Ezora Chronicles

In this series of articles, I will guide you through the process of designing a sandbox hexcrawl, illustrating each step with Chardauka, one of the continents of my world. Throughout these articles, I will cover both adventure content creation to populate the hexes and the worldbuilding elements that bring the setting to lif e. The other day I watched a YouTube video where its author reflected on a fairly common idea: that modern RPGs' obsession with story, with a tight plot, has displaced exploration and, in the process, has worsened the gaming experience compared to Old School approaches. The critique isn't off base. Many commercial adventures that put the story front and center end up becoming a very narrow rail from which players cannot deviate without derailing everything. Adventure paths are especially guilty: a succession of scenes meant to occur in a specific order, with very little room for the table to explore, make mistakes, or simply do unexpected things without...

This entry delves into a corner of Ezora, a fragment of my world’s lore that you can adapt to your game if you find it inspiring. Use this adaptable lore to enrich the story, characters, or themes of your own game world. Dahanya, The Flame that Renews, embodies the beauty of fire, the burning passion, the transformative purification, and the fertility that is reborn from the flames. In the Flaming Jungle, her influence manifests with special intensity during the period of activity of the pyrosequoias, when fires prepare the ground for a new life cycle. For her faithful, fire is not only destruction, but transition: that which reduces, cleanses, and allows starting over. As guardian of the rebirth cycle, Dahanya presides over the reincarnation of souls: when a body is returned to ash through ritual cremation, the soul is liberated to be reborn in a new body, purified by the flames and ready to continue its spiritual journey through multiple lives. She is the mother of Sulayra and t...

In this series of articles, I will guide you through the process of designing a sandbox hexcrawl, illustrating each step with Chardauka, one of the continents of my world. Throughout these articles, I will cover both adventure content creation to populate the hexes and the worldbuilding elements that bring the setting to lif e. Cover of The Evils of Illmire The Evils of Illmire is an adventure published by Spellsword Studios for B/X D&D, Old School Essentials, and other OSR systems. Originally conceived in 1998, it was remastered thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. It is a sandbox hexcrawl with remarkable attention to detail, set, as is customary on this blog, in a swamp (although it also includes forest and mountain biomes). I believe it is one of the best hexcrawls published in recent years and a magnificent example of applying this structure to small-scale settings .  While reading Challenge of the Frog Idol and Fever Swamp , the idea of creating a hidden cult...

This entry delves into a corner of Ezora, a fragment of my world’s lore that you can adapt to your game if you find it inspiring. Use this adaptable lore to enrich the story, characters, or themes of your own game world. Y'rinriss is the goddess of cursed fertility, mutation, and life that defies the laws of nature. Represented as a pulsating mass of flesh and coral, embedded with eyes and mouths that whisper to the desperate, Y'rinriss embodies the unrestrained, chaotic life that emerges from death and corruption. In her domain beneath the stagnant waters, where light barely reaches, she reigns as a twisted mother, nurturing her deformed children and bestowing her "blessing" upon those who seek to proliferate new forms of life, even if they are monstrous and aberrant. To the Scaled Ones, Y'rinriss is both a source of power and a reminder of the fragility of mortal form—and the potential to transcend it through mutation. It is said that the first mutated spawn...

This entry delves into a corner of Ezora, a fragment of my world’s lore that you can adapt to your game if you find it inspiring. Use this adaptable lore to enrich the story, characters, or themes of your own game world. At the heart of the Archipelago of Jade and Silk, where cherry blossoms paint the landscape and lung dragons once ruled as gods, rise the Dragon Isles. This is the home of the drache , a people whose history is woven with threads of elemental magic, political ambition, and an intimate connection with legendary creatures. Their culture, inspired by Eastern traditions, is a crucible of elegance and brutality, where honor coexists with opportunism. In this article, we will explore the drache’s background, their relationship with dragons, and the conflicts threatening to tear their society apart. A People Between Dragons and Conflicts The drache are expert navigators, formidable warriors, and shrewd merchants, but their identity goes beyond these skills. Their society has ...

Among the treasures I’ve discovered as a Dungeon Master for my campaigns, few sources have had as lasting an impact on me as NOD Magazine . Published by John Stater, this magazine not only revolutionized my approach to designing hexcrawls but also provided an overwhelming amount of material to enrich each hex. In my opinion, Stater is one of the finest creators of hexcrawl content. His ability to condense fascinating ideas into brief descriptions, while leaving space for the DM's imagination, is truly a work of art. While his contributions to the Hexcrawl Chronicles series for Frog God Games are commendable, they feel much more "vanilla" compared to the bold creativity found in NOD. For those interested in exploring his work, I highly recommend visiting his page, Land of Nod , where a couple of issues of the magazine can be downloaded for free. . Module Cover In NOD Magazine #16 , Stater presents a hexcrawl set in Kush, inspired by African myths and folklore. This main f...

Worldbuilding, the act of crafting a universe with its own rules, cultures, and mythologies, appeals for various reasons. For some, it is a pastime, an end in itself, while others use it to prepare a novel or design their own role-playing campaigns. Regardless of its purpose, what makes a setting special, what truly sets it apart, is that personal pursuit, that unique reason driving us to create it. It’s the heart of our creation, the foundation that gives it identity. In my case, I have always been fascinated by settings where gods play an active role in the world. Ezora, my own fantasy world, was born as an opportunity to reflect on the human and the divine, the relationship between mortals and deities, and how faith shapes reality. Faith as a Creative Force One of the central concepts in Ezora is that faith is not merely a matter of abstract beliefs but a tangible power that shapes reality itself. When enough mortals believe in something with true fervor, that belief can shape the v...

One of the best pieces of advice I can offer any Dungeon Master, especially those running a long-term campaign, is to create and maintain a well-organized and generic stat block bank. If you primarily play a system like OSR or a D&D derivative, this will be particularly useful. Having a stat block bank means you’ll always have NPCs, monsters, and other creatures at your fingertips, ready to recycle and reuse easily, saving time and enhancing your ability to improvise. The Advantage of Reusing Stat Blocks During the years I ran D&D 3.5, I collected generic NPC stat blocks from the modules I read. Thieves, cultists, bandits—these kinds of NPCs all found a place in my archive. I reused them repeatedly, tweaking minor details when necessary. For example, I’d sometimes change the weapon they used to suit the scene or simply alter cosmetic descriptions: a bandit could go from a menacing thug to a desperate young man trying to save his family. These quick adjustments make stat blocks ...

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the overall structure of the Red Hand of Doom module. If you prefer to discover its details on your own, I recommend reading with caution! Adapting Adventures: Flexibility as a Narrative Key When adapting an adventure, I usually break it down into its constituent parts: locations, monsters, and NPCs. This approach is particularly useful in adventures like Red Hand of Doom (RHoD), which follow a linear structure. One question I always ask myself is: Is it possible or desirable to visit these locations (or nodes , as Justin Alexander calls them—in an order different from the one proposed in the adventure? In most cases, the answer is yes. The structure of RHoD is brilliantly summarized in a flowchart presented by ksbsnowowl in The (New) 3.5 Red Hand of Doom Handbook for DMs : Ambush on the road —> semi-remote town —> wilderness —> Army’s forward scouting base (Vraath Keep) —> secondary forward base/choke point (bridge) —> atta...