When I was three, I accompanied my father to the bog to pick cloudberries. It was the result of my relentless begging. I had begged for days, and finally, he agreed to try. My boots were too short, so of course my feet got wet. But I picked half a bucket of berries and wanted more. I can still remember the feeling of the wetlands, the buzzing mosquitoes, and the vastness of the wide bog. Reindeer roamed slowly through the fields under the quiet sky. It was as if a new world had opened up.
When I was in preschool, we visited a gold digger camp outside our town. The guide was a grumpy old man who declared that he would step aside for no one, whether child or adult. I was slightly afraid of him. After showing us how to use our tools, he went off to mind his own business. When it was time for lunch, our teachers tried in vain to start a campfire. They tried to light the logs directly with their matches. I protested, saying that was not how to do it. They laughed because I was only six years old—what did I know? After some futile attempts, one of them turned to me, slightly embarrassed. ”So, you knew how to make a fire?” ”Yes, I did.” I collected twigs, small sticks, and birch bark. They looked at me in disbelief. ”That will burn out in a minute,” one of the teachers said. I went to the ring of stones where the fire was supposed to be. I placed the birch bark, twigs, and sticks. I asked for a knife, cut small slivers in the logs, and lit the bark. Soon, the fire grew, and the grumpy old man, who had apparently been watching from a distance, stepped forward and tapped me on the shoulder. ”Step aside for me, boy,” he said.
The wilderness was almost my second home. From a young age, I walked the woods, bogs, and moors; roamed the mountains; and fished in creeks and lakes. It was a place where I could find solitude and where the burdens of everyday life were lifted from my shoulders. During the summer, I slept under clear blue skies when the midnight sun turned night into day. I slept in small cabins and lit hundreds of campfires. I fished throughout the night in small streams, and gazed longingly at the stars when autumn forced the midnight sun to disappear.
After a day of sweating and feeding the mosquitoes on the bog, we relaxed in the sauna, listening to the crackling fire and the hiss of the water on the stones.
During my long walks in the wilderness, my thoughts tended to drift toward storytelling and world-building. Some of these experiences and thoughts have now been published in Hardships of Wilderness, a hardcover book for Dragonbane. In it, you can choose from different professions related to life in the wild. You’ll also find rules for folklore (but of course, it’s fantasy, so the beliefs might be true), rules for traveling in different types of terrain, weather rules, tables of events, NPCs for your campaigns, and, of course, adventure sites and seeds. The book is available as a beta version on our Kickstarter page and will be printed in Swedish and English next year. If you made a late pledge and have not yet received the link, please send me a private message, and I will take care of it.
You can still make a late pledge here (we will close the pledgemanager once the books are at the printer): https://daniel-lehto.pledgemanager.com/…/participate/
This game is not affiliated with, sponsored, or endorsed by Fria Ligan AB. This Supplement was created under Fria Ligan AB’s Dragonbane Third Party Supplement License.
