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.

The Barbarian Altanis

Here's pretty much the geographical central point of Wilderlands, which is probably why it makes sense there's also way more ruins here than just about anywhere else, as well as little bits of nowadays completely nonfunctional roads. This is where once stood the ancient Dragon Empire, ruled by some half-dragon folks called orichalcans, who unfortunately got their shit kicked in by their former slaves - the red-skinned altanians who now live here. The orichalcans got basically genocided, and there are now very few of them running around and nobody likes them.

There's a mountain range going through the middle, and it splits the area into several different weather zones: you've got hot, and slightly less hot. The nomadic altanian folks run around this place, but a few of them threw their lot in with the Invincible Overlord and settled down, and are known as the Traitor Barons. There are also elves here.

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. The ruined capital of the ancient kingdom Kelnore lies basically in the opposite end of the bay where Tarantis is put on: the place basically blew up and burned down the last time it was sacked, and it's said demons and shit still inhabit it. Much of the land is a hot and dry desert, inhabited by bandits and nomads and bandit-nomads.

This is where you go if you want to set off to the far-away (as in, outside the maps entirely) kingdom of Karak.

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.

There are great many demons running around, likely because an earlier emperor made some unknown deal with Demogorgon in order to get him around to personally beat the shit out of some invading City-State chucklefucks. Not wanting to be outdone (although it really is hard to top that), the current emperor has a bunch of disguised succubi and mariliths in high positions. He's been going insane in the later years, which may or may not be related.

Desert Lands

The much-travelled crossroads between the lands of north and south, this area has something extremely useful and surprisingly rare in this setting: actual fucking roads. You don't need to traverse the wilderness and get lost and shit, although there are still bandits and monsters preying on it so don't get too excited. It is also the site of the Holy cities, five desert cities on the entrance to bigass underground caves full of mushrooms and lakes, sacred to the faith of Mycr. Unfortunately, the current asshole Emperor of Viridistan really doesn't like Mycr, and has spent his 150-year rule persecuting them. Even now his forces have occupied several of the cities.

Despite being at the crossroads, there's no city-state here. Even the Holy Cities, the mecca for a whole religion, are pretty tiny and slummy. Blame Viridistan.

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.

Other Lands

Seeing how the setting's pretty tiny it occasionally makes references to places out of the map. Three of these are of some real importance. The kingdom of Karak to the east is old, far more ancient than even the oldest true kingdom in Wilderlands (Kelnore), and basically fantasy India with bits of China and Mongols mixed in. It has powerful horse armies and navy, and sees wilderlands as a bunch of barbarians to be exiled into. The Great Glacier, north of Valon, is one big chunk of ice age, incredibly expansive and basically impossible to cross, though there are stories of other kingdoms beyond it. The ice wizards of Valon have hidden schools here. Finally, far to the south there's the Demon Empires, a mighty empire split in two and constantly raiding the northern lands - though far less in the last hundred years, whatever the reason. There are demons and fire elementals here, and the whole thing started as a breeding project by fucking aliens.

History

There were aliens.