The Wyrd Lands

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 ...

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...