Background: Prismanon

Prismanon, World of Many Colors, is the evolved and refined recreation of an epic fantasy setting I built for a homebrew RPG system, back around 2001 or 2002, when I decided D&D 3rd edition was too frustrating. The original version of this world, which went unnamed until this TD&D thing started a couple months ago, was extremely silly. It was the first time I had run a game where I felt like I had full control. I could write my own monster statistics and make up any old thing I wanted. Which meant I came up with some of the weirdest things. It was a world where all shops were run by the same guy, named Henry. It was a world where one of the major languages was Hoo-Hah, the tongue of the ninja. The heck was I even doing?

When I started to design a new setting for D&D 5th edition, I realized I needed a name for the first city. "Why not Oakwater?" I thought. "It's a good name, simple and easy to remember, and I can take inspiration from the old setting whenever I need ideas." As the background of this new world came together in my head, I realized its greater cosmology (which will not be spoiled here) is not incompatible with the backstory of the old Prismanon. At this point, it was inevitable that they'd become one.

The world so far.

Prismanon is divided into 5 major continents: Ysteran, Cenaldea, Abaranda, Hanteron, and Molacquin. I'll detail those eventually. The city locations on this map are not entirely set in stone. As it stands, this makes the world kind of small, if taken to scale, but I might be okay with that. The original version of this world was even smaller. I designed the old world in the style of Final Fantasy (generally, but also specifically VII), where an entire continent could have only a handful of towns, which you visit in sequence to continue the story. It was a bad idea. It took ages just to get the heroes to leave Oakwater.

In the next post, I'll talk about the Oakwater Heroes and their humble beginnings.