The Wyrd Lands

Designing a game inspired by the Dark Ages presents a range of challenges and rewards. Chief among these is that we know very very little about it. What people do think often comes from our much later notions of nations, power identity and more In this post I am going to talk a bit about how I have tried to bring some of the "history" into FEUD, a system-neutral adventure module that will be live on Kickstarter September 18th. Follow now to be notified when it launches ! Some of the books that influence FEUD It's not the Dark Ages There are many names for the dark ages, but I use the term Migration Period. For me this name captures better the realities of this period. It covers around 300 - 600AD (definitions differ) and covers events from across all of Europe, the Mediteranean and North Africa.  It is the time when the Western Roman Empire changed and eventurally fell, the empire of Atilla the Hun, rose and fell, new kingdoms emerged and fell. Throughout it there was cha

A game is a setting. My game is The Wyrd Lands. Across roughly 100 pages about 4 describe a suggested mechanical system to play with. The rest is all description of the setting. The whole "book" is trying to build the character and identity of this world so that people can play within it.  At its core the book is the tool to create four things: a region, a settlement, a household and a character.   This post is about the Perchance random generators I decided to make of these four areas. These have been shared on the itch page for this project.  The Trondle-Papa entreats you enter How The Wyrd Lands might be used I envision that any campaign of The Wyrd Lands would start with the players taking the (as-yet-unreleased) pdf/book alongside some (as-yet-uncreated) character sheets, and working together through these four stages. By working through these we create a broad context of a region, and then increasingly narrow contexts of settlement and household before we reach the cha