I made one post about my work-in-progress personal setting+game, the Needle-Heart and the Wyldlands project, but never really expanded on what it was like, so here it is:

The original intent of the setting was to allow me to port basically any kind of module, dungeon, adventure or material from any setting to my own kitchen-sink world with minimal converting effort. This was achieved by making the wilderness outside the central "safe haven" City ever-changing: the Wyldlands are always changing, swallowing and spewing out things all the time.

That way, if I had a cool snowy mountaintop dungeon I wanted to throw at my players or test out, but their characters are in the middle of the desert, no problem: a mountain can just pop up there for a couple of days before disappearing again.

The guiding principles for the setting are very simple:

• Everything is either in here or out there - the setting sacrifices a tight, cohesive worldbuilding for the opportunity to encounter all sorts of weird and wonderful sights.
• Everything is on a timer - opportunities appear and disappear as dungeons, False Cities, entire ecosystems that might have something useful for you, are only acessible temporarily before being swallowed.
• Everything has a cost - from lodgings and food to equipment and information, the players always need to spend money. But this is more than a "fun tax" - if players spend more, they get better stuff that has special benefits.

Originally based on Knave and Cairn, the system is classless. This ties the characters into the previous points.

• Pretty much any character concept goes, reinforced by backgrounds that can give some unique edges. The City and the Wyldlands are full of weird people.
• The characters are always "in motion", as equipment decays, information ceases to be useful and random events change things up in the City. Everything forces the players to respond to the world and keep moving.
• The characters are also defined by their gear and, taking a page from Into the Odd, their crushing Debt that drives them to go out and explore. There's always the incentive to spend more money on better equipment, but paying off your debt is the only way to get Experience¹.

Another advantage, for me, of this approach, is that there is only one City the players will be spending most of their time on, so I can spend all my effort into making it as much fun to explore and spend downtime on as possible and get to use all that material.

• The City is not just an interlude between one dungeoncrawl or hexcrawl and the other: it can be a place to play as well - an urbancrawl. There are things to do, people to talk to and places to explore.
• The City changes with time, even if in different ways than the world outside does. Rent becomes due, random encounters introduce complications, people change, die, etc...
• The City is a drain on your resources, but it is also the way you recover from the maladies of adventuring, namely Pain and Stress

With all that said, here's how I'm trying to make all of this come together and work as a package:

• The City is full of options - factions vying for influence, odd-jobs for characters who want to make some money on downtime, special contracts that provide side-objectives for delving into the Wyldlands, etc...
• Timers are always there, but are not always strict - long-term stuff happens in increments of weeks, like the healing of Wounds or stuff disappearing and appearing in the Wyldlands, but sometimes you can put ticking clocks on encounters to make things more interesting, like a timer for a dungeon to be swallowed that pressures the players to get as much treasure as possible then get out before it is too late.
• A quick, rules-light system allows me to focus on making stuff interesting. Decisive combat means I can focus on monster themes and abilities instead of crunching numbers for balance. A fixed XP track means I can focus on stocking dungeons and locations with interesting treasure instead of trying to find the right amount.

With all that context out of the way, I can start posting some of the cool stuff and ideas I had planned for Needle-Heart over the following couple of days.

1. Character progression is still something I'm tinkering with, but it's probably going to end up as simply a chance for improving your stats by rolling under them, like in Knave.↩

#Adventure Calendar Jam 2023 #Needle-Heart and the Wyldlands #procedures #theory #worldbuilding

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