The Wyrd Ones Outline

Introducing The Wyrd Ones – A Worldbuilding Project

I think a lot about my kids. They are poop-eating goblins right now, but one day they’re going to have the mental capacity for tabletop roleplaying games. I have joked the reason I’m having four kids is that childrearing is easier than trying to get four adults in a room at a consistent time. So when they are finally ready the question is – what setting?

While I enjoy the Eberron setting it’s clearly made for people who are sick of Bog Standard Middle Earth Ripoff #7. My husband is capable of running Warcraft (he has his own setting version as if WoW never happened – a ‘Warcraft 4’ if you will), but the stakes are too…adult. It’s somewhat inappropriate for a 7 year old.

The bones of this discussion happened a few months ago on a very long road trip. My husband and I laid out our primary goals for this setting:

Must be accessible to children…and not boring for fantasy-aquainted adults.

Must encode familial values through storytelling in an elegant fashion, in contrast to VeggieTales-like Christian encoding subtlety of a hammer.

Like all Requirements Docs, everything flows from there. These are the next tier of thoughts:

The setting will obviously be medium/high fantasy because that is Fun.

Fantasy races must align to standardized fantasy ideas. No tribal halflings riding dinosaurs (even though I love that).

The most frustrating thing about reading any worldbuilding project is the amount of contextual knowledge you need. As an example, I love Pillars of Eternity and I can tell the world is well thought through but nowadays when the lore dump happens I hear wordswordswords and my brain tunes out. The setting should reduce mental friction (especially since kids will be playing it).

The setting should allow for cozy adventuring for the wee explorers. Goblins eating ranch animals. Timmy fell in a well. Please pick moongrass from the Twilight Forest glade.

The setting must have a variety of civilizations and climates to enable a variety of adventure types, but expanded over time from a small base so as to not be overwhelming.

Above enables cozier “Kino’s Journey” type adventures – Country of the Week, low stakes, admiring the wonder of exploration.

Beginner adventures will focus on black-and-white villains with no surprises. Dragons attacking villages and the like.

As the players grow up, the villains will be shown to be puppeted by obviously evil people who have convinced the majority of citizens they are good. Moral complexity will be shown later. Good citizens who defend evil (because they don’t know better), and even later, villains that do good to accrue capital to do more evil later unnoticed. This will set up the Epic plots.

There must be a readily-accessible source of monster-of-the-week and dungeon-of-the-month. Ancient civilization ruins or the like.

The player character options must be really cool and customizeable and obviously stand out as Awesome against the typical citizenry, or even villains.

The setting will utilize elements of our favorite D&D 3.x supplements like the Stronghold Builder’s Guide (building up a fortress/town and maintaining it), Stormwrack (island-of-the-week adventures), Frostburn (frosty environ fun stuff), and all of the Dragon supplements (Races of the Dragon, Draconomicon, Dragon Magic) with accompanying lore.

Unlike Eberron, dragons will keep their alignment coding and there will be an ongoing conflict between the Metallic and Chromatic dragons (part of the Epic plots).

Since it is my setting for my family, the protagonist group will be polytheist-animists in contrast to the greater population of monotheists. Different areas will be different monotheists, “fringe” civilizations will be different polyanimists. Monotheists will not be inherently classified as evil, but as difficult to get along with. Beginner zones (bordering countries) will either be neutral-to-PCs and morally good or evil and kill-on-sight with morality becoming more complicated as the players age. (“This group hates us and wants to kill us but they are really nice to their people and strangers they think believe the same thing.”)

The goal is to help my kids understand that they are being raised as a religious minority and the average person will at best regard a polytheist with curious confusion. It will help teach them that being honest about who you are isn’t always a good idea (useful for any ‘divergent’ type personality anyway).

There are other concepts that don’t exist in many settings I want to explore with my children through play – Wiccans/Brosatru (false polytheists), Wokies (false atheists), and the general scourge of Materialism.

The world will be alive with spirits and the polytheist/animist viewpoint will be organic, instead of the typical fantasy Cosmic Vending Machines of Various Things. Gods of forests are bigger than gods of small plants. Gods of Concept are even bigger than that. Gods are just really really big spirits, there was never a firm division between Thor and a rock – just an extremely large gradient. Worship is sacrifice, yes, but not a defined economic transaction. “I give so that you may give” is key.

There will overall be a focus on non-Abrahamic Indo-European myth and creature structure. Adjacent mythsets from adjacent cultures will be included as they make sense. Polytheism is rooted in the land and similar lands will generate similar structures. (E.g. the Ainu of northern Japan have myths that closely resemble the Sami because Arctic circle cultures generate similar myths, and much of Norse myth incorporates Sami ideas due to proximity).

Magic system TBD. I want to express the allegory of how the average person is stuck in raw Materialism regardless of their religious beliefs. It would be ideal to make an allegory that the stronger your Will and belief in the value of non-material things, the stronger your magic. The Christian analogues will likely have “blessing” magic because that’s the only magic typical Christians use.