Grayshore is an old-school fantasy setting for roleplaying games (like Dungeons & Dragons), computer games and whatever else that needs a consistent world.
The setting is licensed under CC0, which means you can freely use it, even in commercial works, with no strings attached. It is also open source (meaning that all assets, code, maps, and text are publicly available) and accepting pull requests.
The setting itself has these guiding principles:
- High adventure
- Diversity
- Systems
Provide opportunities for escapist power fantasies. We humans love feeling smart, strong, adept, and important, and — by extension — enjoy empathizing with others in such positions.
The concepts of "escapism" and "power fantasy" have bad connotations but here they are used neutrally. The stories of Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Wonder Woman, Black Panther or Indiana Jones are all escapist power fantasies. They follow people who are unnaturally smart, strong, adept, and important. That doesn't mean the works cannot have a message. It just makes their initial premise more attractive and enjoyable.
In concrete terms, Grayshore is all about high-stakes conflict, freedom, heroism, leadership opportunities, challenging trials, exotic places, powerful entities, and combat.
Grayshore is home to some creatures who are undeniably evil. For example, kobolds and orcs in this setting are vicious, cruel, bloodthirsty killers. They are here to provide conflict without the need of much setup and with minimal moral dilemma for the players. They are the Grayshore equivalents of Storm Troopers, Nazis and Dementors.
That does not mean all conflict in this setting is like that. Most adversaries are examples of Grey and Gray Morality. But there are some simple conflicts in Grayshore, and those are the ones people have come to expect from fantasy fiction (orcs versus humans, dwarves versus elves, and so on).
The setting and its inhabitants are diverse.
One aspect of this principle is the variety of possible places to visit. To use the aforementioned stories as examples again, think of all the exotic places shown in a typical Star Wars, Indiana Jones or Harry Potter movie. Think of the sheer diversity of the characters.
The other aspect of this is a little less obvious but at least as important as the first one. Old school, medieval fantasy settings sometimes tend to reflect old school, medieval world views. This leads to fantasy settings with diminished value of women, absence of persons of color, religious supremacy, etc. None of this is beneficial for the Grayshore campaign setting — it is preferable to project today's values to the imagined medieval-like world.
Heroic stories are, by definition, about an individual's power to change the world. We like tales where a single person stands up to something and wins. The solution to a problem is often a single, tangible act, such as cutting a knot, killing an evil wizard, or throwing a ring into lava.
This is the core of Hero's Journey, an archetype shared between various cultures of Earth. It's not just some recent fad. It's a deep human preference. And it's possibly also a very useful belief.
Yet, we all know that the world doesn't work like that. The world is a massive, counter-intuitive system full of weird ripple effects, feedback loops, and emergent phenomena. Here in reality, one-off deeds by single individuals seldom solve anything. There is no magic ring the destruction of which will make evil go away. Killing a single leader is as likely to make things worse as it is to make things better. And cutting a knot when everyone is trying to untie it ... that's just a dick move.
This setting is about high adventure. Problems that the players will be facing should conform with the Hero's Journey. They should be solvable by easy-to-understand (though not easy to execute!) acts. When there's a dragon on the loose, we don't expect the players to ponder the implications of dragon slaying on the local ecology.
But that shouldn't be an excuse to make the whole setting simplistic. Heroics is the lens we're looking through, but the subject we're looking at can be a complex system.
The dragon from the example above will be a simple external threat but its presence can have complex effects on geopolitics, trade, religion, migration, or whatever else you think of.
If you're not familiar with the concept of systems dynamics, I can recommend reading Thinking in Systems (or at least watching the 15 minute MIT course introduction).