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...

Having talked about my main source for information on trolls , I got to the point that I want to try and design them as they will appear in the game.  The main idea that stood out to me is that trolls are not (necessarily) big humanoid monsters, but they are the shape of things that you see in the half-light, or an imagined voice at night. They have the ability to 'entroll' you - that is, when you become captivated by them, you run the risk of being changed and in doing so become the troll itself.  What I present below is how this might be done as a monster in The Wyrd Lands RPG, following my current design principles .  Pesta i Trappen Trolls From retainers have I heard That they saw two such boundary-walkers, mark-steppers,  holding the moors. One, they thought, like a woman, the other,  shaped  in the form of man;   both treading the ruin road.  Also known as: boundary-walkers; mearcstappa; wealth-sucker; guardian of the corpse-lake; swall...

 In this post I'll begin the process of creating a specific creature for The Wyrd Land's bestiary. I've explained my design principles for these  in this post . But to put it simply, this is going to be a creature that is  of the world.  It has to be truly magical, meaningful and complex. It also won't have any stats.  After picking up John Lindow's book Trolls  in a fantastic book shop near where I live in the UK, I have decided to make these strange enigmas my focus. In this post I am going to write up the key things I took from the notes I made.  The trolls described by Lindow come from the 10th Century onward in Norway and Scandinavia. These early trolls are not the thuggish brutes that have come to us from Tolkien. Though these exist in the medieval literature, such as in the characters of Sledge-hammer and Iron-nose, inhabitants of Slab-land (likely Baffin Island in North America): There he saw a big cave and a bright fire in it. He goes up to t...

This is the first post in a series in which I begin to design some monsters for my Wyrd Lands setting. This series is called Building Wyrd Beasts, and in this one I am going to set out my current design principles for these monsters.