Game = Setting; OR, how I learned to stop worrying and love Perchance generators

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 character. 

Every time I have play-tested this, working through the various tables, this has met my purposes of creating a dynamic world that characters are deeply grounded in. Finding the links between region, settlement, household and character quickly makes the world grow beyond one's sight.

However, the GM or solo-player needs to be able to make something on the fly. I always thought I would need to make some kind of generator but thought with my non-existent knowledge of coding that this would not be possible. 

Enter my old friend, procrastination. 

Making the generators

About two weeks ago I needed to start "marketing" for my upcoming Kickstarter for FEUD and - um - I felt anxious and didn't want to do it. Fortunately, that same weekend Chaoclypse made a video about creating random generators on Perchance.

My brain rejoiced. It had found something that I could obsess over to the exclusion of all other thought and so ignore my campaign and the associated difficult feelings. 

And reader, I obsessed. 

About four days of basically ignoring my work and anything else and just bashing my head into Perchance until I had transferred something like 16000 word of inter-related tables onto 6 generators (only 4 are visible, 2 are back-ground ones). Where the region affected the landscape, the landscape affected the fertility, the fertility interacts with the number of settlements in the region, I managed - through brute-force - to get the generators to work. 

The are now usable, though not perfect. If you would like to have a look you can start with the link to Region creation and follow the links to the other areas. 

I am going to press the button a few times and share some results below about how I would use this. 

An aside

FEUD is releasing as a system-neutral adventure which I wrote rolling randomly on these tables. One funny thing is about the story. FEUD is about a blood-feud. I rolled on my 'region story' table to find the story and rolled 'beginning blood-feud'. I thought to myself, 'that's a bit grim, let's try something else'. I think I rolled that dice in a row 5 times and each time got blood-feud. Now, you don't have to be priest of the old world to hear the Wyrd talking so clearly.

The Four Generators

Let us start with the region. The whole process is ultimately about making the player's settlement and context. Therefore, the region creation is written as though from the perspective of that settlement: 

There is immediately quite a lot here and that is by design. There are some things that will never come up in play, but you want that broad spread of detail in order to form potential threads of story and adventure. 

A few things that jump out to my imagination are the lake and the forested landscape. I immediately see a lake with these settlements in a ring around its shore. Perhaps relying on it for food and even travel out of the region. Interestingly the fertility is not enough to support the region and the story is of rivalry between settlements. Perhaps dwindling fish stocks (8 is a lot of settlements, David) mean that conflict is brewing over the remaining resources. 

We have a broad sense of the potential problems for this region, now let's move into a more detailed view of our settlement. 

Our settlement, as yet unnamed, is big; it is the largest a settlement in this world can be. Its relationships are also pretty negative with 2 actively hostile neighbours and only one friendly. This matches nicely with our regional story (I hope you can see how this spread of details is increasing the chance of finding links and parallels). 

The fact that this settlement is so large is significant to the region. As, I think, is its story of tyranny/corruption/indolence. The fact it is ruled by a single lord (without a council) suggests that it isn't that the stock of fish in the lake is dwindling but that this settlement is preventing access to it. 

My thought is that the lord (I use some gendered language but "lord" can be any gender players choose) is overlooking the historical rights to access of the settlements. We can see that politically the settlement is part of a "moot" - an informal coalition of settlements - but our lord is trying to seize control based on the size and scale of their settlement, perhaps then impacting on the region's ability to gather enough food. 

Together, the region and settlement establish the backdrop for our game. Now we move into the link between the individual and the community: the household. 

I am going to focus on a couple of key areas for the household. The first is to think of their role: farmers. Now, in our context we can interpret that as fishermen and we can see their ancestry is of specialists, these are people with a long intergenerational knowledge of fishing, perhaps on this lake. 

They are also not particularly wealthy (the word "mathm" indicates a sort of social credit rating describing the level of wealth they have access to) and their story is of ambition. I am going to see this as a household that is actually keen to engage in the disruption from the lord, people who are hoping to use their skills in fishing to aid in winning in any conflicts with their neighbours and, therefore, rise in wealth and power. 

The household though does not dictate our character's motivations, their role in the story may not be to support the household but to hinder. 

Here we see our first character. A hunter, perhaps in the forests around the lake. Hunters are those who spend time away from home. Our character is aligned with the wild and life - the sort who would not see centralised power a a positive thing. 

Perhaps they return from a hunting trip and find the household eagerly helping in the pre-cursor to war. How they will act will be uncovered in play.

There are some details around the presentations of the skills of the characters that I am still to work out. At the moment I have put all their details together and would let the players choose their "level". I have shown these below. 

 The last thing we might need is equipment. 

The Wyrd Lands represents a far less individualistic world than most medievally games. The idea of hoarding wealth is actually a negative thing (you've heard of dragons right?). In terms of equipment we see this in that individual draw from a pool of equipment associated with their household. 

There are different levels of quality of items, with various tags. The drop-downs at the top allow you to choose an item and it randomises the tags. For instance we see that our character carriers an unbalanced bow. 

Access to the best items is likely controlled by the head of household and who knows the relationship these siblings have? 

There is still more to do and a lot more to refine but it does at least exist. I am hoping in the next few weeks to write up something of a glossary of terms to use alongside this so that it can be used a little more fluidly without the surrounding text that is present in the pdf. 

Thanks for reading!

FEUD is Kickstarting for a print release of the 60-page zine from September 18th. It is illustrated throughout with hand-cut lino prints that I did on my kitchen table, the originals of which are available as add-ons.

Please consider backing and let me know if there is anything else you want to know in the lead up to the campaign!