I've been tinkering around with this system for a while, with little publicly to show for it. But now I want to give a glimpse of the schematic for a character class in Weardcynn. The aim here is to show how I'm thinking about classes, and how I want them to function. I owe some of this schema to Pathfinder 2e, even though it is mechanically quite different. Whether this ends up being a final product or not, I can't say.

One thing to note about classes in Weardcynn is that they are fonts of specific expertise. Like characters in many other OSR and NSR systems, Weardcynn characters have a base set of adventuring competencies: they can fight, they can camp, they can walk long distances, they can climb stuff, they can use ropes, and they know a bit about assessing treasure, plants, animals, other peoples, and typical structures. They only need an appropriate Action to deal with these if the situation requires it. But character classes take those adventuring competencies and dial up the expertise. Anyone can fight, but a Fighter is an expert at it, trained to help his companions focus their attacks on a foe's weaknesses, or bring a fight to more favorable terrain, etc. Likewise anyone can hunt game, but a Hunter can doggedly track down even the most elusive prey, including other people if necessary.

Hopefully what I've written below captures the essence of a character class so that you can tell quickly what its expertise is, and how you might play it at the table. Don't worry too much about the mechanics for the one Action that's detailed here. The Action is included to help convey that expertise, and while the mechanics do matter, they aren't the focus here. That said, I am interested in what impressions people have of how the Action works.

Wynflæd examined the tracks on the ground. They would be nigh invisible to her companions, she knew. Lucky for them, she was here. “Three wuducynn passed through here less than an hour ago. The sæp indicates they were wounded. I think we're back on the trail of our quarry.” She could tell where they were going, but knew it would take everything she had to keep them in sight. With luck, they could catch up to the wuducynn before she lost the trail entirely.

As a Hunter:

You are a master of tracking, hunting, and wilderness survival. You possess an unparalleled ability to read the subtle signs and traces left behind in the natural world. You can track prey, identify edible plants, locate water sources, and navigate through even the most challenging terrain with ease. Your knowledge of the wild allows you to thrive in environments that would challenge others.

In Combat

While you may not be as heavily armored as a Fighter, your agility, knowledge of the terrain, and proficiency with ranged weapons make you a formidable opponent. You use your understanding of the environment to your advantage, setting traps, ambushing enemies, and exploiting the natural world to secure victory.

Around Others

You may appear quiet and observant, preferring the company of nature to the bustle of civilization. Your skills and knowledge, however, make you an invaluable asset to any group venturing into the wild. You provide food, guidance, and protection, ensuring the survival of your companions.

In the Wild

You are in your element, moving silently through the undergrowth, reading the signs of the land, and using the resources of nature to your advantage. You find peace and solace in the wilderness, drawing strength from its untamed beauty.

In Downtime

You maintain your hunting gear, practice your skills, and scout the surrounding lands. You share your knowledge of the wild with others, teaching them how to track, hunt, and survive in the wilderness.

You Might

• Feel most at ease in the wilderness, surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of nature.
• Possess a deep respect for the balance of nature, understanding the delicate interconnectedness of all living things.
• Find satisfaction in providing for others, ensuring their sustenance and safety through your hunting and wilderness expertise.

Others Might

• Misinterpret your quiet nature as aloofness or a lack of social skills.
• Perceive your tracking abilities as supernatural or even magical, attributing them to powers beyond the natural world.

Things You Can Do

You can spend EP and use an Action to make a check for any of the following:

Track

(1 EP/x) Track a creature through any terrain, no matter how faint or obscured the tracks or how long the trail is. Spend 1 EP from Body for each level of faintness to detect and then follow the tracks. The level of faintness is determined in secret using the faintness table below. For each distance interval passed, a new faintness determination is required, as well as a new point spend. Note that spending too few points for the faintness means you lose the trail or never find it in the first place, as circumstance dictates.

Faintness (d4)

1. Clear. Tracks run through soft ground, mud, or some other easily readable medium. Tracks are not mixed with other tracks. Other clear signs abound: blood, spoor, fur/feathers/scales, etc.
2. Accidentally Obscured: Tracks pass over harder ground, rocks, etc., as well as softer ground. Tracks may be mixed with other tracks. Other signs aid in keeping the trail: blood, spoor, fur/feathers/scales, odors, etc.
3. Deliberately Obscured: The tracks are occasionally still visible, but pains have been taken to obscure them. They have been brushed over, or they deliberately pass over hard ground. Other signs are occasionally useful in finding and keeping the trail.
4. Expertly Obscured: Only the faintest signs remain: blood, spoor, broken or disturbed plants, faint odors, etc. The tracks are completely erased or keep to hard ground, travel through flowing water, or otherwise are nearly imperceptible.

Success: Only one success is required. A success means you are able to pick up the trail. Check again: At each distance interval (usually a hex), and after each rest. Faintness determination: After the first determination, changes in faintness can be communicated to provide an indication of how many points may be required to continue.

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Haggryme

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Continuing from the last post, here's the Lymewald entry, with detail for the major saints' days. This is the target styling for the entire Book.

Lymewald

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I started playing around with the Dolmenwood calendar recently, as I was gearing up for my upcoming campaign. Initially, I was just going to write down in an Obsidian page my own collection of folk and religious observances for the major feast days and pre-Pluritine holidays, but when I re-encountered Grisly Eye's vellum-doc project again, I decided to give that a whirl.

I started with House Rules but then decided to import some of my calendar entries to see how those looked in the same setup. I had already committed to using medieval illustrated manuscripts as imagery, and it wasn't long before I came across historical examples of Books of Hours, which, as luck would have it, usually include calendars of feast and saints' days. And thus was born the Dolmenwood Book of Hours.

Now, I have considerable work left to do on it, so what I will do in a series of posts here is detail each month's major feast days and whatever folk holidays I plan to include myself. Once the major saints and holidays are accounted for, I will go back and create smaller, less grandiose observances for the saints who merited only a mention in one table in the Dolmenwood Campaign Book.

The methodology for creating these observances for major saints is as follows:

1. Determine if the saint is the patron saint of anything in particular. If so, build an observance around that patronage. If not...
2. Try to find the blessing associated with the saint, then see if it makes sense to build an observance around that. And if not...
3. Use the epithet attached to the saint, on the assumption that the epithet says something useful about the saint where the lore itself does not.

Since there are 34 major saints, plus a smattering of other holidays (mostly folk stuff), the work is approachable if time consuming. There are 100 saints in all, however, and since the remaining saints may have only epithets attached to them, I'll have to basically invent lore for most of them. I will take the lack of lore for these as an invitation to brew my own, knowing full well that a later supplement may obviate this effort. In the meantime, the Book of Hours

In any case, here is the list for Grimvold, The Onset of Winter, 1st Month of the Year.

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One of the chief concerns of a fantasy-adjacent TTRPG is magic. In Weardcynn, I am aiming for a magic that is grounded in several senses. One is the pagan/animist sense, in which the magic user (generally termed in my game as Wyrdwyrhtas, or literally Fate Workers) persuades and manipulates the spirits that inhabit all things into performing tasks. They do this by using Wyrdwegas (literally Fate Ways). There are limits to what can be achieved, and all magic costs, but the ultimate source of it is the vast well of animating spirits that comprise the world. These spirits are often mercurial and uncooperative, so must be tricked or captured in various ways, but they are ubiquitous, representing the divisions within divisions that reflect and refract through all creation.

I settled on “wyrd” as the root of the game's magic because from a pronunciation perspective it overlaps with “weird”, and weird is a second sense in which the magic system is grounded. Magic in Weardcynn is intended to be deeply weird, and at times uncomfortable. In many cases it is also quite visceral, relying on the gross, the body horror, and the uncanny. For example, one wyrdweg (spell) that grants someone the ability to speak another language is called “Tungan” (tongues). It relies on the use of the tongue of a creature that had a language your character might have been able to speak, and it requires that the user place a sliver of the tongue in their mouth. I expect this to turn plenty of potential players off, and that's fine. Not every game is for ever player.

A third sense of grounding follows from the previous two, and this involves the use of toxic, psychoactive, and magically potent substances derived from plants, mushrooms, minerals, and animal parts. These are products of the earth itself, emanations from other creative forces and spirits, which in turn makes this a near-literal grounding. A typical wyrdweg may involve a combination of herbs, animal parts, and symbols, in addition to any words or gestures that might accompany the casting.

A fourth sense of grounding comes from things like the casting time, the duration of effects, the total scope of effects, and so on. In many cases, a wyrdweg is not a thing that can be worked quickly, but at the same time, some of the slowest wyrdwegas also make something you can use later (though your inventory space will limit how many such things you can carry). So you can't always cast wyrdwegas in combat, but you might still be able to benefit from them if you can prepare sufficiently. For those that can be worked quickly, there will be other tradeoffs, since hasty magic is less reliable and/or less powerful, in terms of duration and scope of effect. And finally, what can be done with magic, while nominally powerful, is still constrained by how much total effort you as a caster can put into it. Since you are drawing from a pool of points that have specific circumstances under which they replenish, this effort becomes the currency that provides scarcity for your magic.

There are additional considerations, but these are the factors that ground the magic in the world and place it within the realm of weird but powerful, channeling the earth to perform miracles.

Now I want to turn attention to a quick rundown of examples of wyrdwegas I have collected so far, with a brief description of the rituals involved in casting them.

1. Dead-spræc: This allows the caster to speak with the dead. As long as the caster holds the head (or at least skull) of a creature that was able to speak a language, and as long as that language is something the caster could reasonably have learned to speak (i.e., it has to be a human language or a Weardcynn language, but can't be, e.g., the language of wolves), the spell will work. In other respects, this works as similar spells in other games: namely limited questions (3) and a minimum time between castings on the same skull (a year and a day). Casting this wyrdweg requires placing a sprig of wormwood (or a substance with similar properties) in the mouth of the deceased, then commanding the dead to rise and speak.
2. Tungan: This aforementioned wyrdweg is like similarly named spells in other games. To prepare the sliver of tongue, the caster must dry out the sliver in wood smoke that includes willow bark or a substance with similar magical properties. The jerky-like tongue sliver can be used once and lasts for an hour, but it can be prepared ahead of time and remain potent for seven days.
3. Sweord-han: By infusing dried hawkweed stems, leaves, and flowers in hot water, a wyrdwyrhta can create a magical substance that can sharpen edged weapons such as swords and knives. The substance can be prepared ahead of time, but must be applied within 24 hours, after which it loses its potency. The substance is applied by painting it on the blade of the edged weapon. Each infusion is enough to coat one edged weapon.
4. Fel-gearcian: A skilled wyrdwyrhta can learn from the huntan the art of skin preparation, by which any slain creature's skin can be made into a tool of transformation. This is primarily a tradition passed among the huntan, and it allows them to transform themselves into the animal whose skin has been prepared this way. The skin can be reused unless it is destroyed in combat or takes damage in some other way, but takes time to put on and remove. A common means of preparation includes mixing ground dogwood blossoms, leaves, and twigs with salt to make a magically activated curing agent. Other animals might use different herbs to coax the spirit back into the skin. Catnip, for instance, is common for coaxing big cat spirits into the prepared skins, but is also useful for other spirits.
5. Wind-nama: By casting a handful of maple seed pods into the air, a wyrdwyrhta can learn the name of a local wind spirit, which can thus be bound and commanded to perform tasks according to the effort the wyrdwyrhta spends to achieve the effect. The effect must be something bursts of air or wind can normally achieve. Keeping a wind spirit on a leash is costly, however, and the spirit will take any opportunity to escape.

These are indicative of the kinds of spells you'll find in Weardcynn. They are still in development along with everything else, of course, but they form a representative selection of how I'm envisioning magic to work in my game. Additionally, the language here is not firmly set, but a more thorough review of terms will follow development. I hope to have about 100 spells described, along with rules for how to come up with new spells, inspirations for effects based on the herb references I'm using, etc.

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The setting for Weardcynn is implied within the main rules text. That doesn't mean there isn't a more coherent setting present. I am building this new earth in the image of William Blake's already fallen/always falling Albion with his Zoas and Emanations. In this telling, the fourfold giant that comes to know itself as Albion stirs from within a great deep, void, or unknowing. This is perhaps akin to a Big Bang moment, from which all things proceed, representing the division of all things from the singularity that birthed them.

Physics likewise infuses other aspects of this process. For each action, as we know, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this remains so even in the stirring of Albion from the deep. Albion is the action that spawns the immediate reaction, and his equal and opposite, or his reflection or emanation, is known as Jerusalem. Here Blake is appropriating and reshaping Biblical concepts into something else, and I am preserving as much as makes sense for what I'm doing.

Now, the awakening of Albion and the casting of his reflection as Jerusalem represents the first Fall, because it results in immediate division of what was previously a unity. But Albion is not finished falling. In fact, he will continue to fragment into countless pieces, and some of those pieces claim dominion over the others or, in some cases, claim to have created them. The eight chief fragments of Albion are the four Zoas and their respective Emanations.

This continual falling or fragmentation is the ongoing Fall that is at the heart of what I call the Schismata (which is also the name for the set of mechanics that underlie this system). This is my own embellishment and has nothing directly to do with Blake. It represents the idea that everything is already fallen and always falling further from unity, and will continue to do so until the harvest after the Final Judgment reunites all of the fallen.

If this feels like a heady and abstract mythology (godlar), I agree. It is, however, the basis for what the Weardcynn believe about their own origins. In their godlar, the primary of which they call the Albiones Hweol (Albion Cycle), the Weardcynn believe that mankind (Manncynn) were the creation of the Zoa named Tharmas, and that they had been seduced away from (disunited) by the Zoa named Urizen. This culminated in the spoliation of the natural world, that aspect of Creation they inhabited, primarily through overuse and exploitation. In response, the Emanation named Vala beseeched her Zoa brethren to entrap Urizen and destroy his hold on the Manncynn. It was Luvah's fire and Urthona's hand that created the trap. Vala caused the earth to birth its own new champions, the Weardcynn, to hem in the Manncynn and watch over them until they could learn to aspire toward unity once more.

There is of course more than this, and I will work through how this looks in a concrete sense as I continue development and lay out the mechanical implications. For these, I will make use of Ed Buryn's William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. In the same vein as Invisible Sun (which has had a profound influence on the mechanics of this game), player characters will be able to use aspects of these tarot cards as mechanical touchpoints, not always to their benefit. The precise nature of these effects, however, are still percolating in my head. At the very least, I will have a spread of cards that makes sense for this game and use the positions of the cards to interpret how they influence the world at the moment they are laid out. Whether this can be done without vastly overcomplicating the system is still unclear.

I will undoubtedly return to this topic from time to time as I think about new lore and mythology pieces to slot in, but in no sense do I expect that players and GMs use the result of this work if they aren't interested. It is and will be a supplement to enrich their understanding of the implied setting.

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I recognize that most readers won't be able to decipher the title. It uses the futhorc, Anglo-Saxon runes, and reads, roughly Weardcynn, or wuh-ARD-kin. It is the current culmination of my system and setting development efforts over the last several years.

I have several design goals here:

1. Incorporate my effort-based mechanics system into a cohesive product with its own recognizable identity.
2. Incorporate a Blakean alt-mythology into the foundation of the otherwise post-post-apocalyptic setting, and connect that with mechanical touchpoints in the system via Blakean tarot cards.
3. Ground magic and mysticism in pagan practice and sensibilities, especially through herbs, mushrooms, elements, and animist views that require negotiation with local spirits and which are bound to specific places.
4. Reduce humanity to small players in a world that has grown big around them, amplifying the sense of danger and wonder.
5. Explore the depths of lost and displaced Old English words via reapplication, neologism, and back construction.

What I'm not interested in:

1. History or historical realism. While I care how Old English words were used, I don't need the accompanying cultural weight, because I'm building forward, not going back. This is not a history of any people. It just borrows (and occasionally butchers) their terms.
2. Reinventing racism, sexism, homophobia, and various current and historical social evils. Might those plausibly exist in the setting? Probably. But they will never be mentioned in the implied setting or the mythological supplements, especially in player-facing or playable ways. Don't look for them here.
3. Amplifying existing racism. The reclamation and re-appropriation of both Old English and the runes that formed its pre-Latin writing system should not be construed in any way as support for the various Nazi and adjacent movements that also try to lay claim to these ideas.
4. Coddling players or GMs. Y'all can handle unfamiliar words whose meanings can be revealed via context. And there will be many unfamiliar words, even though Old English is perhaps equal parts familiar and foreign. You can have as much fun butchering the language as I am. But I will provide some rough pronunciation guides.

The Implied Setting

This takes place in a far-future earth, well after the Weardcynn, the new champions of the earth, arose and deposed humanity, knocking it from its dominant perch. Humanity has been reduced to small, very local communities surrounded by gulfs of hostile wilderness patrolled by the Weardcynn. For their part, the Weardcynn have been tasked with keeping humanity in check until they can join in proper unity with the rest of creation.

The wilds are full of spirits, magically active plants, and all manner of beasts, from mundane descendants of those familiar to us all the way to new, fantastic creatures. And the Weardcynn range from the Wodecynn in their forests and Stonecynn in their mountain homes to the various Deorcynn who prowl the spaces between what's left of humanity.

Development Progress and Next Steps

I have finished a tentative outline of the rules, which cover the basics of rolling the dice in the effort-based system, character creation, and tools for GMs to get started. While the rules are fairly light and can follow logically from one another, there is a lot still to do on the creative front. I am busy developing world flavor through spells (wyrdwegas in my parlance), which offer the clearest views into how the world works. As I make progress on those, I will post them here and discuss my design thinking.

Stay tuned!

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