It is 476 AH, and the Continent is an ungoverned wilderness.
After centuries of rule and slow decline, the Ardic Republic has fallen to costly wars, internal rivalries, and wildermen migrations. As the elves relinquished their borders, man rose to dominate a Continent in turmoil.
Amid the chaos, power brokers carve out dominions from the wilderness, some to establish order and others to wield power. Humanoids threaten the North, the Southern dynasties have withered, and the city states of the Serpent Sea are in constant conflict. The Age of History is now, and the Continent is poised to fall into disorder or grow into a new peace.
The World of Trid is a global sandbox supporting a mix of cultures and technology thematically consistent with Earth’s early Middle Ages, but distinctly different through the infusion of magic, real gods, and massive caches of ancient treasure hidden in dungeons and guarded by monsters.
This Gazetteer has been compiled by the Scriveners’ Guild and drawn from sources across the Continent, from Ophidian hieroglyphs to recovered Ardic manuscripts to monastic texts, from unverifiable folklore, and from the generational histories of the Trader peoples, who cannot speak false.
While Trid is vast, it is not unnavigable, and copies of the Gazetteer (with minor and predictable regional variations) have spread via the Continent’s land and seaways. As a result, everything herein is considered common knowledge, or more accurately, common assumptions. Either way, readers are reminded that shared knowledge isn’t necessarily truth—but it is what people believe to be true.
The World of Trid is organised and presented in a modular format, allowing you to either add the interesting bits to your own setting or use everything as-is for your own campaigns in Trid. There’s also a middle path, which is to develop new adventuring locales of your own—Trid is an unnecessarily large place, and there’s plenty of room for new development. To make that easier for Referees, we’ve followed two conventions:
Timeline: Trid’s timeline is “frozen,” and we will not publish any material that goes beyond the current year 476 AH. The pieces are on the board and ready for you to move, remove, replenish and replace, as you see fit.
Scant Detail: Trid is written sparsely to encourage Referees to add details relevant to their own table’s creative vision and style of play. Our approach has been to provide enough information to use on-the-fly at the table, allowing the group to apply detail through successive sessions, to the extent their interest demands.
Humans dominate Trid, but have yet to assert full control of the Continent. The fall of the Ardic Republic created huge swaths of wilderness, which man now struggles to reclaim from monsters, humanoids, and each other. There’s plenty of work for adventurers:
- Expand settled borders and help establish order within them
- Neutralise humanoid threats by plundering their lairs, deposing their leaders, and strengthening settled borders
- Explore dwarf ruins for technology, elven ruins for magic, and ophidian ruins for secrets
- Protect trade routes and forge new ones
- Repair inoperative Far Path portals
- Overcome the Ardic Curse