The Wyrd Lands

I am not a big fan of "dungeon" style adventures. But why is this? I write and play games in the FKR-sphere which, with its links to OSR/NSR, is a space heavily influenced by dungeons ( Dungeon23 anyone?) but I still have always found them a little "off".  This post is about my personal taste, and is not about good/bad dungeon design. I am not going to write, 'I didn't like dungeons until I read/played/ran this one and now I am a convert'. Nor am I defining dungeon - whatever you feel the term to mean, is probably pretty close to what I mean. Instead, I am going to reflect on my feelings as a player in a series of games I played in Dead Planet .  As a player in this adventure, I found myself feeling like one of three things: a tourist, a problem-solver and a survivor. The first two tie in to my personal difficulties with dungeons, the third helps me to understand why I have that difficulty.  The Tourist/problem-solver One of the things I felt in playing...

How do my FKR principles apply to game design? In this pose I am going to take a page from something for my Wyrd Lands setting and see if it meets these principles.  The game is modelled on the time and lands of Beowulf and in this focuses on a story about a bloodfeud between two settlements that threatens to plunge a region into fighting and cruelty.  The page I am taking is from an extract of a law-code: Qualitative Worlds For me this is a good example of qualitative world-building. It is written in a voice that comes from the world itself, and tries to express both the law itself and some kind of contemporary view of that law: ''curse upon us".  As part of this it doesn't determine a rule for the players that ties into a table-level mechanic . Instead it is something that will affect every character in dynamic and unpredictable ways. The table will need to determine in what ways using any approach that works for them.  Meaningful Objects The idea of a meaningful ...