Wilderlands of High Fantasy

Wilderlands of High Fantasy is pretty much the first third-party Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting to ever come out, published in the late seventies by the venerable and back then extremely popular Judges Guild, the first of the many examples when someone else managed their shit better than they themselves did. It began as a single-city setting called City-State of the Invincible Overlord, but quickly grew out of those humble origins and ultimately swelled into a still fairly small land roughly the size of the Mediterranean (a deliberate design choice: this was noted as the amount of land an average Adventurer was ever likely to see).

Judges Guild thrived for some half a decade, producing awesome and popular settings and campaign modules, before its old-school attitudes and unwillingness to move on with the times led it going the way of the dodo. In 2002 it was picked up by Necromancer Games, publishing most of its content anew with updated 3e rules.

Setting

This lands are dangerous and untamed, full of monsters and beasts and barbarians and evil humanoids, ruins of ancient kingdoms and empires and even evidence of interstellar visitations, with city-states ruled by cruel overlords scattered all around that clusterfuck and mostly keeping to themselves. Precisely one of those city-states, Viridistan, could claim itself to be anything even resembling a true nation, and even that's like the size of Belgium at most. A land in decline and facing a rebirth, it is a time of great change, when all creation stands in the crossroads - and it is here where the Player Characters are dropped, to leave their own mark in the history of the setting or even lead it towards the direction they would want.

In short, it was the original Points of Light, and still one of the best to ever have come bearing that description.

You think Greyhawk peasants had it bad? Well, in Wilderlands your average peasant's got a good twenty years of life expectancy, most likely ending your solitary and nasty life in a brutish way by the axe of a marauding beastman, or the dagger of a thief after your purse, or the plague. Just about everyone in charge is evil, law enforcement is too weak and incompetent to protect you (save for the secret police which everyone has and which is too competent), just about all roads are in shit conditions so you can't visit your cousin ten miles away without provoking bandits and monsters, and slavery is both legal and widespread so even your freedom wasn't a given. But if you were really smart or lucky, you could live to the ripe old age of thirty-five or so!

And yet if you've got the strength and the conviction for it, and a few friends to have your back, you could march right up there and topple that asshole overlord and see if you could do better. Rebuild the whole damn ancient empires while you're there. It is the time of great change, after all, and there are no secret societies or other bullshit railroading you and telling you what to do.

It is also gonzo as hell, having been born in the time when scifi and fantasy were not clearly distinct, and gleefully embracing both into a weirdass pulp land where both Conan and Flash Gordon would be right at home. The land is littered with crashed spaceships - as mentioned up above - thanks to a prehistoric space war between two different alien coalitions, and amongst the standard fantasy races you've got folks like cavemen (riding mammoths!), amazons (with captive women doing all the menial work and men kept for reproduction), lion, cat, hawk, and even chicken people, and it's not at all uncommon to bump into a perfectly normal human except with his skin blue, red, green, or even entirely transparent.

The whole setting is split into eighteen different areas, each of which was in turn cut into five-mile hexes. This smallest map unit was then where most of the detailed setting information could be found: one hex could contain a city, while another had a lair of trolls. Some of the towns and cities were then detailed further, sometimes to the point of just about every single building of every single street. From here, it'll be the DM's (or "judge's", as he was known) job to dump his players somewhere in there and watch as they pick a direction at random and begin a path of destruction through it all.

The eighteen areas, in the original publishing order, were as follows:

City State of the Invincible Overlord

The centerpoint of the entire campaign - be it geographically, politically, historically, or spiritually - the titular City State of the Invincible Overlord was built by dwarves on top of an ancient ruined city... which itself was on top of another, even older ruin. Nowadays it is mostly ruled by humans, with the humble Invincible Overlord himself in charge of everything, but the dwarves of the northern Thunderstone are still some of its most important allies. A bit further north there is the coastal city of Warwik, founded a long time ago by some nobility that had the bright idea to try and usurp the City State rule, and who were subsequently banished and are still plotting revenge.

Modron is another iconic city found here, on the shores of Roglaroon River and worshipping the river goddess of the same name. To the east there is the tiny village of Tegel, entirely of no consequences if it weren't for the setting of one of the most well-loved Judges Guild adventures, Tegel Manor. And in the southeastern corner you've got Ossary, a fine example of what happens when you give a bunch of chaotic murderous vikings their own city: its ruling chiefs are basically in the state of total war, fighting in the streets.

Valley of the Ancients

Land of the dragon graveyards, the ancient aliens, and the real weird gonzo shit. There are no great big city-states here because there aren't enough people mad enough to want to live in this hellhole - the only place to get even close, Tarsh, is a pretty piddly place when compared to Viridistan or something. The titular Valley of the Ancients is the site of an ancient dragon empire, now littered with draconic ruins, with the grand price - the palace of the dragon emperor - never having been found.

The vast Glow Worm Steppes are named after the gigantic glowing worms everyone knows are hunting here - but that're actually torch-wielding caveman hunting parties. Tricksy cavemen. The Dar Undine Desert is the hottest and driest land anywhere in the Wilderlands, even more so than the western great desert, but the edges get monsoon rains and windstorms every once in a while because of two gods in a constant struggle over supremacy of these lands. Like, how cool is that?

Tarantis

The pirate land, nominally governed by the city-state of Tarantis, and the Tarantine Merchant's Association therein. They do a pretty lousy job with that. Just about all the city states and provinces around are ruled by sultans also in Tarantis's pocket. It's also said the ruined capital of the ancient kingdom Kelnore could be found somewhere here, and it's where you go if you want to set off to the far-away (as in, outside the maps entirely) kingdom of Karak. Much of the land is a hot and dry desert.

Valon

The area directly north of City State, Valon is named after the house of avalonian ice wizards, the second capital of magic in the setting, and masters of the weather and the sea. Most of the map is filled up by pirate-infested sea, or mountains full of lost dwarven cities, the greatest of them probably the fabled Krazandol. Overall, aside from Valon itself, the region is generally considered a pretty nasty place to live.

Viridistan

Also known as the City State of the Immortal Emperor, along with many other equally-humble names, Viridistan is ruled by Green Emperor - and that ain't no empty title, because the guy and his wife are literally green, said to be the last of the ancient and powerful race of True Viridians. The rest of the kingdom's inhabitants tend towards lighter shades. They are trying to create a true new kingdom to the area, but it hasn't gone on for very long yet so the land is still as untamed as anywhere else. The depths of the Trident Gulf also hold the mermaid kingdom of Sae Laamer.

Elphand Lands

If you're looking for all that Lost World stuff, this is where you'll want to go, right to the northwestern edge of the maps. They've got cavemen, dinosaurs, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, amazons (sometimes riding those saber-toothed tigers), the biggest and most unexplored forest in the entire setting, and mountains full of giants and hawkmen. Not much civilization, though: there's a few towns and fortresses that're lucky if they're past iron age, plus the ancient trading city of Damkina in the middle of a lake.

History

There were aliens.