Welcome to Aorthe!

This wiki is a collection of notes from a homebrew world developed over 25 years of sitting around a table with friends and playing tabletop rpgs. Some ideas are original, some are borrowed, some are a bit of both. I’ve changed and grown a lot as a DM over the years, so some of the information you’ll find here might contradict. When I first joined OP I basically took 25 years worth of hand-written notes and charts and threw them up into a wiki. I use it to supplement my game at the table, make random notes, work out ideas for stories and characters. It’s got a lot of detail and plays to the style of DMing I’m most comfortable with. I’ve always felt that three things are really important to make a game really come to life – verisimilitude (that there is an internal logical consistency that maintains the plausibility of events), malleability (the knowledge that player actions impact the world, for better or worse), and evocativity (enough minor details to at least present the impression that verisimilitude and malleability actually matter.) Everything you see in this wiki is here for that. Simulating genuine (or specific) preparations.

Feel free to take any ideas you like to use at your own table. If my philosophy doesn’t work for you, take what you like and leave the rest. If you want to hit me up with any questions or just to talk about ttrpgs, you can reach me at afascinatingchap@gmail.com anytime.

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Adventures

I’ve decided to share the adventures I’ve written. None are particularly good, and most are particularly bad, but there’s a chance something here might inspire you in some way so it’s worth sharing. Keep in mind that none of them were run as written. My DM style balances and improvises on-the-fly. When you get to the table all bets are off, so I write my modules with that in mind. Nothing goes according to plan.

With the caveats out of the way, if you still want to check out some of the adventures I’ve written, they can be found in this Drive link: Aorthe Adventures

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Background:

Imagine a world that is both new and old. One that bears the scars of forgotten battles and civilizations, yet remains new and undiscovered. That is Aorthe. The land is pocked with the remains and relics of lost peoples, and bears the unmistakable marks of events that have left it broken, and the people living on it’s surface changed.

By currently reckoning, Aorthe suffered a major cataclysmic event nearly 1000 years ago. It was so destructive that it essentially sent the entire world into a Dark Age where the majority of advancement and knowledge were lost and the people scattered to the winds. When the dust settled, people regrouped into basic tribal communities, surviving in a post-apocalyptic fashion. Over the course of the millennium, the various peoples either flourished or suffered according to the various fates that guided them, until the world eventually became what it is today. What is known of it, anyway. Few know of the First Age, when elves and other fae ruled the world. Current time is the Second Age, where the conquering gods rule to maintain a divine truce among them. The future holds but one fate for this world – the crumbling of all authority into the darkness and chaos of the Third Age.

It is a land that is both primal and enlightened, with science and superstition co-existing. It is a world in the cusp of a Renaissance where exploration, invention, and re-discovery of a world re-claimed by nature is the impetus for fame and fortune or tragedy and death. Where new lands await those brave enough to find them, and immense riches wait in ruins of civilizations lost and destroyed in the innumerable cycles of destruction and rebirth that is apparent in the archaeological record of Aorthe.

Aorthe is a world stolen from the fae, ruled by the gods, and inherited by the damned.

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