The Idea
DISCLAIMER: Please note that the artwork depicting locations, cities, and cultures in the Thesa Campaign Setting is generated by AI. These images are intended to convey the atmosphere and essence of the world and are not final representations. Should this project expand, we plan to replace AI-generated images with commissioned artwork to more authentically capture the setting. We kindly request not to engage in discussions regarding the morality of using AI-generated imagery.
I have been working on a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons for some time, developing maps, imagery and story.
The idea came about from my own homebrew campaign, set in the Critical Role campaign setting of Wildemount. My campaign ran for three years with a fully homebrewed story, using elements of the world created for Critical Role, such as locations, NPCs and some story beats. When the campaign ended, I had a session recap document of over 200,000 words, retelling the entire campaign story. I still have that campaign recap document, if anyone is interested in reading it. It is pretty thorough.
I wanted to use the notes to spark some creativity so started writing the campaign out as a book. I changed the story from a party-focused campaign to a story with a lead protagonist, antagonists, all from a single characters perspective. I thought a story about a party of five characters would be messy and hard to follow, but creating a new lead role would focus it into more of a novel. The story followed a new character set in the same world, retelling the objectives, encounters and roleplay from the original campaign from their perspective.
With the Wildemount setting being Critical Role IP, I decided that I needed to change it for this story. I really only planned on changing the names, the Dwendalian Empire became the Varisian Empire, the Kryn Dynasty became the Morn Dynasty, and so on. But it didn’t feel like it made enough of an impact to make it feel like my own. I’m sure, in hindsight, that I was massively over thinking it. But in the end, I decided I needed to make a more drastic change.
So I started reimagining the world.
Thesa. The name went through multiple iterations, and I’m still not fully set on it. I will admit it is hard to find a fantasy name that isn’t SO fantasy you can’t read or pronounce it, or find something that doesn’t already exist somewhere. Anything with too many accents, apostrophes or letters and suddenly my brain glosses over it. So for now, we are sticking with the short name Thesa. It was a bonus that Google doesn’t come up with anything specific when you search it.
While I was going through the process of making this new world, building out the map, the regions, the cultures, I realised one major thing. I can’t write a fantasy novel. I mean, I can write, but my writing experience is in creating Dungeons and Dragons session notes, and writing story beats for campaigns. I was coming at this project thinking I could write some great novel of an epic journey, fighting against the forces of evil for the greater good, but it became immediately obvious that that was not what I was talented at.
So instead, I decided to go with my strengths. Let’s make a Dungeons and Dragons setting.
Thesa, and where it came from.
Thesa Continent Map version 1.0, created in Wonderdraft.
The continent as a whole, still shows some influences from Wildemount. Considering that was where this entire project started, there is little surprise there. The world extends from a snow tundra down to jungle in a similar way to Wildemount, but this was to ensure a range of environments for the players to experience.
In the campaign I ran set in Wildemount, the Dwendalian Empire were the main instigators of the war. They were xenophobic, openly against uncommon races, and the Emporer was a paranoid, corrupt leader. The Dwendalian Empire was not a great place to be, especially for the party filled with uncommon races (there were 2 Genasi and a Bugbear). Now, this might have just been how I portrayed the Empire. But when you have the Cerberus Assembly doing experiments, Volstrucker assassins, and the overall temperament of the people in the nation, it was hard not to portray them like that. I would be interested to hear how other people ran the Empire, so leave a comment below.
Where is all this leading? Well, although the primary nations are inspired by Wildemount, the key difference is their purpose, and how they interact with one another.
The primary nations, the Varisian Empire and the Morn Arcanum, are a contest of might versus magic. Comparing a age of artifice and industrial revolution to an age of tradition and magic. This creates the main divide in the continent, with other surrounding nations benefitting and reacting in their own ways.
The Varisian Empire.
The Varisian Empire is a industrial nation that is dedicated to unity by conquest, sweeping across the continent and absorbing other factions through conquest or diplomacy. Their primary purpose is to unite the continent under one banner and create a new continent without war or fighting, where all citizens work together for a common goal. The way the Varisian Empire goes about this goal, essentially by domination, might make them come across as the “bad guys”, but their intentions are pure. The unity their goals bring will stop unnecessary fighting, the loss of life and the indecision having multiple leaders causes. Emperor Varist, the leader of the Varisian Empire, is a driven, dedicated leader who puts his nation first and ultimately wants the best for his people. The Empire prides itself on their leading artificers, creators who make machines touched with magic to improve the lives of their people. Machines that harvest crops, transport their people, control weather and more. But on the other side of that coin, the engineers and artificers of the Varisian Empire create war machines to strengthen the war front.
The Morn Arcanum.
The Morn Arcanum is the opposite of the industrial power. They value magic, power and knowledge above all else. The Arcanum is wholly dedicated to discovering the lost knowledge and magic of the past ages, uncovering the hidden truths, artifacts of great power, and protecting them. Their conflict with Varisia has been led by the belief that the Arcanum would need to change their ways and share their knowledge or magic with the Empire. The Arcanum see the efforts of the Empire as destructive, ruining the land, the history and the potential knowledge that could be gained from the past. The Morn Arcanum faces a major issue within their own border, the divide between the elite and the common people. The archmages and arcane scholars are the upper crust of the cities in the Arcanum, gaining their place as the elite by being more powerful than others. The value that the Arcanum places on knowledge and magical artifacts severely outweighs the benefit a citizen actually has to the nation, resulting in the working class being looked down on. The elitism has led to poverty in the provinces, where the working class who are not magically capable are not supported by the elite, and are considered lesser people. More on that later in the Morn Arcanum post.
At the core of it all, I wanted to make the primary nations shades of gray, no real good or bad choice.
Biomes.
Being a setting for Dungeons and Dragons, I wanted it to provide a tapestry of environments the players could experience, as such, each nation has a primary biome. The continent is large, spanning from an Antarctic style frozen wasteland in the north to jungle and wetlands in the south, with a balanced progression throughout.
There are five major types of Biome, as detailed in the National Geographic, which are: Aquatic, Grassland, Desert, Forest, Tundra.
Thesa covers four of these five. Aquatic, Grassland, Forest and Tundra. The North and West regions are heavily influenced by Tundra and Forest, with dense pine forests, tall mountain ranges and freezing ice flats. In comparison, the South and West regions are more influenced by Forest, Grassland and Aquatic biomes, with dense jungle and forests, wetlands and swamps, and open plains.
All in all, I wanted to create a tapestry of locations, environments and experiences for the players, to create a world where no two story is the same, where you could spend an entire campaign in one part of the continent and not see the far side.
I have hundreds of notes, images, details and quest prompts for the world, which I will be sharing in blog posts here. So please, if you are interested in hearing more, comment. Ask questions, pose ideas and challenges. All of it contributes to developing the world of Thesa, and eventually it might become something big enough to publish.