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. Back then, I had no awareness of how strongly rules could impact setting—a sign of either my inexperience or how subtle that impact was. Indeed, while later iterations of the Basic game gave us Mystara, rich with detail and truly inspiring creativity, it infrequently matched the tone of the pre-BECMI adventure modules.
By contrast, the implied setting of B/X, being a different ruleset, had a different feel. For starters, it didn't really exist. All we knew of the Known World—as the B/X setting would become—came from a brief write up in the Expert adventure module X1 Isle of Dread. Many of the places described therein came from author Tom Moldvay's own campaign, co-created with Lawrence Schick, and the brilliance of these conceptual entries was that they provided enough information for the reader to imagine—correctly—who lived there and what went on, but they were so happily lacking in detail that the reader could simultaneously imagine—with equal clarity—their own how's and why's.
Though little of the Known World was documented while B/X claimed it, the B/X rules themselves provided some insight. Certainly there were monsters, and there were adventurers who assembled to defeat them, not only to establish order in the world, but also to gather wealth and amass power. But there were other clues about the world that the B/X people lived in—the implications behind the "implied setting." Divine magic implied actual gods. Arcane magic implied spells. Ruins implied ancient cultures; the rich treasures within implied they were powerful. The Common Tongue implies some level of multicultureal unification. The 3-point alignment axis implies that the struggle between Law and Chaos borders on existential.
These are the keys to understanding the implied setting. By accepting the conventions established in the game rules, you necessarily craft the environment around them. Neanderthals attack ogres on sight. We don't know why, but we accept it because it's in the rules. Dragons have tons of treasure—where do they get it and why do they hoard it? Unguarded treasure always contains silver. No idea why, but so many oddly specific details like these pepper the rules, and the referee has to figure it out what it's supposed to mean.
Development Approach
A key feature of the implied setting is its reliance on random tables, both to create it and to run it. The B/X rules had a dice table for just about everything, from exploring a dungeon to encountering and fighting monsters to who lives in that castle. And, with an entire world to populate, random does a great job of laying a solid setting foundation quickly.
Trid is very much a collection of random results stitched together, usually (and most effectively) with the players' unwitting input.
Killer bee honey heals damage, so that's a thing.
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:
Comments