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Solasta: Worldbuilding an Award-Winning D&D 5e Setting
It all started in 2018, when I was contacted by Mathieu Girard, a game developer based in Paris. I had worked with him briefly some years before, when he was a producer at Ubisoft and he recruited me as a contractor for a third-party game. Since then, he had left Ubisoft, founded Amplitude Studios and sold it to SEGA, and now he was preparing to realize a long-held dream: to create a Dungeons & Dragons video game that would be completely faithful to the game rules and would bring the tabletop experience to the screen without compromises. And he was going to do it using the 5e OGL.
Over the course of a rainy week in December of that year, I met with creative lead Antoine Guillaud and lead game designer Xavier Penin at the offices of the newly-founded Tactical Adventures and we hammered out the basics of the world of Solasta. It was to be a high fantasy world with comparatively low magic, which was slowly returning after a great cataclysm.
Solasta had been a very magical world, dominated by a tyrannical elven empire but populated by many other peoples. It had no humans, no gods, and no clerics – until it collided with Tirmar. That world was Solasta’s opposite in many ways: humans were the only sentient species, and there was no magic except for that provided by gods and their clerics. A rebel god had opened a rift between dimensions, causing the two worlds to smash together; by the time Solasta’s greatest magicians had managed to close the rift, Solasta was studded with parts of Tirmar that had been pressed into it like two colors of clay kneaded together. There were humans, there were gods, and there was divine magic.
The elven empire fell. Whole lands and peoples were re-arranged, and after a century of chaos, a kind of stability was achieved. The area around the rift is still a monster-haunted wasteland, where adventurers search for lost magical treasures among the ruins of the fallen empire. As the new nations jockey for power, such relics are vital. Even as the nations plot against one another, they must face an external threat: the Sorr-Akkath, reptilian shapeshifters dedicated to serving the rebel god, who is trapped on this plane as a result of the cataclysm and plots to return to Tirmar – or whatever is left of it. Widely believed to have been wiped out during the cataclysm, they are becoming active once more, though few people believe they are anything more than a legend.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister was released for PC on Steam in 2021, and as part of the build-up to the game’s launch, a Kickstarter campaign offered a 5e tabletop sourcebook as one of the rewards. It made sense: we had designed everything using that ruleset, so the information was there; the world had been designed in enough detail that the book’s text was 90% ready; and there was a plentiful archive of concept art that we could use as illustration. The only thing TA didn’t have was expertise in laying out and producing a tabletop rpg sourcebook, but I knew someone who did.
At the same time as working on Solasta, I was working with Rookery Publications, an indie tabletop rpg publisher founded by Andy Law, who had been running the WFRP 4th edition line for Cubicle 7, former Games Workshop and Blizzard artist Mark Gibbons, and writers Lindsay Law and Andy Leask. With the Rookery’s help the sourcebook was released, looking every inch a “proper” 5e supplement.
The project had already caught the eye of Wizards of the Coast, who were not expecting anyone to produce a video game using the OGL, let alone a whole setting that straddled electronic and tabletop games. After a brief correspondence through lawyers, it was agreed that the sourcebook could go ahead, so long as it was only distributed to Kickstarter backers.
Crown of the Magister carried on, winning a Pegasus award from the French Academy of Video Game Arts and Technologies in 2022 alongside rave reviews across the board. An XBox version was released, and regular downloadable updates expanded the game and the story.
Relations with Wizards improved, and it was agreed that the sourcebook could be re-issued for public sale. Again thanks to the Rookery, it was revised and updated with new classes, creatures, and other information from the downloadable expansions, and it is now available to all from Modiphius Entertainment. And I couldn’t be happier.
I don’t know whether I’ll ever have the opportunity to return to Solasta, but I’m incredibly proud of what it’s become. Building fantasy worlds is one of my favorite things to do, especially with a great team like the ones at Tactical Adventures and the Rookery.
Links
The Solasta 5e sourcebook PDF on DriveThru (affiliate link)
The Solasta 5e hardback from Modiphius: US | UK
Crown of the Magister on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096530/Solasta_Crown_of_the_Magister/
So there you have it. On Saturday, I’ll return to Advanced Heroquest with the monsters from my 1991 “Advanced Heroquest Undead Supplement” manuscript that didn’t make it into “Terror in the Dark.”
The Moons of Arksyra: The d20/3.5 Setting You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of
In 2004, I was working in Boulder, Colorado for a pair of startup game developers. They shared the same ownership, management, and staff, but Hypernova Games focused on tabletop products and Evil Genius Games* developed video games. The Moons of Arksyra was the product of both.
When I arrived, the Arksyra IP was in the early stages of development. The lead writer had created the bones of a very interesting fantasy setting, in which several moons of a gas giant were linked by an ancient system of teleporters called the Giharan Towers. There were playable species, some familiar (like the elflike N’Miri) and some more novel (like the catlike Ky-Bril). My job was to help organize and strengthen the work already done, in preparation for pitching an adventure game to Sony for the soon-to-be released PS2. Then I had an idea.
The proposed video game would take several years and a lot of money to develop, even with backing from Sony – supposing we got it. Within six months, I estimated, we could put together a d20 System sourcebook which could bring in a little cash, establish the IP and the company in the minds of gamers, and if all went well, anchor a line of tabletop game products for Hypernova.
The book came out, and was uploaded in PDF form to DriveThruRPG, which was new then. The Playstation game was never finished, but Hypernova and Evil Genius did complete a couple of downloadable games before relations between the two principals – one creative, the other financial – deteriorated to the point where all communication was conducted through their lawyers. The twin companies lasted just about a year, although I have just discovered that the Hypernova Games brand has carried on under one of the original owners, and has achieved some success in developing casual games. Their website is at https://www.hypernovateam.com/.
The Moons of Arksyra setting went no further, but the PDF can still be downloaded from DriveThru. If you’re interested in my second major world-building project after Warhammer’s Old World for WFRP, check it out (affiliate link). It’s a fairly modest thing, which I had hoped would have the chance to develop further, but though it’s far from perfect, I still look back on it with some fondness.
That’s all I have for now, but I hope you found it interesting. For more on my work for d20 System, D&D, and associated games, see My Complete and Utter D&D/AD&D/d20 Bibliography.
*Not the same Evil Genius Games as the company that was in the news earlier this year.
Graeme Davis 