Well, trav­eler, you have stum­bled from the wilds of the Inter­net into a medieval fan­tasy world I am build­ing for some future novel and d20 v3.5  game mod­ule (under the terms of the Open Gam­ing License) that may or may not come into exis­tence. Open game con­tent appears in ital­ics; I reserve copy­right pro­tec­tions for every­thing else here.

The world and its won­ders are still devel­op­ing in my imag­i­na­tion, and but I don’t want to wait until I think I’m fin­ished before I start writ­ing it down. This is very much a work in progress, but here is what I have so far:

Nume­naria is an Earth-like world criss-crossed by mag­i­cal ley lines, the inter­sec­tions of which form dev­ils’ tri­an­gles, fairy rings, “high places” and dimen­sional gates to other planes of exis­tence. Humans occupy only the small cor­ner of the world that they have man­aged to clear of mon­sters and magic. They plant, har­vest, build cathe­drals and repair their water mills rel­a­tively unmo­lested by the super­nat­ural hor­rors that they (often rightly) believe lurk in the wilder­ness. A monothe­is­tic reli­gion that wor­ships Gob the Almighty fills the spir­i­tual void left when the ancient heroes (and vil­lains) ban­ished the evil witches, sor­cer­ers and demons from the north­ern realms of Dar­ril­hin, Thoest­strand, Lumar­tia, Ryeld­den, Lour­dril and the Drea­gar Confederacy.

East of these king­doms lies ruins and wilder­ness occu­pied by nomadic horse­men; the lands beyond the horse­men are unex­plored and wild. Ruined cities, haunted cas­tles and demon gates pop­u­late a dan­ger­ous wilder­ness that pre­vents the denizens of scat­tered Free Cities and king­doms from spread­ing across the world.

The ley lines and por­tals are both a bless­ing and a curse for Nume­naria. The sen­tient inhab­i­tants who are able to risk the unpre­dictable back­lash can har­ness magic and use it as they will, but they risk falling prey to invaders from other dimen­sions who want to hold this sin­gu­lar world and its nexus of portals.

Most peo­ple in the North­ern King­doms never leave the area pro­tected by the near­est cas­tle or strong­hold; many die before their sec­ond birth­day of dis­eases that are pre­ventable in the pagan empire of Kyr­ishia to the south. Those who sur­vive their first harsh win­ter or lean har­vest could very well die in their first mil­i­tary engage­ment. Because of the enor­mous amount of effort and orga­ni­za­tion required to actu­ally break open a cas­tle, rival nobles usu­ally sim­ply destroy each other’s means of pro­duc­tion – the land, peas­ants, live­stock and build­ings – and then offer terms of peace. Chivalry is only for the nobil­ity, and peas­ants are per­fectly legit­i­mate mil­i­tary tar­gets. In fact, they are the pre­ferred tar­gets in a mil­i­tary cam­paign. Killing peas­ants is safer for the rel­a­tively small feu­dal armies than engag­ing in pitched bat­tle; it also achieves the mil­i­tary objec­tive of forc­ing an oppos­ing noble to the bar­gain­ing table by dis­rupt­ing his source of income.

Nume­naria is a world of dan­ger­ous magic and high adven­ture. The luck­i­est and bravest can strike out for the wilder­ness and carve out a king­dom for themselves–or die in the process.