Wild Fields

Dzikie Pola is a Polish tabletop roleplaying game first published in 1997. It was designed by Jacek Komuda, Maciej Juerewicz, and Marcin Baryłka, and had a second edition (by Komuda, Michał Mochocki and Artur Machlowski) released in 2005. It’s still pretty popular in Poland!

The game bears all the hallmarks of mid-late nineties design - vast skill lists, point-buys, slightly confusing rules, detailed combat, and task resolution. I thought the challenge of “refreshing” Dzikie Pola with my own sensibility, and years of new developments in the TTRPG space, would be fun. This was a thought exercise and I don’t make any claim to the original game but rather a loving homage.

I wanted to retain some of the game’s unique character, so I kept the idea of hardcore task resolution and lists of skills. My solution was to chunk these into affinity groups and use them to enforce the freewheeling, slightly chaotic, vibe of the original by requiring that characters use all their skills in a group before refreshing them. Sure, use that saber, but keep an eye out for an opportunity to use artillery. Hold your liquor, but eventually you’re going to have to beat somebody up. This works surprisingly well! The minimal rules are at the bottom of each character sheet.

I built out my version of Dzikie Pola around a simple one-shot adventure and some pre-made characters. It’s all totally functional, although churning through the disparate skill list is awkward and there aren’t any rules for helping, added difficulty, or other stuff that is bound to come up. Wing it, I guess. This process, and a successful playtest, inspired me to move forward with my ideas here, because the “hyper task resolution” aspect is genuinely fun and charming. We’ll see where it leads!

One final note for non-Poles: The story of the Dzikie Pola could be compared to the American story of the “taming of the west” and includes some really cringe-inducing nationalism as well as very unpleasant topics like slavery. In terms of genre, the game is meant to be over-the-top, romantic, violent, and a little swashbuckling. Proceed with caution and know that Wikipedia won’t give you the complete context here.