I made a setting for D&D 5e based on Greek mythology – Year of the Gods – and ran an epic campaign in it 2021-2022. Now I am happy to put up my setting and campaign notes online.

The basic idea was to make a somewhat gritty high fantasy setting, stylistically somewhere between the Heroic and Archaic era. There are heroes around, the gods do intervene… but people are poor compared to standard fantasy, magic is dark, things like philosophy and maps are not yet invented, social norms are not our own and pretty grim. Might not be to everybody’s taste (D&D after all tends towards a mildly Early Modern setting with the too horrible or inconvenient aspects of the past shaved off), but we had great fun playing the campaign. It involved everything from sports logistics to legal drama to divine heists to deadly family feuds. Besides the obligatory monster fights, dungeon crawls, and seafaring odysseys.

One of the fun aspects was that I tried to make images of characters and scenes using AI methods at the start, and got fantasy-coloured blobs. As the campaign progressed the images became better as technology advanced. During the Valley of the Birds part  I could merely make weird bird-monsters. By the time the player characters were at sea I could render pretty decent scenery, as long as it did not involve people. As they reached their destination the city scenes were coming to life. And in the final tragic war, I could make portraits of the people involved. The longer I delayed finishing the write-up the better illustrations I could make. But at some point you have to draw the line.