Strange Perspectives: Part 4 of 4

The Wyrgog Travel Guide: Why You Should Never Camp Near a Bone Totem

Years back, one of my players told me — proud as a peacock — that he’d learned everything worth knowing about wilderness survival from playing fantasy roleplaying games.

So I asked him. What great wisdom had he picked up?

He didn’t even blink. “Never split the party.”

I told him that wasn’t wilderness survival.

That was obituary prevention.

Real wilderness survival is knowing which berries won’t put you in the ground, how to stay dry after three straight days of cold rain, and why bedding down next to a mountain stream during spring runoff is a fine way to wake up halfway to the next county.

Sundrah, though, has one more rule. And every traveler ought to tuck it away somewhere safe.

If you find a bone totem, don’t stop to admire the craftsmanship.

Keep walking.

Better yet, pick up the pace.

I learned exactly how much muscle those little things carry on a trip through the Witchwood. I’d spent most of the evening doing what us Game Masters live for — painting the picture. The wind never blew from the same direction twice. Trees leaned at angles that had no business standing. Every so often something cried out beyond the firelight, and every last description I gave dropped a hint that unseen eyes were pacing the party through the trees.

My players ignored all of it.

That’s another thing four decades behind the screen teaches you. Players don’t fear atmosphere. Not really. They know the Game Master is over there sweating, trying to make them jumpy, and they’ve decided not to give him the satisfaction.

What they fear is specifics.

So when one of them wandered off the trail and stumbled onto a crude little totem — animal bones and strips of hide lashed together with more spite than skill — the whole table went dead quiet.

There was nothing magic about it. No glowing runes. No skull with emerald eyes. No ancient curse carved down the length of it.

Just weathered bones swinging from a crooked sapling.

And the conversation that followed ran damn near an hour. All of a sudden everybody wanted to know who built it. How old was it? Did it mark a trail, or was it a warning? And — this was the big one — was whoever made it still close by?

For the first time all night, nobody wanted to keep walking.

That was the moment it clicked. That was when I finally understood what made the Wyrgog work.

When I first cooked them up, all those years ago, they were just monsters. They skulked in the woods, jumped travelers, and died real pretty under the swords of my adventurers. They did the job. But they weren’t interesting. Not deep down.

The older I get, the less monsters do for me.

Anybody can write a monster.

People are the hard part.

The Wyrgog didn’t get interesting until I quit asking how they fought and started asking how they lived.

Who decides where the Clutch hunkers down for winter?

Who teaches the young ones to hunt?

What stories do they pass around the fire once the little ones are asleep?

What makes them laugh? What keeps them up at night?

Those questions led me somewhere I hadn’t planned on going. The Wyrgog weren’t just another batch of monsters sitting around waiting on adventurers to show up. They were a people. Customs. Traditions. Loyalties. History. The Rune Gods made them to replace humanity, sure — but they never once looked at themselves as failed humans, or as some savage knockoff of civilization.

They already had a civilization.

It just wasn’t ours.

And that right there is the whole thing.

Fantasy is stuffed to the gills with creatures that exist purely to get bumped into. You find the ogre. You fight the ogre. You loot the ogre and mosey on down the road.

The Wyrgog don’t sit right in that slot.

They feel like a people who happened to notice some strangers tromping through their backyard.

That’s a very different kind of problem.

A giant spider wants to eat you. Simple. Honest, even.

A Wyrgog might spend three days watching your camp before it decides whether you’re worth the bother. It learns your habits. It clocks who takes the watch and who nods off first. It sees who wanders off alone for firewood and who never goes anywhere without a buddy.

Or maybe it looks you over and decides you aren’t worth the trouble at all.

Somehow, I find that one even worse.

Here’s something I’ve always loved about the Wyrgog. They’ve got zero interest in convincing anybody they’re civilized.

You see this all the time in other settings. The monstrous races get handed this almost desperate itch to imitate us. They build castles that look like ours. They set up kingdoms that look suspiciously familiar. Before long they’re just folks with funny teeth.

The Wyrgog never gave a damn about any of that.

A Wyrgog settlement doesn’t look like a human village that couldn’t cut it.

It looks like a place built by people who were busy solving an entirely different set of problems.

The fires burn.

The hunters come home dragging game.

The children wrestle in the dirt while the elders spin stories that have been handed down for more generations than anybody’s bothered to count.

Life just keeps rolling, same as it always has.

The difference is their traditions got shaped by predators instead of farmers. By Clutches instead of kingdoms. By loyalty to the Rune Gods instead of any notion of what we’d call civilization.

There’s a confidence in that.

An unpleasant sort of confidence. But confidence all the same.

Which brings us back around to the bone totems.

Folks misread them, mostly because we humans can’t help assuming that everything we run across was put there for our convenience.

We find a trail marker, we figure it’s marking a trail.

We find a monument, we figure it’s honoring something.

Somebody planted a signpost, well surely it’s got something useful written on it.

Sometimes a bone totem isn’t meant for you at all.

Sometimes it’s just one Wyrgog telling another one:

We were here.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

And the unsettling part isn’t the totem.

It’s the moment you realize that if somebody took the time to leave it standing, then somebody thought this spot was worth remembering.

And if it mattered to them yesterday…

no real reason to figure it stopped mattering today.

I’ve spent more time than I’ll admit wondering what the average Wyrgog makes of adventurers blundering through the wild.

Picture it. You’re up in the trees, looking down as five heavily armed strangers come marching straight into your territory.

One of them’s singing while he walks.

Another keeps poking mystery objects with a stick.

A third announces every single thing he sees at full volume, like talking quiet is against the law.

The wizard’s dead sure every crumbling ruin is packed with forgotten magic.

And the rogue? He’s already jimmied open three things nobody asked him to touch.

From where the Wyrgog’s sitting, adventurers must look hopelessly reckless.

Which — let’s be honest with each other — isn’t the worst read on the situation.

The best Wyrgog encounters I’ve ever run almost never came down to combat.

Combat’s easy.

Sooner or later somebody rolls initiative, the dice hit the table, and everybody knows the rules from there.

Suspense is the hard stuff.

A far-off howl riding the wind.

Fresh tracks circling the camp that weren’t there at sundown.

A hunting spear stuck silent in the ground beside the trail.

A flicker of movement where nothing should be moving.

That slow, cold understanding that somebody knows exactly where you are — and has known for a good long while.

Those are the moments that stick to players.

Years later, they won’t remember a single attack roll.

They remember staring into the dark and realizing the dark just might be staring back.

I reckon that’s why the Wyrgog are still one of my favorite things I ever made for Sundrah.

Not the claws.

Not the Rune Gods.

Not because they’re dangerous.

I love them because they make the wilderness feel lived in.

The forests belong to somebody.

The mountains belong to somebody.

Those lonely valleys past the last farmhouse aren’t just empty stretches of nothing, sitting there waiting on heroes to come explore them.

Somebody already lives out there.

Whether you’re welcome is a whole different conversation.

Which drops us right back at that bone totem.

You find one, you keep walking.

Don’t stop to investigate.

Don’t poke it with your sword.

Don’t burn twenty minutes debating its cultural significance while you’re standing three feet away from it.

And whatever you do, don’t grin real confident and say:

“It’s probably nothing.”

In my experience, those are usually the last words a party gets out before the Game Master reaches for the dice.

Conclusion of The Sundrah Survival Guide

When I kicked off this little series, I figured I was writing a travel guide for a fantasy world.

Turns out I was writing about something else entirely.

We started with merchants scraping by after the apocalypse. Then we sat a while with bureaucrats holding civilization together on nothing but paperwork and pure stubbornness. We tagged along with adventurers building whole careers out of remarkably bad decisions. And finally we stepped past the campfire to shake hands with the neighbors waiting in the dark.

That’s what Sundrah has always been to me.

Not the Rune Gods.

Not the monsters.

Not even the magic.

Those are the easy parts.

The good part — the part that’s kept me at this table for forty-some years — has always been the people trying to survive smack in the middle of all of it.

Even the ones with claws.

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Want more dispatches from Sundrah and the wider Worlds of Pulp? Come pull up a chair at the Scaldcrow Games table — the fire’s lit, the dice are warm, and there’s always another story waiting in the dark.

If you would like to revisit past articles, look no further than the Geek Opera Index!

Watch the shadows, my friends. And always check your ale for poison and make sure not to camp under a bone totem.