This repository contains all my notes and campaign details for a West Marches style megadungeon set in Myrida. It has been divided into two sections:
- Player's Guide - This contains all the stuff a character just starting in the game would know.
- Gamemaster's Guide - This is for Gamemasters only. If you want to run this setting for your own game, feel free to have a look. If you want to play, KEEP OUT.
If you want to run this setting for your D&D group, I think that would be super cool. Feel free to reach out to me on social media with questions. However, this repository is a complete work in process and contents are likely to change. Nothing in here should be considered canon. If you want to run this game, I recommend you fork the repository and fill in the gaps you need for your group.
Myridia is a campaign world that will be detailed online at a future point. However, there are some key things about Myridia that are relevant if you want to run or play in this campaign yourself.
The entire world is a series of demiplanes, called spheres by those who live there, connected by gates. Each of these spheres is between a couple of miles to a couple of hundred miles in diameter and have varying geographic and climatic features. So, for example, a desert sphere might connect to a jungle sphere and a polar sphere. Trips of any significant length will pass through several types of environments.
This has several benefits:
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If you play a ranger that has a favored terrain and the adventure never takes you there, that's not fun. These means that, as a ranger, you usually will take forest since most campaigns start in temperate forests. In Myridia, odds are, you'll visit all sorts of environments and your specialization is bound to happen.
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At higher levels, characters will begin to teleport everywhere and overland journeys cease to be a thing. Since teleport only works within a given plane, this makes teleport useful, but still restricts its usage for really long trips. The forces higher-level characters to make overland journeys.
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Of course, plane shift is always an option. However, it has a material component of a 250 gp tuning fork tuned to a specific plane. Since each sphere is a plane, that's a lot of tuning forks. This makes the frequency of a particular sphere a useful bit of knowledge. Something that might need to be acquired through adventure.
It's not unusual for celestial bodies to be gods. This is a pattern in the real world. The sun is a god, the moons are gods, the planets are gods. However, Myridia takes it a step further. Every single star is a god. There are literally an astronomical number of gods.
The sun, moons, and planets are well know gods that many folks worship. Prominent stars as well. But, there are as many obscure gods as your characters and campaign can demand. Want to have a weird cult that worships a near forgotten deity. No problem. Does your character want to create her own god that only she worships. Completely viable. The setting and pantheon bakes that in.
Characters can never remember the weird fantasy names we make up for characters. So why bother. The gods are given memorable names with related meanings in the real world drawn mostly from Greek and Latin (with a little Sanskrit thrown in for fun). Helios is the sun god, the moon gods are Therion and Chandra. The dwarven city-state is Lithos and the city where the priesthood have their observatory to study the sky and catalog the gods is called Theopolis. The book they catalog the gods in, the Astronomicon. The Dwarves have Greek names like Nicholas, Polynikes, or Theodosia and write with Greek letters. The Men have Latin names like Julia, Marius, or Flavia and write in Latin letters.
One of the things that always bugged me was that the Elves, while very long lived, had the same range of levels as Men or Dwarves. Elves like for over a thousand years. At their peak, they should be easily ten times as powerful as the lesser races. In Myridia, they are. The Elves keep to themselves and no one bothers them because they are all epic-level powerhouses that do things like summon winter, use magic to grow the forests spheres they live in, and power word kill entire orc legions. The Elves that you encounter out in the worlds are the young ones, full of wanderlust and looking to explore the world.
Myridia is loosely inspired by ancient civilizations of the real world, particularly the Greeks and Romans. This is a pleasant change of pace from the typical medieval European setting most games are set in. Instead of kingdoms and duchies and counties, it is a series of city-states with stretches of wilderness between. The wilderness is full of ancient ruins from previous civilizations. This provides ample dungeons to explore and bandits to encounter and keeps the long arm of the law, which characters often frustrate, short.
This work is licensed under a the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. The full license is here. A human readable summary can be found here.
