +25 to block chances
- Blood Bond (level 5): +30 to block chances
Romance
When it comes to romance, a character will gain bonus damage against enemies that attack the fictionalized counterpart, until the end of the mission.
- Favorite (level 1): +1 damage
- Flame (level 2): +2 damage
- Honey (level 3): +3 damage
- Lovers (level 4): +4 damage
- Soul Mate (level 5): +5 damage
Rivalry
Finally, rivals will get a stunt bonus every time the rival performs a stunt. This will last until the opposing character also performs said action, so no, they don’t follow each other. In Wildermyth, this term refers to a critical hit rather than a stun.
- Pair (level 1): +25 to the waterfall
- Annoying (level 2) : +35 to stunt
- Enemy (level 3): +45 to stunt
- Antagonist (level 4): +55 to stunt
- Rival (level 5): +100 at the waterfall
How does marriage and children work in Wildermyth?
Marriage and children are much more arbitrary. As of yet, there is no way to manually trigger either event, although we do know how each can happen.
Marriages can occur between characters in a romance (they don’t need to be level five) during the Peace Years. It’s a sort of epilogue that follows after completing a chapter of an adventure. The game will display this event in its comedic thumbnails if it occurs, but there is no guarantee for this.
The same goes for children. Marriage does not always lead to this, as couples can still have children without ever getting married and vice versa. In our experience, we’ve come across the son of only one character, so again that varies.
One way to increase your odds is to have fewer than five party members (which is the maximum party size). Again, that won’t guarantee this, but the game will most likely result in one of your characters introducing their children as a member of the group.
In summary, you can force certain relationship results through the aforementioned expand mode, or just by disabling random results. But if you experience Wildermyth as originally intended, have fun watching your characters have fun or declare their rivalry to each other!
How to marry characters in Wildermyth
Your epic adventure in Wildermyth can take you and your various characters all over the world working together to try to prevent one of the many evils from taking hold of what’s left of the world. Your characters will develop relationships with each other along the way, and some of them might even fall in love. When they fall in love, a random event may occur where they spend part of their years in peace getting married, but it doesn’t always happen.
First and foremost, you need to make sure that the two characters you want to marry have had at least one romantic story development. This can happen during Random Events or Story Events when you land on a tile. Both characters have a chance to develop a romantic engagement based on their reactions. After the event, you can check their character sheet to see if they have become “flames”.
You want to make sure that these two characters stay together, because the characters can fall in love with each other. This can happen if you don’t lock their relationship as a soul mate in the character sheets. You only have to do it with one of the two characters. By locking down their relationship, they won’t try to romantically engage other characters.
The marriage between two characters will occur during the years of peace, following the end of a chapter. You’ll read about this during the synopsis of what many characters are up to. This is not guaranteed to happen between two soul mates or those who are developing a romance. Sometimes the couple will never get married, but they will refer to each other as “love” and even have children together. You can increase your chances of two characters getting married by increasing their “romantic” trait during the character creation process.
