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. 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...