The Wyrd Lands

In the Wyrd Lands RPG, the GM is not a neutral arbiter. They are the Wyrd. The Wyrd is fate, luck, chance, design and chaos. They are are the world and its people.  However, despite being the embodiment of the spirit of nature and existence, they also need to run the game. This post overviews my first draft of my GM guide, for the Wyrd Lands . Please excuse the formatting on this, it is early days.   This GM guide is supposed to be a single side of A4 that you might print out and have with you in any game to help you handle unexpected situations. I feel that you can start any discussion of this by asking two questions: What things do you want to hand to run your games? What things do you want to track as you play? Let's start with things I want to hand:  This table is a way with coming up on-the-fly with attitudes for characters, including creatures and even whole communities. I always find this the hardest thing to think up in the moment: how characters act and reac...

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...

 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 ...