This is an interactive map-guidebook to Dornn, the setting associated with Down the Worldwell's rules and system. It is an abridgement of the full Dornn setting guide, which you can acquire -here-.

You can click on any region to get an overview of the population, culture, geography and history of the local area. The pinned buildings represent political powers that control that area--click on them to learn specifics about their capital holdings, relationships and general presence in the modern age. Each of this panel's subpages elaborate on the broader aspects of the Dornnian Midlands--places, people, history and memory.

All of the content on this page could be described in-world as "common knowledge" -- the stuff you'd hear back if you ask a stranger about a place, time, or group of people. Despite this, there is a lot of information in here that may be better experienced in game. Read at your own risk!

  Dornn is a large, convoluted and unnatural place. It's built on the bones of classic high fantasy and RPG cliche, just without any editorial oversight (nobody is allowed to say no to me!) It's centered on the Midlands, three re-re-shattered continent-archipelago-amalgams that play host to a mess of magically-paralyzed politicking. A long history of divine convolution, depths-secreting, meddlesome intrusion and unexpected immortalesque manifest destiny has crushed and rewritten the realm into something that only scantly resembles the high-Modern familiars it pulls from. Dornn is overfull with confusing interests and predicated on a lot of repeatedly-recalibrated world-law.

  As an adventuring setting, Dornn is thematically between the extremes of "miserycrawl" high-consequence low-heroics adventures and "mad-magical superscience" romps in a world where you're always too close to the naked Truth. It is an old place, lousy with history-rewriting disasters and incomprehensible meddlesome outsiders. Despite being a high-magic setting, the Strain system from Down the Worldwell is built to demonstrate why magic isn't very widespread or trusted in Dornn--being almost completely unpredictable and very prone to lethal failure. This puts adventurers in a unique position--they can get a lot stronger, but their odds of doing so aren't as skewed as they may expect. It's a bumpy road to the summit.

  While the setting has many different time periods to work with, most everything is written for the Seasons of Stagnation, so named for the faltering pace of Human invasion in the face of simmering tensions, constant rebellion and unexpected failures in their once-thought-perfect immortality. The Seasons follow a long series of societal collapses and planar catastrophes, a time without well-maintained roadways or usable long-distance communication. The empires of this age are weak and dependent on old-world tech that no longer functions how it used to (the Gods have changed their minds concerning some things), and the Human Empires did not do a good job at rebuilding global communications or transport. In the wake of their gradual disappearance, everything has backslid into a bit of a frontier mindset--outside of the more established city-states and towns, borders are ill-controlled and governments struggle to maintain a grasp on their citizenry. The majority of the plane is a ruin-washed wilderness, populated only by strange beasts and opportunistic sellswords.




  This page is not intended to fully describe Dornn, just to aid in creating characters that make sense and planning broader objectives as a party. As I publish more modules and content, the shape of Dornn will become clearer, and I may periodically update this page to reflect changes and other useful information. If I do, this content will be delineated as "[X]-SPOILER", where [X] represents a particular piece of content you can filter for. Some questions will never be answered, though--if I did that, there'd be no point in using the setting at all.

  Dornn is far too big to map comprehensively. There is always room to add your own stuff! Nestle towns in new areas, write new histories, change the fates of entire species if you want. The point of a fictional setting is in providing inspiration--this is about helping your mental garden flourish. Steal what works and bin the rest.