Welcome to Malune!

This includes spoilers up until the end of Episode 2 of Many Merchants of Malune.

Hi, Realmers!

We hope you're doing well! Us? We've been enjoying our adventures in Malune and we hope you've been listening along! If you have, we thought you'd enjoy some insight into how we created the world of this campaign.

If you've finished Episode 2, you know that our party is setting out and for many of them, this is their first taste of the world outside of Solay. So what exactly is beyond Solay, and how did it get there?

This is our map of Malune as it stands today! You can see Solay there on the west coast, and the long road we have ahead to reach the fabled city of Astra. Jesse put this map together in Inkarnate, a software for creating fantasy maps.

To populate this map, we did a collective worldbuilding session. It started the same way a lot of the best parts of Many Realms start: a messy bunch of notes and doodles on Jesse's dry-erase mat.

Jordan drew a straight line across a dry-erase mat and said "we can make this twist and turn later, but let's talk about the general gist of the major landmarks and cities on Malune". We used a similar process in Season One (Tallow), where we let each other shout out any silly idea-- and that's how the Well-With-No-Bottom was born. In the end, Jesse gave the well a bottom, so who knows what Jordan will have up his sleeve.

Just like Season 1, there are actually some particularly fun facts about some of the names and styles off the locations in Malune:

• "Nen", which Eli pitched, is actually the name of the magic system from HunterxHunter. It's a fun sound! It feels good in the mouth!

• We all had chances to pitch random names and Eli pitched "Astra" as one of the locations because she has been playing a lot of Valorant (which has a character named Astra in it). The rest of the team wanted some sort of fun celestial parallel (Sol) but didn't want it to be quite so direct. Hence: Solay.

• Jorie and Jesse had a lot of fun naming The Cig Fold... the Fig Bold.... the Big Cold Foggy Valley. This one came from a lot of discussion about how in fictional world building, the names of places are usually so unbelievably well thought out and tend to work on multiple different levels. However, in real life, location names are often so straightforward they are silly. Often, rivers are called "[River But In a Different Language] River." We threw out "Big Cold Foggy Valley" as a joke but.... that's too good not to keep. Jordan shot down the indigenous fauna named "The Big Cold Foggy Yeti" though.

Here are a few detail shots of our initial brainstorm:

Spoiler: "Love" may be a strong word in this case.

We really kind of left it at "nerd city" for Jordan to flesh out. We'll have to see what he does with that.

Eli did in fact name a bar (as she has The Rabbit Cleaver, The Hardware, Seph's, and The Rabbit Phaser). I'm not sure how well the Shiraz has done after the Great Fire.

As for the rest of the world, this is a campaign Jordan has tried to start on and off mic for a couple of years now, so he has had a lot of the peripheral ideas percolating in his brain for a while now. Here’s what he has to say about building this setting out:

It has been awhile since I have DMed and so the first session or two of Malune were certainly quite daunting. I tend to have a preference for building a world for my players that is fairly detailed but not necessarily the highlight of any particular interaction the players may have. Its all food for thought and more importantly, red herrings.

There is a tendency for DnD players to take every piece of information as some type of gospel, information that will certainly come back later, right? Wrong. I think by being granular and detailed it allows for any twists or turns in a story to actually come as a surprise since there are so many moving parts. However, more importantly that is player freedom. By feeling that the world is filled out, it in turn stands to reason you can explore that filled out world, rather than having the sense a story is on rails (nothing wrong with that). And boy! The players have taken some interesting turns.

I tend to warn my players that PC death is a very real possibility and even welcomed in my campaigns. This again, to a degree, is a red herring. Will I actually kill them? Well, if they make a silly decision, yes. Do I want to kill them? No, most certainly not. I think this looming threat has already caused Jesse, Eli, and Jorie to react with the world with trepidation. Keenly listening and observing the NPCs and the world around them.

Sylvie’s defiance of Tulip was a very rational and fun response. I felt that it had checked me as well that if I was setting the terms of this campaign to be one of measured responses, the NPC’s have to play by that rule as well. If Tulip is outwitted, Tulip is outwitted, and so he was.

I was quite surprised by Eli’s attitude toward Ben The Butcher! I thought she would find him a little rough but endearing, but she quickly took a disliking to him.

Now Zeke and Radolo. That was unfortunate. I will admit that I thought Jorie might be endeared to Radolo despite his…light trickery.

Perhaps I am unable to write endearing characters. Food for thought.

We hope you enjoyed a sneak peek at the making of Malune! We'll have more to share soon, and feel free to reach out to us any time. ❤️

Cheers,

The Realms Cast