Author's Notes

Trid is my attempt to create the "implied setting" modeled in the Basic and Expert D&D rules of the early 1980s. The provisions established in those rules are Trid's foundations—its "givens." This applies to the macro as well as the micro, so certainly Trid includes the classes, spells, monsters, treasure, and magic items described in the rules, but also the quirks they engender, so it is understood that clerics have power over the undead, that neanderthals attack ogres on sight, that unguarded treasure always includes silver, etc.   These working assumptions define Trid's present, but they also demand a past to explain them. There's a reason why things are the way they are—a rationale for why each class has unique abilities, where monsters come from, and why the wilderness is so dangerous. Importantly, there are ancient sources responsible for the dungeons and ruins that contain all the treasure and magic that adventurers risk their lives to obtain.   Imagining these details within the implied setting's boundaries is a creative challenge I've chosen to meet by heeding the rules' own guidance. Thus, encounter tables define populations and settlements; treasure tables spawn magic and coin; reaction rolls suggest why monsters and NPCs do what they do. Naturally, this approach has spawned the need for other, bespoke, dice tables, and so Trid is very much a collection of random results stitched together, usually (and most effectively) with the players' unwitting input.   All these elements needed a home, and I created Trid as a subcontinent on a sheet of 4'x3' butcher paper back in the late 80s. It drew heavily from the campaign worlds of the day, and anyone familiar with Pluffet Smedger's seminal work will recognise immediately its influence on the map. From the start, Trid was a sandbox, where a high-level world history was enough to create some context for actions at the local level. As such, it did a great job of supporting the "B/X Lifestyle," wherein players let their characters loose in a given region with general success, retired their characters well before reaching name-level, and then cast their attention to new PCs who faced new challenges in a new areas of the map. This model made it easy to develop Trid incrementally, one small—but suitably detailed—area at a time.   Yet, as the individual sandboxes multiplied, so too did the connections between them, and Trid's relatively small physical area started to feel confined. Instead of simply extending the map, I redrew Trid and redistributed the material from the original. To save time and to stretch myself creatively, I came up with some guidelines to follow during the process:  

1. The setting reflects the application of the core rules-as-written (RAW).
2. Random first—explanations later.
3. All conflict is local—action in the Trid sandboxes is not about saving the world.

  Moving Trid from my notebooks and paper hex maps to my hard drive has the twofold goal of organising the setting into a more cohesive whole and sharing it with other referees who are looking for a fully supported and growing B/X/OSE setting. While it's often challenging to run games in someone else's setting, my goal is to make Trid accessible in a modular fashion, and this site is organised so that referees can use as much as they wish to either run their own campaigns in Trid or pluck ideas for use in their own settings. To that end, any page with the "OGC" tag is Open Game Content that may be reused or freely repurposed under the terms of the Open Game License.  

Appendix N

Trid is an amalgam of many disparate inspirations, which have found their way into the various sandboxes across the setting. Some of the more pervasive elements are drawn from the following sources:  

Fiction

Cornwell, Bernard: The Saxon Stories   Hardy, Lyndon: Master of the Five Magics   Howard, Robert E.: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian; The Bloody Crown of Conan; The Conquering Sword of Conan   Lewis, C.S.: Chronicles of Narnia   Moorcock, Michael: The Elric Saga   Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Hobbit   Vance, Jack: Dying Earth   Wolfe, Gene: Book of the New Sun  

Non-fiction

Breay, Clair and Story, Joanna (editors): Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War   Cheyney, Edward P.: A Short History of England   Chickering, Howell D.: Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition   Frere, Sheppard: Britannia: A History of Roman Britain   Fry, Stephen: Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined   Gaiman, Neil: Norse Mythology   Gibbon, Edward: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire   Haywood, John: The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings   Howarth, David: 1066 The Year of the Conquest   Jager, Eric: The Last Duel   Jotischky, Andrew and Hull, Caroline: The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Medieval World   McCall, Andrew: The Medieval Underworld   McEvedy, Colin: The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History   Tuchman, Barbara: A Distant Mirror  

Role Playing Games

Baker, Richard: Worldbuilder's Guidebook   Charlton, Coleman and Fenlon, Pete: Character Law & Campaign Law   Cook, David and Marsh, Stephen: Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rulebook   Gygax, Gary: B2 Keep on the Borderlands; World of Greyhawk   Heard, Bruce: Voyage of the Princess Ark (DRAGON Magazine, Issues 153-188) ; Champions of Mystara: Heroes of the Princess Ark   Judges Guild: Ready Ref Sheets, 2nd Edition   Moldvay, Tom: B4 The Lost City; Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook; X1 Isle of Dread