The Wyrd Lands

  FEUD is a project of a system-neutral adventure that is currently live on Kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thewyrd/feud-0 ). This post is about designing FKR-y, system-neutral adventures. Adventure summary: In the shadow of the mountain of a half-forgotten god, a new horror is stirring: blood-feud has come to the land. This dark-age inspired adventure puts you in the role of ordinary people struggling to survive the outbreak of blood-feud. Here are three things that I think help in system-neutral design: Clear organisation Clear but evocative language Inspiration over direction Clear Organisation One of the un-sung roles of mechanics in adventures is that they are key structuring elements. When I read system-based adventures I tend to flick between the sentences where mechanics come in ( Make a DC:15 stealth check, on a fail... ). The reason for this is that these are the moments of action where I as GM will actually have to act. I have often found that I would...

Actually, I am not trying to make a walking simulator RPG but a going-for-a-walk simulator RPG. Going for a walk/hike in the countryside engages a level of gentle imagination, concentration and variety that is a natural fit for the experience of playing in an RPG.  A key thing we are doing on any walk is engaging with the landscape, step by step you respond to the challenge of the terrain and the weather. This blog post explains my reasonings for my first draft of my environment rules which i posted on itch today . The game this is part of, The Wyrd Lands , which is a game inspired by the Dark Ages/Migration Period. It doesnt have a lot of the conveniences of the medieval fantasy world, including: few major roads, horses are a rare and prestige possession. When people travel across land, they are relying on their wits and their body. An image of The Valley of Brothers in The Wyrd Lands Outside of dungeon rooms, RPGs are typically concerned with getting to action rather than the jou...

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. Bu...

 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. T...

I am not a big fan of "dungeon" style adventures. But why is this? I write and play games in the FKR-sphere which, with its links to OSR/NSR, is a space heavily influenced by dungeons ( Dungeon23 anyone?) but I still have always found them a little "off".  This post is about my personal taste, and is not about good/bad dungeon design. I am not going to write, 'I didn't like dungeons until I read/played/ran this one and now I am a convert'. Nor am I defining dungeon - whatever you feel the term to mean, is probably pretty close to what I mean. Instead, I am going to reflect on my feelings as a player in a series of games I played in Dead Planet .  As a player in this adventure, I found myself feeling like one of three things: a tourist, a problem-solver and a survivor. The first two tie in to my personal difficulties with dungeons, the third helps me to understand why I have that difficulty.  The Tourist/problem-solver One of the things I felt in playing...

How do my FKR principles apply to game design? In this pose I am going to take a page from something for my Wyrd Lands setting and see if it meets these principles.  The game is modelled on the time and lands of Beowulf and in this focuses on a story about a bloodfeud between two settlements that threatens to plunge a region into fighting and cruelty.  The page I am taking is from an extract of a law-code: Qualitative Worlds For me this is a good example of qualitative world-building. It is written in a voice that comes from the world itself, and tries to express both the law itself and some kind of contemporary view of that law: ''curse upon us".  As part of this it doesn't determine a rule for the players that ties into a table-level mechanic . Instead it is something that will affect every character in dynamic and unpredictable ways. The table will need to determine in what ways using any approach that works for them.  Meaningful Objects The idea of a meaningful ...

I might be wrong, but I think I design FKR games. I'm going to talk here about how I have tried to do this in my game  Revealed Wrists.  I'm going to begin in this post by considering by what I mean by an FKR game.  Revealed Wrists is a game about noble women in medieval Japan. I call it a game of 'aesthetic intrigue' as your characters will scheme for the expresses' reputation using knowledge of taste and, well, aesthetics.  It doesn't specify any kind of system, nor does it specify if it is a solo/group game. In some respects, it doesn't look overly like what are normally thought of as FKR games. People might assume its a story game, but it also has no moves or tokens or any meta tools at all.  What makes this an FKR game in my-mind is that it tries to embody the 'Free' element of Free War-play (FKR). What does "free" play mean? Around the birth of the FKR discords, I wrote something in the ' The Neverending Drachenschwanz ' which...

Can we map where a thing is or its dimensions when playing RPGs? I'm not sure we can.  There's been a certain amount of discussion recently about the idea of conceptual mapping in RPGs, mostly inspired by the comments in this video on Video Game design . The general idea is about applying a version of our understanding on how we form cognitive maps in our minds (imagine how you know the way to your nearest shop or back to your hometown).  Taking that and applying it to designing levels in computer games. Raccoon Medicine has started an excellent series on thinking about the same ideas in terms of designing and running RPGs. I am not going to do the same because they are doing it better than I and you should head over and read them. For this post, I looked at some actual plays (using the same as I used in this post on narrators ) to see if I could identify evidence of this kind of mapping when players were moving characters. In short, I didn't really find it, and I am now no...

Do you like charts? Cos, baby, I got charts! RPG charts!  Last time I tried applying a literary theory to an extract from an actual play of Into the Odd . This led me to pick out the idea that the language of RPG play seems to move between four levels of perspective when players speak.  I decided to try and track these levels of perspective within through multiple games. I decided to take a similar moment between them alla similar moment in multiple games. This moment was action or event resolution and the games range from Into the Odd, through 5e and Night Witches. I'll start with sharing the chart and the data it's based on for Into the Odd, then show the other charts and then write a little about what they mean to me (and maybe a bonus chart or two!). Into the Odd (Tuesday Knight Games) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D46WpD9wSB0 (24:52 - 27:08) GM [1.5]You probably could take a shot at them now, if that’s what you wanted to do.  P1 [1.5]Yeah, let’s light em up. P2 [1...