The World of Trid began in 1989 as a setting for my B/X D&D game, mapped on a single piece of 4’x3′ butcher paper tacked the wall of my high school bedroom. The map has changed over the last three-and-a-half decades, but one constant has been its thematic adherence to the B/X implied setting.

That term refers to the setting implicitly described by the B/X rules, where humans can achieve higher levels than demi-humans, where divine spells prove the existence of the gods, where Neanderthals attack ogres on sight and unguarded treasure always contains silver. Though it seems like an obvious direction to take, it’s an important factor, for it helps bridge the gap between the game rules as theory and the setting in which they’re put into practice. It’s my hope that if you’re familiar with the rules, you’ll have an easy time navigating Trid.

Trid’s technology and social structures are roughly analogous to late 5th/early 6th century Earth. While early mediaeval history is of especial interest to me, the greater value is that this period is arguably the closest we can get to the implied setting in the real world. This period saw a global superpower collapse after centuries of decline, leaving entire cultures to reorganize themselves to survive a near-instantly hostile landscape. So too on Trid, where the Ardic Republic has just fallen, settled lands have given way to wilderness, and safe havens are few and far between.

And that dangerous landscape is the foundation of the implied setting, yielding up ancient ruins to explore, roaming monsters to defeat, and power brokers to help or hinder as they carve out new dominions. History does not repeat, but it rhymes—even in made-up worlds—and so amid this backdrop, pantheons will be displaced by singular gods, the nobility will spar with religious orders for social control, and people will migrate until they find safe homelands. You’ll see the old order change, yielding place to new.

The World of Trid represents how I chose to recreate the implied setting, but at its core, Trid is one of many possible extrapolations of what the B/X implied setting could look like. And while it’s inevitably embellished with its own house rules and additions, Trid does my best to cleave as closely as possible to the tone and quality of the Basic/Expert canon.

With that, welcome to the World of Trid—good gaming!

Development Approach

Trid’s guiding development principle is to honour the implied setting, while remaining flexible enough to support ideas I haven’t thought of yet. To keep me grounded (i.e., coherent) and bake scalability in, here are the “rules” I set for myself:

Default to RAW: To maintain compatibility with the implied setting, Trid is written for use with the Basic/Expert rules-as-written (RAW). While Trid includes its own house rules, new classes, monsters, spells, etc., these are themselves modular and optional. The goal is portability: One should be able to adventure in Trid straight from the books or even using their own house rules.

Random first, logic later: To match the tone of the implied setting, and to populate it quickly, Trid relies on a host of random tables, from the basics of terrain and culture to the minutia of village shops and dank treasure holes. Random results are conceptual, suggesting what might be, until the referee can weave them into something that engages the player characters. Some random results remain untethered and are left for the referee to explore or ignore.

Detail is the enemy: To promote customisation for individual campaigns, Trid is presented with the minimum detail needed for Referees to run their own campaigns while allowing them to expand as desired. While this approach has the obvious benefit of saving time, the key advantage is flexibility, making it easy for the Referee to connect random elements and incorporate the players’ (often unwitting) input when- and however inspiration occurs.

It is upon these foundations that Trid is built, though it is inevitable that individual Referees will customise the setting to suit their creative impulses and playing styles. Obviously we encourage this—that’s part of the fun of RPGs—and to facilitate such tinkering, Trid is presented in a modular format that allows Referees to start with the B/X rules as a common basis then use this material to run Trid as-written or cherry-pick the pieces you like.