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.

Welcome to the Argent Isles

This is an introduction to my custom sandbox setting. Erika in the OSR Discord was really helpful with editing and readability.

On the planet Terra, gods are pretty common. It’s estimated that twenty-seven pantheons currently exist, with thousands more having disbanded over the years. Civilizations grow quickly with their gods’ strength and fall just as quickly as rival pantheons wage war upon each other. As such, most history is lost, jumbled, or even made up (the job of an archaeologist is incredibly difficult due to having so much badly-preserved history to sort through, so they occupy a very privileged place in most societies). For the past five thousand years, the three most powerful pantheons have settled into an uneasy truce….

Each of the Three Exalted Pantheons (as they are often called) rules over a different part of Terra.

• The XEN-342 Research Team- This group of five extradimensional eldritch anthropologists came to Terra for research thousands of years ago but got stranded when a stray hyper-comet destroyed their home dimension. Powerful enough to destroy Terra with a blink of one of their billion eyes, the Research Team is content to benevolently rule over their domain, Xetuhil.

• The Seething Guild- Long ago, an ultraviolent seven-member adventuring party slew an existing pantheon and took their place. Each member of the Seething Guild has grown to hate the others and they remain locked in stalemate, each always searching for an opening to strike against the others and steal their power. They rule the Land of the Jagged Cliffs with caprice and cruelty, but are usually too busy backstabbing each other to bother hurting mortals.

• The Ascended Duchy of the Argent Isles- These eighteen archfey rule the Argent Isles but spend most of their time partying in dimensions beyond mortal comprehension. If a mortal is able to catch their attention they are gracious (in the Flannery O’Connor sense of the word).

Our adventure begins in the Argent Isles, whose continents are:

• The Verwood, a continent whose main eco-biomes are temperate forests, with swathes of desert throughout the southwestern part of the continent. Considered the most ‘settled’ part of the Argent Isles, about 3/4 of the continent is inhabited territory (including the largest city in the Argent Isles, Melidad-upon-Riversfolly) divided into independent kingdoms, which exist in harmony with one another. In the past it was mostly home to elves, but it now has large populations of humans, halflings, dwarves and gnomes as well. Bordton (the starting location) is by the southeast coast in the kingdom of Solan. The Verwood is full of ruins from a technologically advanced elven civilization that was destroyed by gods ten thousand years ago.

• Lejker-Sil, which was once a single temperate continent that shattered into a hundred islands when a sleeping giga-serpent underneath it rolled over in its sleep. Now these islands and archipelagos are linked by bridges made of the silk of domesticated spiders. The native dragonborn have splintered into factions over the years, and piracy is common. Many dwarves now make their home in Lejker-Sil, claiming that the ocean breezes contribute to the making of a particularly strong form of iron, and grand magical colleges can be found in the coastal cities.

• Erdemir, a continent dominated by vast stretches of savanna crossed by mighty rivers who flood their banks every time it rains. The unstable, often-muddy ground has led Erdemir’s inhabitants, who have historically been mostly orcs descended from a pacifist cult, bird-people, and tabaxi, to master the art of building treehouses. Erdemiri wildlife all have potentially-destructive magical powers, down to the lowliest earthworm, necessitating the presence of vast groups of druids to keep the wildlife calm and happy.

• Hellsreach, which is primarily subtropical and downright tropical in the southernmost regions. This continent is primarily settled by tieflings, who are indeed creatures of Hell- but since Hell is only one of the many underworlds in the Terran cosmology, it’s not really a big deal. They’re actually very friendly to newcomers these days and many of the Argent Isles’ wealthiest live by the beautiful Hellsreach beaches. There are many entrances to the underground realm known as the Underdark in the Argent Isles, but most of them are in Hellsreach, which is inconvenient since the Underdark’s drow hate tieflings.