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Terra Virvacus is my D20 fantasy setting for use with D&D.  It is a work in progress, with some history, setting notes, and many house rules and D20 content I’ve developed included.  It’s got a bit of a twist, as humans are not normally a playable race. 

It started as a campaign idea for a game I ran many years ago.  Recently, I got the writing bug, and started putting things together, recalling what I had worked on from memory, and adapting it to work with D20.  It’s far from finished, and far from perfect, but as constructed now, it’s got enough written that anyone can pick it up and run a game in the setting.  Read further for the introduction to get a true feel of the history and twist of Terra Virvacus.

However, many of the children of the racial royalty, including the human King’s daughter, vanished and all indications were that they died.  The human King blamed the elves and began to wage war against the Elves.  The elves then turned up through investigation the plot of the human King to have his daughter assassinate her soon to be husband once the current Elven king abdicated, and seize power among the races.  Further more, the elves found evidence of human research into magics designed to slaughter the other races, the elves united the other known races against the Humans.

The Human king was not without his resources and he denounced all other races as inferior, and vowed to kill them all.  The war took its toll on every race, but the non-humans, lead by the Elves, were resilient.  The Elves convinced the Gnomes, Dwarves, Halflings, and Orcs that humans had to go, with only some arguments from the Gnomes, who were reluctant to enter the fray in the first place.  It was only in discovering the slave Katarans that the Gnomes joined in force, though reluctantly.

With Genocide being a distasteful, if necessary evil, many humans were disguised themselves and live as half-elves, with sympathetic onlookers turning a blind eye to their presence.  The combined might of the Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Halflings, and Gnomes were too much for the humans, and within 2 generations, humans were no more, and the half-elf population had grown mightily.

Almost five hundred years have passed since this great Racial War (Also referred to as the Great War).  Racial nations slowly became more integrated, and many splintered off into kingdoms.  There have been many minor wars, but only involving small nations, and none with the racial overtones of the Great War.  Now, while there are many kingdoms where one race is dominant, the only true racial kingdom remaining is the Orc Nation, which has kept to the seas, and to itself.  The Katarans search for a racial identity by borrowing from other races.  Elven leaders from all nations maintain vigilant watch for the next potential ‘humans’.  Dwarves simply focus on the immediate future, and have tried to leave the past behind.  Gnomes have embraced the Katarans and sought to heal the lands and the people from such an ordeal that has ripples of effects even so many years afterwards.  Halflings have returned to their families and are perhaps the least effected today by the events of the past.  Half-Elves are still caught in the middle of a war that ended ages ago, a constant reminder of what was and what some fear could be again.

Welcome to Terra Virvacus…

You can read and discuss it in this thread in the forums.  To download a copy of the work in progress, you need to be logged in as a bront.org member.

The map can be viewed here.