About this book
Book I laid out the rules. This book is where the world lives.
The Known World — the explored and mapped portion of the physical plane — is not the whole of what exists. The Val'arian homeland lies somewhere across the eastern seas, beyond any expedition that has returned. Other lands exist in rumor, in old memory, in things people refuse to discuss in public. This book covers what has been documented. The rest belongs to whoever is brave or reckless enough to go looking.
You will notice blank spaces throughout. They are there by design. Why did the Val’arians cross the eastern seas and settle north of Endoras? What does the Ordo Draconis actually believe it is accomplishing? What happened to the Vysandri — and does anything of them remain? Are there Ilyans still active somewhere, and what would they want after all this time?
This book does not answer those questions. Your table does.
That is by design. A setting that explains everything becomes its own constraint. The Known World was built with room in it — room for what the GM needs the history to have been, room for what the players discover is actually true, room for a campaign that runs for years and leaves its own mark on the fiction. What happened to the Vysandri could be the spine of something that outlasts every other story your group has told together.
I built the scaffolding. I have my own answers — more than fit in this book —, and I left them out deliberately, because the moment this arrived in your hands, it became your world.
I hope it serves you well.
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Felipe Escosteguy, 2026, São Paulo, Brazil
A Note on Tone
The Known World does not promise glory. It makes glory possible — at cost, with risk, without guarantees. That distinction is worth understanding before you open the rest of this book.
The characters in this game are mercenaries: people who chose a dangerous profession because the alternatives were worse. They have debts, dead friends, and reasons. They may die for something that matters, or for nothing, and the world will keep moving either way — unless they make it stop and notice them. That possibility is real. So is the other one.
This is not a grimdark setting
Grimdark argues that heroism is an illusion, that good intentions collapse into bad outcomes, and that survival is the only honest ambition. The Known World does not argue this. Heroism exists here, but it costs something real — and that cost is what makes the Vithurian Orchestra mean anything at all. A song is not a reward, but proof.
This is not comfort fantasy either
The Church of Tar'amaan is a recognizable institution: sincere in its beliefs, coherent in its theology, and willing to burn people for both. The Cadman occupation of Norderenn looks like what an occupation looks like — fifteen years in, long enough that some people have made their peace with it, some have built lives under it, and some have been destroyed by it. The scramble for obsidian looks like what resource conflicts look like: principled arguments serving naked power interests, with real people caught in between. The setting does not flinch from what power does to people.
Evil here is not always the warlord with a body count. A merchant lord who watches a quarter of the city starve rather than lower his margins is as much a villain as anything that crawls out of the Dead Lands. The setting has both. It takes both seriously.
What the setting does not do is wallow. Darkness in the Known World serves the themes, or it gets cut. The question before any dark scene is always: does this make the world feel more true, or does it just make it feel worse? Those are different things, and the line between them is the line between honest writing and cruelty for its own sake.
The reference points — Dragon Age: Origins, the first two Black Company novels, Abercrombie's Shattered Sea trilogy, Sixmorevodka’s Degenesis — share a quality worth naming. Decent people operating in indecent conditions, occasionally, at real cost, managing to change something. Not saving the world. Changing something.
The scale stays human even when the stakes are cosmic.
That is the kind of story this world is built for.