Real World Inspiration: The Thrones & Bones Board Game
How a historical Viking boardgames influenced an in-universe variation
Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest issue of Lazy Wolves, the newsletter for Lazy Wolf Studios and the Thrones & Bones games for Tales of the Valiant and Dungeons & Dragons.
Recently, I’ve been going through the Norrøngard Campaign Setting and talking about the real world inspiration behind some of the fantastic locations.
Today, I’m going to talk about something else, the creation of the in-universe boardgame, Thrones & Bones, from where the title of the book series and RPG series get their name.
When I first started writing Frostborn, the novel only had one protagonist, Thianna, child of a frost giant father and a human mother. She was, by virtue of growing up the littlest giant, extremely tough, athletic, and hard-headed. My wife told me, “you have to have a boy protagonist too.” And so I created Karn Korlundsson, a human boy to be my co-protagonist. Since Thianna was athletic, I made Karn clever. If she were the brawn, he would be the brains (a reversal of a common trope in children’s fiction at the time). Since she was really good at Knattleikr, the Viking ball game, I needed him to be good at something non-athletic. I decided that gamers have always been gamers, and I made him an expert in a boardgames, modeling his personality on modern day video game enthusiasts.
The Vikings had a boardgame they loved called hnefatafl, an assymetric game in which one side is surrounded and outnumbered by the other, and the object is to either capture the defenders’ king or navigate a path for the king off the board.
When I began writing Frostborn, I thought Karn would just play hnefatafl, but as the book progressed, I realized the rules of the game were going to play into the narrative. And that’s when the trouble started. Though tafl style games were common in various European countries, there is no complete description of how the Vikings played it. They only left us bits and pieces, when they would describe cool moves or winning strategies. As a result, the versions of hnefatafl we have today are reconstructions, and there are quite a few of them.
As I looked into it, I discovered that they varied wildly—from the number of playing pieces, to the number of squares on the board, to whether the corners were special areas or not, even to whether dice were involved! If I were going to use hnefatafl, I’d have to pick which reconstructed rules I wanted.
And that’s when it hit me.
Instead of using hnefatafl, I had the opportunity to do something exciting. I could make my own tafl game, inspired by hnefatafl, but unique to my world. Ever since I read Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Chessmen of Mars as a child, which featured the Martian game of Jetan and included the rules in the appendix(!), I’d been obsessed with in-universe games that readers could play. Now I was going to make my own!
I stopped writing, and I went to Michael’s and bought a blank wooden board. I got paint pins and dowels, and I made my own set. Right off, I had to decide on the number of pieces and the number of squares.
Looking through several of the existing reconstructions, I cherry picked the rules I liked, and—adding a few original rules of my own—I began to workshop them into a game. I spent a good week, full-time, working on revising and playing the game, and then I took it to Starbucks and set it in front of my two oldest nephews, both chess champions, and I watched as they played each other for three hours.
And that’s when I knew I had something.
And like The Chessmen of Mars, the rules for Thrones & Bones made it into Frostborn’s appendix.
One of the proudest moments of my life, actually, was when I went on tour across the US for Frostborn and had the opportunity to play Thrones & Bones against young readers who brought their own homemade Thrones & Bones games to my signings!
When I turned to creating tabletop roleplaying games, the rules for Thrones & Bones were reprinted in the Norrøngard Campaign Setting and again in the more recently released Player’s Guide to Norrøngard (Tales of the Valiant edition). You can also get a 3D printable version, with a snap-on arena for when your poor PCs have to fight on a life-sized board, here. (The link is worth clicking for the pictures alone!)
If you wanted something really fancy, these amazing Thrones & Bones sets were created by Jack Windsor of Ignited Arts & Design! I’m sure he’d be happy to make you another.
And, of course, here is one of my favorite boards.
So that’s the story of how my very smart wife got me to create a male protagonist, and his need to have something he excelled at lead to the creation of an in-universe game that became a real world game as well.
I hope you enjoyed this peak behind the curtain. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to know about next, and please click the links below to join our Discord and follow the forthcoming Kickstarter.
Be healthy!
If you ever decided to create a tactical fantasy board/wargame out of your world, I'd be first in line to buy. Just an idea!
This is very cool! Love hearing about the integration. And loved running "Troll of the Town" by the way.