Worldbuildify! The Sword Defiant
Worldbuildify! is a new series where we’ll be taking a non-interactive property; a book, a movie, a concept album, a series of nightmarish paintings daubed on the walls of an abandoned house, etc, and looking at what we would do if we were tasked with creating a ttrpg setting based on that property.
In this, our first foray, we’ll be looking at Gareth Hanrahan’s The Sword Defiant for a couple of reasons. 1) Gareth is an author who straddles both literature and ttrpgs; Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green, 13th Age, The One Ring, Traveller, and a tonne more on the ttrpg side, and several book series on the lit side; and I think he’s extremely cool and inspirational - there’s a really big section of the ttrpg world that wouldn’t exist without him. 2) As part of his Black Iron Legacy book series, he created a ttrpg adventure called The Walking Wounded, which was exactly what we’re going to do here, taking the world of his book series, and making it gameable, and reading that was the first time I’d ever thought about doing it myself. 3) The Sword Defiant is a really good book, and I think more people should hear about it.
As of writing this, the series, The Lands of the Firstborn, currently contains two books, Sword Defiant and Sword Unbound - and while we’ll draw from both, we’ll focus on the events of the first book, both for simplicity and spoiler reasons.
Review
First, a little review and summary of the property. The Sword Defiant is a fantasy fiction book set in the aftermath of the Victory of the Ages. The Nine Great Heroes defeated the villainous Lord Bone in his seat of power, the dread fortress of Necrad… and then had to keep on living. We follow Alf of the Nine as he picks up the pieces of his broken life, grappling with a reputation he no longer feels he deserves, and bound to oaths to long-since-dead allies and former friends. When another of the Nine contacts him for one last mission, he is torn between reliving old glories and reopening old wounds.
It’s a tropey story - intentionally so, it relies on these tropes to subvert them and to allow it to skip over some of the baseline worldbuilding minutiae - if you know the tropes, you can be immediately invested. The makeup of the Nine is a great example - You have Jan the cleric, Peir the paladin, Alf the fighter, Thurn the ranger, Berys the rogue, Lath the druid, Blaise the wizard, Laerlyn the elf, and Gundan the dwarf - and just from that you know their personalities. Classic D&D trope, used well - and something for us to note for our purposes.
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| Map of the Lands of the Firstborn by Jon Hodgson |
Themes
The story focuses on Necrad, the First City, a shadowy, haunted megadungeon of a metropolis that was once home to the BBEG, and still houses many of his minions, witch-elves, ogres, vatlings, and other assorted mooks. We don’t look at it just as a place though; Necrad is an event. Everything in the story hinges around it - the once-ascendent witch-elves resent the new League of goody-goods that control what was once theres, the League chafes at sharing a city with the enemy that they fought wars to stop. The Nine splintered over Necrad, winning the war hurt their loyalty to each other; and the city inexoribly pulled them apart.
This is the main hook we’ll be building the rest of the setting around - but there are several other themes we should keep in mind from the original property.
Poisoned chalices. The Nine won. They got everything they wanted - and it broke them apart. Throughout the source story, each time characters get a win, it’s at the expense of something else.
Industrialisation. Before Lord Bone, magic was a tool reserved for the elves and the College Arcane; something that takes a very long time to acquire, and a lot of power to enact. Lord Bone’s development of charmstones, spell skulls, and all manner of other set-and-forget magic means anyone with money can now have charms to make them practically supernatural - war has changed.
Reputation and history. Each of the characters in the book grapple with history - their own history, mostly. Whether they’re failing to live up to their reputations, or hiding from traumatic pasts, or trying to reclaim a new future, characters and societies are very involved in how they are remembered (and how they can seize the narrative!)
Setting Questions
Now, we can ask some foundational questions for our setting guide; when/where/what:
When and Where are actually the same question - and it’s all about flexibility of canon. The further you get from established canon, the more flexible you can be with your stories, but the fewer guide rails you have to make sure that it still relates to the source story. So, if you want the most canon-friendly story, you should set it simultaneously with the source material, right? Depending on the stories you often run into two problems. 1) The players aren’t the protagonists. The big events of the world don’t involve the players - and that means that it’s hard to set up compelling narratives for them. 2) Similarly, there aren’t a lot of gaps to slot in independent narratives - all the fun things are happening where the heroes are. Free League’s The One Ring 2e puts its narrative between the events of Lord of the Rings’ Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring - about 50 years before Frodo leaves the Shire. Most of the “canon” characters either don’t exist yet, or are at totally different and unnotable stages of their lives.
In our “canon”, it has been twenty-odd years after Lord Bone’s defeat in canon. I want the rawness of the war to be important, but I think characters should be healing - if poorly - from it, as should the world. We can’t set it too close to the war, but also not too close to canon that we’re stepping on its toes. We’ll go for about fifteen years - there is a new generation that doesn’t remember the war, but isn’t capable of defending itself yet - the world still needs old soldiers. Characters here should be touched by the war; so if that was fifteen years ago, the sprightly twenty-something human fighter is now in their mid-forties, still capable, but definitely slower.
Conversely, I want to link the setting very closely to the “where” of the source. There’s a lot of untracked ground in the Lands of the Firstborn, and given how important Necrad is to the setting, I don’t think we can leave it. Plus, I want every character to be measured by their proximity to Necrad and the war - setting it in the canon lands gives us that intimacy.
What? What sorts of stories are we telling? I think that, just like the source, the sorts of stories we’re telling here are less important than the metanarrative we have. In the aftermath of the war, there are two sorts of stories that jump out - stories about recovery; clearing out the last remnants of lord bone’s soldiers, questing to find cures to battlefield curses, etc, and stories about exploitation - beating back Wilder from the New Provinces, working the Cold Trade, looting ancient structures. These are pretty generic adventuring stories - and on the surface, so is Alf’s story in the sourcebook. The interesting thing about the story is that the adventurers are no longer generic; they’re made unique by circumstance.
I’ve spoken before about mission statements, and I think this is a good example of that - it doesn’t matter what the adventurers set out to do, they should be doing so in relation to Necrad and the war. This setting should pose the question; “times have changed… have you?”.
In the full setting guide, we’d probably talk more about the interesting magic systems (there’s four-ish sorts of magic in the system; Star, Earth, Alchemical, and Intercessional, each used in different ways by distinct groups of people, with some important hooks built-in to them), the nuances within the races, factions, and locations and really flesh out the setting to let GMs come up with their own adventures - you can see some of my process for something like that here.
We’d also have to grapple with what system to use - do we build our own from scratch, create a custom hack of an extant game, or use a pre-established game whole cloth? That’s out of scope for this series, but something to explore another time!
Sample Adventures
Let’s come up with some sample adventures - the sort of things that would be packaged with the setting as starters to help show players and GMs what the setting is about.
We’ll use four adventures that will be loosely linked; sequential, one-to-two session adventures that can also be played standalone and gradually introduce more and more mechanics and setting.
Necrad is the hook here, of all of the setting, Necrad is the bit people are picking up the book for. All of the politics in the setting are here, all the races in the setting are represented here - and it’s the most technologically advanced place in the setting. We should start here; immerse the players in the setting as fast as possible - we want them to compare everything to Necrad, and how better to do that than making it the baseline.
How do we do that without overwhelming them though? We have to give the players a balance; something familiar, something new. If it’s all familiar, it's unengaging. If it’s all new, people are likely to bounce off of it. As a helping hand, we’d give pregenerated characters with both thematic links to the adventures and relevant skill sets that we can make shine through the challenges of the adventures.
Adventure 1
We’ll start in Necrad, with a commission to go out into the Sanction, where Lord Bone’s factories moulder and chimeric abominations roam the streets, and recover a cache of charmstones. In essence, it’s a classic dungeon-crawl, but we’re wrapping it in the fiction; we’re telling the players that they are playing scavengers, looting the remains of this city. We’re telling them that the city is divided into distinct zones, each with their own feel, and we’re telling them that charmstones are a reward item. Through the adventure, we’re also telling them about Lord Bone’s industrial manipulation of this ancient city, and the dangers within. It’s self-contained, so there aren’t any big twists - get to the loot, escape through the Catacombs, drop off the loot at the pre-arranged location, done. We don’t answer the important questions: who is the buyer? What are the charmstones for? Who gave you the original location? There’s no build-in for downtime, we don’t need to get into the settings’ politics; we don’t need that yet.
Adventure 2
Adventure 2 builds on our themes and introduces Necrad’s main factions - these being the League, the Liberties, the Wood Elves, and the Cold Trade. The players are double-crossed by the charmstone buyer from their last job, and it will end with them being forced to escape the city before they can confront them - because we want the players to have a hook to come back.
The Wood Elves have been tracking a thief; several of their delegates have been robbed in the past few months - and now one of them has been killed in an apparent mugging-gone-wrong - they’re looking for answers. The players are implicated. The League is tearing apart the Liberties to find them, and the cold traders are the only line the players have to escape without facing justice (the implication being that elven “justice” is fatal to any suspects, especially with the charmstone evidence the buyer has). We open the rails up a little here; there are some more choices as to how the players conduct themselves, but it’s still fairly on rails - we’re still holding their hands through the learning process here. The players will be smuggled out into the New Provinces - if the GM wants to set off on their own campaign after this adventure, we can guarantee that we’ll come back to Necrad - the New Provinces and the conflicts it presents are very tightly linked to Necrad.
Adventure 3
Adventure 3 contrasts Necrad with the world. We open in the New Provinces, and we’re going to go heavy on factions here. I find the easiest way to introduce players to factions is to start in media res - there’s an ongoing situation, everyone interesting is active and doing things - no-one is sitting in the background just hoping the players look at them. The three factions relevant to the New Provinces are the Provincials themselves, the Wilder, and the Church of the Intercessors. How do we attach them to this goal of getting the players back to Necrad? The players have been given the name of a Witch-Elf house that the buyer who sold them out is staying in - they are motivated to get back - but they’re wanted criminals, they can’t simply walk in.
The Intercessors have declared a holy site, deep in Wilder territory. The Lords Provincial are duty-bound to help them - but turning a blind eye (or even actively sabotaging the church!) protects fragile peace treaties with the Wilder and certain… rebellious elements. The Wilder, pushed out of their ancestral lands, want to keep this territory, but don’t have the man-power by themselves to hold it - especially pushed on other fronts by settlers from the New Provinces.
The Provincials have trade links - if the players gain favour with them, they can get in via a trade caravan - or as bondsmen of a Provincial lord. The Church has shrines within Necrad that need tending, but as the Intercessors cannot pierce the necromiasma of the city, only trusted clerics are allowed to tend them - and pilgrims aren’t scrutinised like common folk. The Wilder knew Necrad before the Nine conquered it; they were servants to the Witch-Elves in ages past. They know the secret ways into the city - into the very house that the buyer is hiding in. Helping the Wilder, however, requires the players to act against the New Provinces and the League - are they willing to burn those bridges (or are those bridges already burned)? This is a more open adventure; the three factions are scrapping over a shared issue - and it is up to the players to navigate the situation to their best effect.
Adventure 4
Adventure 4 takes us to the House of the Blue Hart, a dilapidated witch-elf mansion for a second look at the Cold Trade and spotlights the various ‘evil’ races. It’s another sort of dungeon, but a close-quarters, populated one. Once upon a time, when the Witch-Elves were ascendant, this house was home to maybe a dozen elves and maybe a hundred servants and human cattle. Now, it’s packed with witch-elves, ogres, vatlings, and other “monsters”. Here, the players are to be confronted by their past - perhaps last they encountered ogres was when Ulfir Bronzetooth’s horde razed their village; how do they now respond to this ogre, with a curiously metallic tooth, defending his own home?
Lord Bone’s industrial machines have carved a swathe through the house, converting the beautiful, if eerie ancient walls into ugly, functional, pipe-lined brick tunnels. It’s also, clearly, a trap. After making their way through booby traps, past chimaeric monstrosities, and across unseen lines between districts, the players confront the buyer. It turns out that the buyer is a power in the Cold Trade; the players can choose to kill them - but there are some lucrative opportunities if they choose to work with them…
By the end of these four adventures, the players have skimmed the surface of Necrad, exploring some parts of it while aware that there is much more lucrative riches out there if they are willing to risk it. They have touched on the internal politics of Necrad, and have aligned themselves to or against at least one of them - and similar for the wider politics of the North. They’ve even confronted their own prejudices, and have a connection to the Cold Trade that wraps around every part of the Lands of the Firstborn, whether that’s positive or negative. There’s a lot of the world left to be explored, and a lot of factions to further interact with - and a lot more interactions to do with the factions they’ve now been exposed to
I hope this exercise has made you interested in the world of the Lands of the Firstborn and the process that goes into taking a story like the Sword Defiant and reworking it for play. Are there any other properties you’d like to see me go through this process with?
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