I’ve put a lot of work into this campaign (and campaign world), and I plan to continue refining it as we go along. My main goals as GM are to:

• Make sure that everyone, myself included, is having fun
• Craft an engaging world and story that keeps interest and has room for growth and exploration
• Keep the players absolutely terrified all of the time, whether of death or even worse consequences
• Create combat scenes that are outrageously violent

In creating my own campaign world, I have obviously thrown out much of the tone and world information contained within 4ed’s core rulebooks. This is a world entirely of my own invention, albeit inspired (as is everything created, naturally) by many other worlds, games and works of fiction.

It is my intention to run a world that is relatively unique and also as believable as possible within the general expectations of fantasy, particularly in character motivations, the brutal nature of combat, the harshness of reality and the ambiguity of characters’ morals and actions. This is a morally gray world spiraling deeper and deeper into darkness. Little is as it seems, and even the worst villain has some humanity and motivations that at the very least make sense in context.

I have attempted to craft my own hybrid mythology from bits and pieces of Norse Paganism and related mythologies, Kabbalistic traditions, beliefs and concepts (these much more subtly), and 4ed and prior D&D editions’ generic pantheons. In the interest of ease of play and (I admit) simply to ease what is already a massive workload, the ‘relevant’ gods will consist primarily of those listed in 4ed’s Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. However, these gods, their personalities, appearances, domains, and true natures have been modified (sometimes extensively) to fit Midgard’s background and tone and also my own ideas of what gods in a fictional universe should be like. Thus while the core rulebooks’ information on these deities can be skimmed for a general idea of what to expect, more accurate information can only be found on this wiki’s various pages (Pantheon in particular). Even then, common sense and skepticism should be applied; it is naive to assume that popular knowledge and lore are all there is to know, or are even necessarily genuine.

I have spent some time already using public domain images and GIMP 2 (sometimes in tandem) to produce images (such as the Midgard banner, and the image of the six planes superimposed over the fallen World Tree on the World page) to serve both to improve the image and feeling of professionalism (or at least feeling of work effort and dedication) of the wiki. However, I would like to note that at time of this writing, the rough map of Midgard I have up is completely terrible, and at some point I will try to produce a replacement that is less cringe-worthy, whether through extensive personal effort and suffering or through the enlistment (if possible) of friends with artistic ability superior to my own. Maybe at some point I’ll redraw a map on paper (the original was lost during an extensive attempt at transforming my room from the ninth circle of hell into a semi-respectable dwelling place) and scan it in, then work it over in GIMP. At the very least, my cartography skills with a pencil are less thoroughly reprehensible and embarrassing than the results of ten minutes’ apathetic experimentation with GIMP’s brush and fill tools.

I would also like to state that at present I am not particularly interested in finding new players through the internet, but if you really, really want to play for some reason, hit me up at malkuthsephira@gmail.com and I may consider your inclusion.

— the dungeon master