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 was a different world to the post-medieval one that a lot of us live in today.
In early play in this setting I realised that my players and I were approaching the setting from different angles. I realised I needed to put more design effort into communicating the setting and some of its ideals. This post is about some of the assumptions I think I am working with and the design choices I made to help communicate the setting.
This post is the start of me beginning to upload my core system to itch in preparation for my first product in this world, Feud: A tale from the Wyrd Lands. If you have any advice for how to respond to this challenge, please let me know!
There are no taverns but there are halls
The tavern is a place where strangers mingle, shady deals are struck, and stricken peasants pay what gold they have to some of the mercenaries heroes gathered there waiting for their next mission. It is a place of meeting but also a place of strangers, isolated tables of people with their own motivations.
The hall is not this. The hall is a place of community. It is the heart of society and humanity. Those who drink in the hall are taking part in the most ancient and vital of human ritual: the sharing of food and drink. Here, weddings and funerals are held, oaths and bonds forged, crimes punished, the gods appeased.
The broader point is that the people of my world are people who belong to a place and a group. Their motivations are those that are tied to the group. Quests and missions are given from the hall but they are done with the motivation of the hall, not the individual or the party of adventurers.
Design-choices
There are many ways I have tried to locate and tie the player characters in their settings. The main one is that I have character creation be the last step in a process that goes: region creation (landscape and wider politics), settlement creation, household creation, then character creation.
Individual players will be thinking about their households and their characters when they act. The equipment they carry comes from the household, for instance, and they gain aspects of cultural identity from their household which they can call on to give them success.
A second area I have included is the idea of bonds and oaths. Different households can be bonded to each other or have sworn oaths. These are legal connections that require support in the first case, or shared fulfilment of a task in the latter.
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| Axes of the Wyrd Lands |
There are no adventurers but there are raiders.
A group of strangers are spotted at the boundary of the territory. Well armed and travelling light, are these adventurers on a noble quest to solve other peoples problems? Or, are these in fact raiders, come to steal and destroy and slip off again before sun-up.
In the Wyrd Lands, they're the latter. Outsiders are likely to be seen as outlaws and exiles, unless known in some way. An exile is not a sort of cool wanderer, but they are made almost less than human for their exclusion from the hall. The old English poems the Seafarer and Wanderer that treat these people describe people grieving for the life they used to possess.
Traditional adventurers exist in a very poetic and literary space. They are disconnected, typically, from the world around them and move in liminal and almost imaginary places that we call dungeons. Particularly in a class-heavy game they are essentially emblematic: this is the paladin, this the barbarian, this the rogue. They are very explicitly figures out of novels, films and stories.
The Wyrd Lands has these places. There is magic and strangeness; there is heroism. But above all this is humanity. The people involved are people. They are trained to fight and bear arms - it is a very dangerous world - but they are farmers, hunters, trappers, smiths, carpenters. Even when they go to raid and pillage, they are human committing human acts.
Design Choices
One of the ways I have tried to structure this game is to think in terms of stories. This is equivalent to the idea of the adventure. But I have these stories existing across the scales of the game: regional stories, settlement stories and household stories. These stories, the starting point for the gameplay, are typically designed as human stories.
The upcoming game Feud, I made after creating a region and rolling a story for my core settlement: the blood-feud.
Some other stories:
- Region: Raiding
- Region: Wildfires
- Settlement: Problems growing/finding food
- Settlement: Conflict over inheritance
- Household: Property dispute
- Household: Relationship breakdown
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| The Hills above Boradell, site of the coming Feud |
There are morals but they are not of good/evil.
This last one is trying to capture a moral system that none of us really know anything about. It cannot be stated enough that there is no real historical basis for understanding this time. We know next to nothing about their beliefs, cultural practices or values at all. Everything we can glean comes from later, and often Christianised contexts.
That being said, we can assume that they were different to many values captured in pseudo-medieval adventure RPGs.
As an example, I recently played in an anglo-saxon british PBTA game made by Gallus games (link). In this there an NPC, who was brother and heir to the lord. We spied him, in the hall, putting something in his aunt's food. When we cornered him later, one of the other players said something like 'it doesn't seem to be our business' at which point I launched into an impassioned rant about the evil of his act of subterfuge. act of subterfuge within the hall.
The hall was (probably) a sacred place. When the english were converted to christianity one of the arguments was that the soul was like a bird, coming from the darkness, spending a short time in the light and companionship of the hall, before departing. The hall was life, the outside death.
The challenge is trying to model a world view that is non-christian/monotheist, non-individualistic, and rather fatalistic.
Design Choices
My game has an alignment system! A classic two axes grid which tries to capture the two themes of thebworld: the conflict of Wyrd and Will (around which the resolution system revolves) and of the Hall and the Wild. This has an impact on Mood - a stat that only the GM will see. When characters spend time outside of their alignment or act against it (wyrd being fatalistic and communal, will being ambitious and individualistic) their mood decreases, impacting the outcomes of events they are part of.
If you want to answer some likert style questioning to find your alignment you can try this here. This is part of my attempt to start uploading my "core system" to accompany some more world-focused products.
Conclusion
For me a lot of the pleasure in this kind of design has been around creating this world. I have only touched on small elements of it here but figuring out how to do some of this stuff in game-design has been a really interesting experience.
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