Illuria: Isle of Champions

I learned to play D&D when I was 10. It was 1980. Forty years later I still remember those games and the lifetime friends I made from gaming in my teens and twenties. In real life, I got a doctorate in the history of science and taught university. Studying the esoteric and occult became part of my job and D&D fell by the wayside. A couple of months ago, I started building the fantasy world I would now find “fun” — a world informed by a lifetime of erudition, knowledge, and scholarship and inspired by the best of fantasy and horror. A world in which to experience unique D&D adventures. I named it Illuria.   Illuria is a rich, textured world with complex possibilities for character development. It is a place to be born and come of age, laugh and cry, eat and sleep, work and play, fall in love, suffer heartbreak, get sick, grow old and even die. A place where one can battle for glory or maneuver for power, find forbidden tomes of obscure lore in dark dungeons and dusty libraries, learn new skills and acquire wondrous items, chart new lands beyond the sea, and still realize there is more to discover. It is Illuria — a place of mystery and magic!   Illuria is a continent on a world that has had many names. It is a realm of the weird and wonderful, a diverse place shaped by unique climates, cultures, ecosystems and geography. It is the resting place of a crumbled empire — the Illurians — who came from across the sea more than a thousand years ago and sought to tame a “savage” land. A land whose history was even then deep and shrouded in the mists of time. There is a vibrancy and energy in the New Kingdoms that formed from the ashes of the Empire. Though order and peace exist in some lands, there are also many dark, unexplored corners of Illuria. Understanding is slowly returning to the level it had reached during the “Time of Light,” a kind of early modernity (and beginning of a “techno-magical” revolution) which swept through the Illurian Empire two hundred years before its fall. While the once great imperial seat Illur has devolved over the past half-millennia into a theocratic city-state of arch-mages and necromancers vying for ever diminishing power, the New Kingdoms of Illuria have given life to cosmopolitan centres of trade, industry and knowledge. Sarnath and the Eastern Kingdom have taken the lead here. Illuria is on the cusp of a new early modernity and witnessing “techno-magical” innovation (driven by an “age of sail”). But it is also a place of dark woods, massive mountains, ancient crypts, forgotten temples, strange beasts and harsh barbarian lands.   Illuria: Isle of Champions is a dark fantasy setting with Gothic horror undertones inspired by fantasy and horror classics like:

• Malory's chivalrous Le Morte d'Arthur
• More’s intricate Utopia
• Swift’s satirical Travels
• Beckford’s decaying Vathek
• Shelly’s spark Frankenstein
• Byron, Keats and the romantics
• Poe’s grief in “The Raven” and the entire Gothic tradition
• Lord Dunsany’s Pagana pantheon (which I've adopted and expanded upon)
• The spiritualist movement and the mysticism of theosophy
• H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and Cthulhu mythos
• Clark Ashton Smith and the Lovecraftian tradition
• The swords and sorcery of Robert Howard and Fritz Leiber
• Michael Moorcock’s brooding anti-hero Elric and the acid fantasy of the 70s and 80s
• Recent fantasy writing by George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfus
• A host of other amazing work I can’t recall but will surely borrow from
• As always, the shadow of Tolkien looms!