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Overview

Warning

If you are a player, go no further. This is the realm of game masters and dungeon masters.

Danger

Perhaps you didn't hear me the first time. If you are a player, go no further. This is the realm of game masters and dungeon masters. Dragons - plural - lurk here.

First Principles

Remember some basic tenets from the overview Antire:

  1. General notes on setting:
    1. The current era is roughly equivalent to late 17th and early 18th century. That matters more for technology and trade. Firearms, cannon, eyeglasses, and pocket watches are common.
    2. There are exceptions thanks to both magic and just plain making exceptions. Plate armor is still common on the battlefield given the frequency of big monsters. Toilet paper is a thing. With magic, so are flush toilets.
    3. The Pestilence period corresponds to the high middle ages/early renaissance for Oenklay and much of western Larleoge.
  2. It's left to the people of Antire to figure out metaphysics, religion, and etc. If there's actual deities anywhere, they're not making it obvious. The only consistent thread in belief is the notion of Elders, but what that means varies.
    1. Religions do exist. The total surface area
    2. Dragon worship is very common. It's hard not to when seeing a dragon flying high in the sky is not a rare event.
    3. There are more than a few ultra powerful beings willing to be patrons to lesser beings who further their ends. While immensely powerful, their supernatural powers are in line with spell casters, not divine beings. That doesn't stop some from acting like it though.
    4. Reverence for ancestors all the way up to outright worship is common in some cultures and some of those ancestors (or someone else...) answer requests.
  3. Racism and any other form of otherism is not built into the game rules. To that end:
    1. Race, species, etc do not dictate good, evil, whatever. Goblins can be great heroes of good.
    2. Avoid tired old tropes such as noble savages or demonic witch doctors - at least unless you balance them out.
    3. While otherism is not built into the rules, that does not mean it doesn't exist in universe. Examples:
      1. Kobolds are villified in Oenklay thanks to their role in the Pestilence. Even before the Pestilence, they were treated like dirt.
      2. "Unciv" is a derogatory term for any group living outside of more structured societies.
      3. Among the gnomic peoples of Oenklay, the sub groups of goblins and bugbears are looked down on by most other gnomic peoples. Bugbears still manage to control many unciv groups by right of might.
  4. Alignment - Ditch it as a mechanic. Pathfinder dropped it altogether and various mechanics in D&D have really deemphasized it (e.g., Protection from Good and Evil does not have anything to do with alignment - it works based on creature type) For any class, magic item, or ability that focuses on it, focus on the game play of the PC in question. Use it as shorthand for NPC behavior.
    1. Even for fiends and celestials, think of it as they got into that category because they earned it or were created for it by a master.

Cosmology

To be really simple: cosmology is left up to you. The idea of Antire sitting in a material island of the Far Realm has occurred to me.

In the original Oenklay campaign (it used fourth edition D&D), Antire was a disk world with an underside and it flipped like a coin between chaos and order. It also connected via Astral Plane (with substantial travel differences. It looked more like spell jammer than anything else) to the outer planes. That's not canon anymore... maybe. We'll see.

If you want Antire to be a MASSIVE Ravenloft Dark Realm with the mists at the rim being Ravenloft's mists, go for it.

If you want Antire to just be a flat world in normal D&D space with the borders either non-existent or something else, go for it.

Antire has a LOT of land compared to earth. There's no need to ever deal with the borders if you don't want to do so.

Geology, Climate, etc.

Antire is not set in our universe and its use of the laws of physics does not extend to gravity forming planets out of dust. Whether Antire is a floating rock in outer space, an island in the Far Realm, or whatever else, the domed-disc shape is its reality. That's not just the view of confused in-universe scholars.

To picture Antire, imagine it as a patch cut out of a Rugby ball or a gridiron football. The curvature running north-south is more extreme than the curvature running east-west. The sun passes directly over the easternmost and westernmost points on the edge, although it is at "higher" altitude when it does so versus when it passes over the center point of Antire. The sun's travel through the haze of the border mists means western Oenklay's afternoons tend to be gloomy and makes for temperate climate despite the closeness to the sun's track.

The low angle of the sun in the far north and far south means these lands are forever cold. North facing slopes of the notherly Platergs never lose their snow and ice cover. Even as far south as Hishadyn, snow lingers almost until midsummer on the northern slopes.

Conversely, the center of Antire all hot tropics with blazing hot deserts and suffocating rain forests. The sun "pulls" the winds along its path, creating strong winds out of the east. At mid-latitudes1, the winds rebound and blow from the west. Where the circulation turns north or south is as much a function of geography - mostly elevation - as any other dynamic. Thus, the mountains flanking Alramun Desert to the east and west keep it bone dry even though it borders the ocean.

My best advice is don't worry too much about it! The intent is to add some weirdness to the game, not add headaches. If it's too much to think about, remember the center of the disc = hot, the north and south = cold.

Antire has all the underworld you need for your adventures. If you don't need it, ignore it. If you need a full underdark - sure. Canonically, kobolds made extensive use of a subterranean travel network that links major kobold cities (I mean, major for Oenklay's kobolds) during the Pestilence.

Enough boring. What about adventures?

Antire can support dungeon crawls, role playing heavy adventures, and anything in between. Dragons, as mentioned, have many cults and supernatural beings like fiends and celestials are always cooking up their own plots.

Antire is positively loaded with liches and other big-bad level undead. Many are far older than the maximum of ~4500 years of history any society on Antire records. Aberrations ranging from mindess to mind flayers

Adapting adventures

Despite it's novelties, many existing adventures readily adapt to Antire. It is still a standard fantasy setting in most respects. Where you may want to make changes are to "re-skin" some adventures that just make that tired old assumption that goblin = bad, elf = good. Adding some background that explains that this particular group of gobilins is evil is ok. If the person asking for help is a goblin or goblins are part of the village that needs help, it goes a long way towards balancing the evil gang in the dungeon.

If you figure out how to place Curse of Strahd in Antire, let me know!

  1. Despite Antire emphatically not being a sphere, it's still handy to use the terms of latitude and longitude in an informal sense. I don't want to hurt people's brains trying to invent new terminology when existing terminology will do just fine. Low latidue = sun's path. High latitude = "poles". ↩