Midgard

Recently Open Design LLC has started Midgard, their most ambitious Open Design project ever. Wolfgang Baur, Brandon Hodge and Jeff Grubb are co-authors of this upcoming campaign setting for BOTH Pathfinder and D&D 4th Edition. The news post on the Kobold Quarterly website also mentions the possibility of using Green Ronin’s AGE system (from the Dragon Age RPG). But of course this depends on the votes of the patrons. As with all Open Design Patronage projects, people can become patrons, help the funding of the project in exchange for being able not only to follow but also influence the development of the project.

Although I currently don’t play any of the systems mentioned, I am quite interested in this project. I am actually interested enough to ponder becoming a patron myself. As you all well know world design is something I am very interested in and the chance of looking some industry veterans over the shoulder is just priceless.

The current plan is to release the campaign setting as a hardcover book before, during, or shortly after Gen Con 2012. That’s quite a project for the small-but-fierce kobolds at Open Design, but I am confident that they’ll be up for the task.

By the way, check out the Midgard Launch trailer below!

Standard patronage will set you back about $30. With higher levels of patronage you get additional perks like a free copy of the Worldbuilder’s Handbook, which contains a series of essays on world building by the settings’ designers, or even a signed copy of the hardcover book. Shiny!

What I really hope is that they make the rules separate enough from the rest of the book, so that running the campaign with a different system easy enough. IMHO the way to go would be to do it Freeport style: there’s one book with all the background information and separate books to cover the information needed to run game in that campaign using the various systems.

By the way, has anyone of my readers been an Open Design patron before? If so, would you like to share your experiences here?