The Wyrd Lands

Characters in RPGs are typically disconnected from the world around them: exiles, wanderers, adventurers. They don't belong to the spaces in which they act. This post is about the opposite: characters who are embedded within an environment.  Tales told in the setting of the Wyrd Lands are designed to be about the place and its people. In my mind I think of the characters as embedded characters.  Why I think embedded characters matter When I say embedded characters, I mean characters that have a stake in the place where they act. They emerge from that space and their motivations are tied to its motivation, not simply their own personal ones.   This is in contrast to the dungeon-tourism of adventurers that I have been writing about recently . In this, the adventurer is typically coming into a place, solving its problems or getting some kind of wealth from it, before moving on. They are knights, ronin and gunslingers.  A quick aside: I am not saying that these kinds of characters are

Swords and ale, magic and monsters! It sounds like pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, but The Wyrd Lands looks more odd when you scratch beneath the service.  One of the challenges in writing content for the setting is that it is trying to represent a world that doesn't really tie to the standard late medieval/renaissance that most fantasy/pseudo-historical settings do. This typical setting is predicated on the idea of a knight-like adventurer in a world that is quite like our own: written laws, nation states, international trade, industry, recognisable classes etc.  My setting of The Wyrd Lands is inspired by what's called the migration period. This is the time and the land of Beowulf: the isles and shores of Scandinavia and northern Germany before the Vikings, before the English existed as the Western Roman empire declined and fell.  This is a land about which we know incredibly little. There are almost no historical records and those that do exist are written much later. But it w

 What happens if you take non-adventurers and send them to a dungeon. In this post I am going to send four foodies on a fact-finding mission to The Keep on the Borderlnds and the Caves of Chaos. They might drink an Ogre's wine and sample Hobgoblin hors d'oeuvre.  This comes out of my last post where I decided that my problem with dungeons is that actually I don't like playing as adventurers. It also comes out of discussions on the FKR server about where do you find dungeon-like adventures that are not "grimdark".  I felt that if you take a different perspective on a dungeon you can find them to be far less miserable than they at first seem.  This is a semi-tongue-in-cheek experiment and is in no way an attack on Keep on the Borderlands (though there are a couple of funny things in this module).  Why the Keep on the Borderlands? In my last post I talked about the idea that dungeons are coloured by the assumption that the people going into them are adventurers. Thi