GM Guide for The Wyrd Lands

In the Wyrd Lands RPG, the GM is not a neutral arbiter. They are the Wyrd. The Wyrd is fate, luck, chance, design and chaos. They are are the world and its people. 

However, despite being the embodiment of the spirit of nature and existence, they also need to run the game. This post overviews my first draft of my GM guide, for the Wyrd Lands. Please excuse the formatting on this, it is early days.  

This GM guide is supposed to be a single side of A4 that you might print out and have with you in any game to help you handle unexpected situations. I feel that you can start any discussion of this by asking two questions: What things do you want to hand to run your games? What things do you want to track as you play?

Let's start with things I want to hand: 

This table is a way with coming up on-the-fly with attitudes for characters, including creatures and even whole communities. I always find this the hardest thing to think up in the moment: how characters act and react in the moment when confronted with the player characters or their actions. 

I find I tend to fall back on relatively standard responses: anger, acceptance, fear. This list is a way of quickly rolling or picking something that is perhaps more complex and nuanced. 

I have put sets of associated attitudes together to allow for a range that might fit the moment of the game better. 

I have also found this list really useful when doing prep. After creating a character, rolling to see what thier attitude to, say, the leader of the settlement can be immediately positive for creativity, especially when you try to figure out why they have this attitude. 

Within the full character creation section of my game that are about a total of 8 tables of names for the 8 different cultural groups in the setting. This is a random selection from these tables. The reason I include this is sometimes you just need a name and the names of The Wyrd Land, like many parts of it, are not really medieval.

I have also put the modern version of English in case you wanted to use this. They are all double-barrelled to allow you to take half or the whole name or mix and match them together. Maybe the characters meet Grimr-Cwen, or the Masked Queen. 

This simple little section builds on a slightly more complex set of ideas about how to run the environment. I have been writing (and TikToking) recently about my interest in having an environment that actually matters and I think this table is a simple way of helping us to do that.

Any session I run of this game, and often multiple times throughout, starts with a roll to see what the weather is. This can have a huge impact on the events and outcomes throughout the rest of the game. 
 

This is a reminder of the suggested system for the game. I won't go into detail on this system (though comment if you would like me to) but I think there is a big question mark about the value of including something like this. 

In my mind I am making two slightly seperate things: an RPG system and an RPG setting. The setting is the most important thing and I want to produce products that are system agnostic for this setting. Therefore, I wonder if in a GM guide it is better to do without this summary of the "system" and instead include some other, potentially lacking, features of the setting. 

Perhaps a space to list the cultural groups, the main professions, spiritual and health beliefs, etc. 

On the topic of the system this last part is very much about the tracking part of the GM's role. In this little table each of the player characters, their alignments and associated mood is to be tracked. 

This whole thing is something I am dubious about, mostly because I am so bad at tracking things when I run games. But the ideas encapsulated in here are fundamental to a character's engagement with the setting. 

The mood of the characters is the only stat that they possess, though it is all handled by the GM. At the end of each session there should be some reflection to see if the character has acted or lived in a way in-line with their alignment. If they have their mood - a measure of belonging - increases and if not it decreases. 

This idea of mood is trying to capture this idea from the Old English poem The Wanderer:

    Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan

    A weary mood shall not withstand wyrd

Having a strong mood allows you to resist Wyrd better, but it can also lead to pride and a taunting of chance. (In the Battle of Maldon the English Earl allows their viking enemies an advantageous position due to their ofermod or 'over-mood). In doing so it brings characters' doom closer - doom being the chance or likelihood of a character' destruction. 

A weak mood, or being modcearig, mood-weary or mood-chary, mean you are less able to resist wyrd and must give in to it more. But this pleases the wyrd and pushes doom away. 

I still have a big question mark over this. I think bringing in this concept of mood and doom is vital to capture the spirit of The Wyrd Lands, but this kind of tracking approach... I need to play with it a bit more before I can decide if I like it or not!

Thanks for reading, if you have any thoughts about what a good GM guide includes, I would love to hear them. 

I am also getting closer to launching a kickstarter for my first product in this setting, hopefully I will share something with you in the next post!