BUILDING BÖDENGÄRD
Bödengärd was built up over many decades in different ways, so it is ultimately a pastiche. The first reason for it to come together was as the setting for Hand of Doom. However, what eventually was called Bödengärd was birthed well before that.
Long ago, in 1986 I was ten. I was the GM for most of the roleplaying sessions with my friends. We played all the time, during middle school lunch, after school, whenever. Sometimes for only 20 minutes & sometimes as long as 8 hours.
My ability to immediately fill in the gaps of imaginary worlds came in very useful because I never even remotely wondered about what came next, I just knew. We never used pre-made campaigns, it was always things I would make up on the fly, responding to the players.
I also have a mythic, ordered view of the world that can build up a structure for people looking to make sense of the apparent disorder of the world around us. My understanding of the world comes from the study of ancient works.
These games began with Adventures In Fantasy (which I bought on sale at the Model Train store, which was the nearest hobby shop to my house), then rapidly turned to D&D, then TMNT & all the Palladium games), Warhammer, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu & then into my own system.
I left roleplaying games when I was fifteen & I didn’t reapproach them until 2007 when I realized that I wanted to do drawings for roleplaying games, so I did a bunch of work for Labyrinth Lord.
At about the same time I was coming up with the basic materials that would go into making PORK magazine & I decided that I wanted my approach to fantasy to be similar, dragging the material into the gutter & having this early New York mess of immigrants forming the American culture out of European elements.
The Würstreich is Germanic. Most of Western Europe is Germanic, or has Germanic tinges, even England.
This mixes well with my obsession over German Jewish culture & the way it informed NYC. I was also coming up with a concept that was the intersection between Hassidism, the Amish & Skinhead.
Years passed & PORK magazine took over our lives. We released Hand of Doom in 2017, then in 2018 I had the stroke that would leave me disabled & not able to draw the way I wanted so I started writing about the Würstreich.
As I started thinking about what lay beyond the Eastern Provinces of the Würstreich I mapped out the rest of the continent. What started out as an East-West slice of Bödengärd soon developed into almost the whole thing.
My love of geology & science in general helped out as I approached the land mass as a new, whole thing. The land has to make sense, it’s not just a random selection of elements.
The mountains are created by geological activity, usually the intersection of tectonic plates. Sometimes ranges are created by the plates pushing against each other, other times they are made by the volcanic activity that is created by plates pushing against each other & they are further shaped by erosion, glacial movement & other things.
Water comes flowing out of these mountains & is collected as rivers which grow larger & larger the further from the mountains they reach. Lakes furtherly collect the water that comes down.
Ordinary Earth geology is a good starter, but Bödengärd is augmented by strong fantasy elements. One is the area of the Northern Middle. This was fertile farmland until it was turned into Wasteland by a magical cataclysm caused by the hubristic arcane explorations of Imperial sorcerers.
The other fantastical element is that the continent just appears to end & there are floating islands. This area is called the World’s End. I have no scientific explanation for this, it’s just cool.
I try to keep mythic elements all around, ruins, megaliths & other hints at other, older civilizations but that isn’t different from the world we inhabit, where the ghosts of the past saturate everything.
Big sale going on at GOBLINKO. 25% OFF everything, 50% off Hand of Doom