In the North of every Man's Heart

Talking about RPGs, I was always fond of tiny, simple stories! Short adventures, small worlds, few lines of background. They are my favourites. Why? Well, partly because I am a lazy player and a lazier DM. Give me too many details, too many things to remember or to take into account, a world too wide to stage my stories in, and I feel thin like butter scraped over too much bread. But also because I love filling in the blanks to make the gaming world mine. I love going in depth rather than in width.

I am not talking about width in a geographical sense; I like adventures presenting several changes in scenery. Adventures that let you travel from deserts to mountains, from plains to seas, from ancient crypts to forlorn battlefields. But I want them to be nothing more than sceneries; I want them to show me only things that are relevant to the game action. I need no more. I want no more.

That's why I wrote Tales of the Wolfguard, a tiny setting, beautifully illustrated by Alessandro Paderi, but full of secrets, things to discover, places to go and stories to tell. I wanted to build a world with the narrative depth I always longed for.

At first, in Blizzard Vale there was the town of Ysvindur, the Wolfguard and the clan of Elves only. I envisioned a narrative dynamic where most of the adventurous and dramatic action stemmed from the conflict between the civilised people of Ysvindur and the barbaric Elves, with the Wolfguard playing an uneasy peacekeeping role. Then, my friend Giuseppe Rotondo pointed out to me it was a world too narrow to tell; above all, there was no wow, as he said to me, no sense of wonder, no surprises. After all, it looked too much like a Wild West border town, whose settlers conflict with the neighbouring natives and where the Wolfguard plays the role of a sort of Indian Agents.

He was right. The first draft of Tales of the Wolfguard was too narrow in scope. Tiny as I wanted my setting to be, it ought not to mean the adventure opportunities should have been just as tiny. So there came the Ikaryas, the dungeons of Urizen, the Scorpion Milk and the secrets of Ysvindur only the Imperial Legate knows. There came the wurm-riding cultural tradition of the Elves.

As I edited and revised the module and gave it the last few touches, I felt that wind that blows in the north of every man's heart.

The wind of adventure.