Welcome to the Verwood

Verwood is the starting continent for my current sandbox campaign. Players could easily spend the entire campaign here, if they wanted to, although there’s certainly plenty more of the world to explore. This map isn’t a literal depiction of the continent; it depicts no roads and only the most significant landmarks and settlements. The idea is that if you asked a relatively knowledgeable resident of Verwood to think of the strangest, most unique places in the continent, this would be their mental map of where one would find such places. 

A lot of the locations on here come from my favorite OSR adventures- Stonehell Dungeon, the Caverns of Thracia, Magical Industrial Revolution’s city of Endon and the Slumbering Ursine Dunes are among the most significant inclusions (though I changed many of their names to fit my world better). Here are a few of my own original landmarks that I find particularly exciting- I’ll probably post some more gameable writeups of adventure locations and dungeons eventually as well. 

One fun setting detail is that High Elves in this world look like six-foot-tall bright-purple or gray-skinned Yoda-people with giant pointy droopy ears, baldheaded but with lots of curly black body hair. They have three empty eye sockets, and they hold magical eye-orbs or magically levitate them near their heads in order to see. The reason they look this way is that when the game first started, one of my players (playing a high elf wizard) asked her boyfriend to draw a picture of her character based on a vague description and he drew a simple sketch of the weird creature described above. Obviously I adore it and immediately ruled that all High Elves look that way. They still look down on all other creatures because they consider themselves the most beatiful.

The City of Antigisse 

Antigisse is among the wealthiest cities in the Argent Isles (the continent cluster where Verwood is), basing its economy on maritime trade. Agents of its Reyes Company, a guild of merchant venturers, can be found in every port in the known world. Antigissens value art, wealth and freedom far more than conquest; artists are revered, and the people occupy the heights of fashion and live by following the latest trends. Should someone have their garb declared “so last week”, the normally charming Antigissens will become cold and distant towards them. Members of the Ascended Duchy (the local gods, snobby aristocratic Archfey) enjoy spending time here, as it suits their glamorous lifestyles. 

Some of its landmarks are: 

-Angel Street, a grand avenue by the luxury shops that is lined with flowers and topiaries and paved with iridescent bricks 

-the opulent four-story glazed-brick headquarters of the Reyes Company 

-the bohemian Vernier Plaza, whose cafés are frequented by radical philosophers 

-the twin Sol and Lune Pavillions, where the greatest theatrical and musical performances in the Argent Isles may be seen 

The Burrows 

From afar, all you see are the towering windmills, which generate power for the Burrows through an ingenious pulley system. The mounds of mushrooms, hollowed tree-stumps, and carved-away boulders (as well as the humans and halflings who guard the city’s perimeter, well-paid to keep a watch out for any threats and alert the Burrows' denizens when necessary) that make up the city proper do not become visible until you get closer- and even then you will need to be very close indeed to see the people of the Burrows. It is a city of gnomes, who are about five inches tall (though their hats add another two inches), making their home in a network of toadstool houses and burrow mounds. They are welcoming towards bigguns (as they call anyone much larger than themselves), willing to give them magical shrinking mushrooms so that they may enter the city. 

The gnomes here are an egalitarian and community-oriented people, though mostly they are young gnomes of less than two hundred years old; almost all gnomes, upon reaching middle age, will set off into the world alone to seek solitude in some secluded wilderness, communicating with others by messenger-sparrow and perhaps visiting their friends every few years, returning only if they decide to start the cycle anew by having a child to raise among the Burrow-gnomes. 

A few landmarks: 

-the Magnificent Haberdashery, a hollowed elm stump where the very finest gnomic hats are made. All gnomes wear pointy red caps, magicked to be convenient places to store anything they may need and be virtually indestructible and impossible to misplace. Every few years, a gnome’s friends will all pitch in to buy them a new hat that is embroidered with runic depictions of that gnome’s greatest deeds. A gnome’s final hat before leaving the Burrows is presented to them at a grand going-away party, and it must last them the rest of their life. 

-Mr. Featherflower’s Bakery, where the wizened Mr. Featherflower sets out delicious trays of fresh-baked treats each morning, many of which have whimsical magical effects. The eccentric baker chose to remain in the Burrows his whole life rather than set off into the world, and although everybody agrees that there’s something a little strange about him, the pastries he concocts keep the whole city running! Many have tried to emulate his recipes, but he refuses to tell anybody his secret ingredient…. 

-the Hedgehog Stadium, where trained and pampered hedgehogs compete. Among the most popular gnomic past-times, many gnomes keep a stable of hedgehogs to run in the daily races. Each year, the ten quickest hedgehogs are chosen for the Grand Prix; the winning hedgehog gets a year’s supply of delicious rare berries and its trainer receives a special trophy-hat. 

The Island of Sugar 

The hardscrabble settlements along the southernmost edge of the Verwood, near the wasteland canyons, are afflicted with a terrible curse, and have been for as long as anybody can remember. Each year, the five most brave, virtuous, and kindhearted children in the land awaken one morning to find their bedrooms suddenly filled with marvelous golden trinkets. Though the trinkets uplift their families beyond their meager means, the child will not live long enough to enjoy it. Once all five children have been selected (usually within a few weeks of each other), the children are rounded up by strict order of the King Vecana and sent away to the Island of Sugar. Guards accompanying them to prevent their escape report that upon arrival, the children are met by wonderful creatures- floating spun-sugar pixies, jolly chocolate toads big enough to ride on their backs, gelatinous blobs who bounce and glisten- who lead the children away, and through the doors of the Factory. The children are never seen again. 

If any of the five chosen children fails to enter the Factory, the Factory will spend the next year pumping out foul-smelling sludge that poisons the ocean, killing all the fish, leeching into the groundwater and ruining the harvests, and pouring down acid rain from the skies. The entire region becomes unlivable. Thousands perish. And so, every successive King Vecana must shamefully decide, the children must be sacrificed. 

The island itself overflows with the Factory’s constant products. It spits out mountains of candies all night and all day; they heap into mounds upon the land and spill over into the sea, where they dissolve. The Factory itself is a squat and hulking structure, constantly spewing smoke from two chimneys- one that belches a foul, polluting black smog, and another from which clouds of sparkling candy-colored smoke drift up towards the sky. 

The people and rulers of Vecana would do anything to be rid of the horrible Factory, but the island is impervious to all forms of attack available to them, and none who set foot inside the Factory have ever come back out.

Ibis' Rest

Wizards are generally dangerous- after all, one spell gone wrong from a wizard of sufficient power can blow up a whole city block. As such, large wizard clusters are generally discouraged in most civilized areas. Though some wizards choose to live far from civilization in the wilderness, the seclusion often causes their mental health tto rapidly deteriorate and they find themselves drawn towards eviler powers.

To avoid such problems, the more sociable wizards of the Verwood have established a colony near the Western Ruins where they may study the ruins and develop their magical talents in peace. With no actual leadership, the colony is essentially anarchistic, which works out well because all the wizards there are powerful enough to defend themselves and their interests while also keeping other wizards from using their powers to hurt others. But there are those that say the city’s apprentices are the ones who are really running Ibis' Rest.

Some landmarks are:

-Spire Way, where a maze of wizards' towers cover the streets like the bristly feathers of an ibis. Sparks of magical octarine light flicker out so brightly at night that there’s no need for streetlamps

-the infinite library, a skyscraper complex with ten levels aboveground and countless more underground, kept running by strange technologies scavenged from the Ruins

-the Clocktower, looming over the rest of the city. The wizards claim that it is the most accurate clock in all of existence. Said to be haunted by the ghost of a terrible power-mad sorcerer who was flung from the top by an angry mob

The Northern Ruins

The Northern Ruins are the smallest and most well-tamed of the Verwood’s ruin sites. Characterized, like all the ruins of the High Elves, by sleek white-marble plazas, stadia and colonnades, the ruin complex is less contaminated by the purple sludge of petrified Elven remains than the other ruins, indicating that it may have already been abandoned before the mysterious Elven civilization was wiped out. However, its underground complexes found at the Sky’s Tears digsite seem to be massive.

In modern times, the Northern Ruins have been somewhat reclaimed. Vagrants, wanderers, and people looking to lay low for a little while often take up residence in the still-standing structures or pitch their tents within the relative safety of its rubble. A few enterprising businesspeople have set up permanent shops and services nearby, both for the miners at the Sky’s Tears and for those living among the nomadic tent-cities of the Ruins.