World Building: Your World Still Needs a Why

On the 17th of October, people sat down in the Great Hall of Stirling Castle to play Call of Cthulhu. I was in Scotland at the time. I didn’t make it. That still annoys me. What caught my attention wasn’t the castle (well fine, it kind of was the castle). It was what sat underneath the show. The game came out of A Viking in the Sun, a University of Edinburgh research project on Harald Hardrada, and its sister show in Istanbul earlier this year was built from real archaeological objects, historical sources and Icelandic sagas. Historians did months of careful work so that four players could walk into a room and go wherever they liked.