The Nature, Effects, and Ramifications of the Wyrd

A player in the upcoming campaign set out that he was confused on what the Wyrd was. This was interesting, as I was somewhat confused as to what it was as well. Up until that point, my ideas had been a sensory, vague swill of open-ended metaphors and useless slivers of anecdote to describe it. But now, the ideas have come to cohesion.

The Wyrd is tracts of land where the veils between the planes grow weak, allowing their influence to spill over to various effect. As is orthodox by most cosmologists on the Disk, The planes are all in the relatively same place, as well as their pasts and futures: as if each plane where an image, and they were lain over each other and held up to the sun. However, most mortals cannot see or engage between the planes, for reasons divine and unknown.

The Wyrd frays the veils between the planes, allowing one plane (or an era of history or the future, or a distinct anti-reality) to gain influence over a certain area. This can manifest in strange creatures, weird peoples, odd (and dangerous) environmental effects, and marked changes in terrain. Most of the time, the usual expectation of geography, physics, and society is uncoupled from the Wyrd.

The Wyrd shifts and undulates according to mortal's involvements with magic and the wyrd itself. Intense use of magic weakens the planar veil and thus can result in Wyrd, as well as mortal meddling with already-established Wyrd: bringing back artefacts, parlancing with it's denizens, and even creating crude charcoal sketches has known to increase the Wyrd's presence. It is for this reason that most magic-use is banned inside metropolises.

Oftentimes, the Wyrd envelops worldly kingdoms or cities, to their knowledge (or not). Other times, races, figures, cities, or geographies of other planes are grafted into our own, bringing with them strangeness and oddity. In select cases, true gates to other planes have been found: however, these are unstable and close and open on near-whim.

The Wyrd has varying degrees of frequency. In the frigid, cold centre of the disk, the Wyrd rarely appears: It is a safe utopia there, but magic is banned (and lacks the luster it has further out). This is the only off-limits portion of the world to my players, unless they intend to retire.

Much of the world, the Hinterlands included, is considered "Border-Realm"– where the Wyrd and the Mundane constantly battle for control. Here the Wyrd appears in marbled bands across certain areas, warranting exploration but in only equal proportion to that of mundane, and far safer territory.

The closer one gets to the edge of the disk, the thicker the Wyrd gets. by the time one reaches the "Far-Realms", the Wyrd is dominant– and beyond that, completely obscures the edge of the world. Amongst these hardly explored areas often come strange and wonderful things. Myth and legend intermingle with truth here, and are often truth themselves. To explore even a sliver of this vast and mythic terra incognita would be the magnum opus of any explorer for years to come.

I hope this clears things up for anyone who did not understand it (it certainly helped me). As a post-script, enjoy some of the art that inspires the Wyrd for me: