The Wyrd Lands

In the shadow of the mountain of a forgotten god, people awake to a new horror. Blood-feud has arisen between two villages. It will trigger schemes and treachery, ambitions and hopes among the various peoples, monsters and gods of this land. You can now follow the Kickstarter campaign for my first print product: FEUD, an RPG adventure of War and Revenge.  The Kickstarter is funding to pay for a print run for the 60 page zine. It will go live September 18th 2023. FEUD is a system-neutral adventure set in a low fantasy, dark age setting. Players will take on the role of ordinary people faced with a terrible situation. A blood feud has come and the players will need to use their skills in combat, tactics and political ingenuity to protect themselves and their loved ones.  This is my first attempt into producing a product applying the principles of RPG design that I have been developing over the last few years. With editing help from the incomparable Matthew K , I feel that I ha...

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...

Characters in RPGs are typically disconnected from the world around them: exiles, wanderers, adventurers. They don't belong to the spaces in which they act. This post is about the opposite: characters who are embedded within an environment.  Tales told in the setting of the Wyrd Lands are designed to be about the place and its people. In my mind I think of the characters as embedded characters.  Why I think embedded characters matter When I say embedded characters, I mean characters that have a stake in the place where they act. They emerge from that space and their motivations are tied to its motivation, not simply their own personal ones.   This is in contrast to the dungeon-tourism of adventurers that I have been writing about recently . In this, the adventurer is typically coming into a place, solving its problems or getting some kind of wealth from it, before moving on. They are knights, ronin and gunslingers.  A quick aside: I am not saying that these kin...

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...