Back in 2014, when I mentioned that I would occasionally buy and read ttrpg books even though I hadn’t played or run a game in over a decade (the most recent books I’d read was the Cubicle 7’s The Laundry ttrpg and some Atlas Games’ Ars Magic 4e supplements), a friend told me I should check out the forthcoming D&D 5e books as an example of ttrpgs as technical writing.
That did it, and I used Meetup to find a local D&D game to join while I indulged in my long-unpracticed love of world building, the result of which is Malbeth (the continent) and the Mickel Kingdoms (the western region).
The last serious world building I’d done was in the early 1990s. The map here was drawn over 12 sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch paper, and I wanted it to include a bit of everything. (The thumbnail image here is hard to see — the lines and names in the digital file are light as I was intending to use the to create a digital hex map. Clicking on that ghostly image (or this link) will take you to a larger version — still not a great image, but better.)
Not only did I give every region its own Köppen climate classification, I wanted every player character species to be represented by multiple cultures of varying stages of technological development from nomadic hunter-gatherers to high medieval city-states. You want to play a barbarian halfling, elf, or dwarf (or gnome, human, or dragonborn)? There was a tribe for that, wether it was nomadic halflings shifting from hunter-gatherers to an agrarian culture, cloud forest wood elves, or a stone-age dwarven kingdom that rejected smiting and metal other than than to create religious symbols. (Gnomes, dragonborn, and humans had their own hunter-gatherer tribes, too.)
There was a dragonborn empire modeled on the Ottoman Empire, a millennia-old mesa-top human kingdom where high elves had found refuge, living in protected forest groves on the mesa and a roughly square mile of forest inside the walls of the capital city. Other realms included a hill dwarven kingdom with a vast network of tunnels connecting dwarven holds to the fortified villages of human subjects who had pled fealty to the dwarven monarchs. There were swamp elves who helped others transport goods through the vast swamp, and a halfling island kingdom known for its scholars and great libraries. There was even a hobgoblin-ruled kingdom open to everyone who consented to live under the hobgoblin’s firm but fair rule.
And there was an order high elf assassins and monks ever keeping watch from their mountain monastery for a return of the Valaraukar, the shadow people who occasionally made incursions into Malbeth after their civilization disappeared some 10,000 years prior, roughly 2,00 years before elves first came to Malbeth.
In 2016, I started a campaign there, but eventually abandoned it because I’d become too attached to it. Malbeth had become a place to tell my stories rather than stories collaboratively created with players. I could have fixed that, but at the time I’d come to realize that I’d discovered Kobold Press’s Midgard setting, and I when I realized Kobold Press’s founder and publisher Wolfgang Baur was one of my favorite D&D designers from the early 1990s, that was that, and I have run 4 campaigns in Midgard since.
As I’m thinking about my next D&D campaign, I’m finding I want to run in a new setting, and that’s got me thinking again about Malbeth. Not as an already made setting but as something to pillage ideas from just as I’m going to pillage ideas from Midgard as I come up with something new.
And so, I’ll revisit Malbeth and how I might use it through a series of posts using the Ruins of Malbeth category.