User blog:EchelonMT/Welcome to Viru: Back With a Vengeance

I Just Can't Leave Well Enough Alone
At some point in the last 3 or 4 years, the naming convention of my homebrew worlds developed. Often times a great deal of thought goes into the names of the people and places I create, but other times I just sort of ... make mouth sounds until something clicks. That was the case with Prynh. Ironically Prynh started out as Krynn, which I swear to god, I had no idea was a D&D world already when I made it. I just thought it wounded good. Then when it came to my attention that it was not only an existing D&D world but one of the official worlds, I just sort of fiddled around with the name and sound until Prynh was born.

Since then, I've made a couple of other homebrew settings for my D&D games. There was Vana, a world that consisted of one small pocket of survival, walled off and segregated from the world that was destroyed in an apocalypse. That one still hasn't seen the light of day in a game, maybe some day. Then there was Vero, a world built to simplify the landscape of D&D and create a more dark and focused experience for campaigns that take place in it. There is a three god pantheon instead of dealing with a dozen dieties with different motivations and realms. There are three nations, each with their own continent, instead of a half dozen cities or kingdoms and a million small settlments in between. I built Vero because I wanted a campaign that takes place in a huge city, and only in that city, from start to finish. So I designed Vero to house that city, the gothic city of Vehrbrud. At some point when I was creating these worlds, I thought, it might be cool to have a similar name between all of the worlds. Vana, Vero... but what about Prynh?

As a graphic designer, I am always looking for ways to take my interests and create art for or about them. When I started gamemastering for a D&D game, I knew I wanted to make a map for my world. It looked great, to be honest, and it started a year or two of time where I took a bunch of cartography commissions for other people's worlds. But since that time, the landscape for both tabletop and also mapping and cartography has changed. You can now easily achieve the same results that it took me a week to build up in photoshop, on programs like Inkarnate and Wonderdraft, among others. These tools that were fledgling versions of themselves at the time, are not producing incredible looking results that improve on even my original desgings of the Prynh map. To be clear, I still actually love how that map came out. It was a turning point for me as an artist. But now, time has moved on and so have I, and when I began to look at cartography again and think, "How can I improve my designs so that people still want to pay me money to make thier maps, because I can accomplish what these new fangled softwares can't" So I started developing a new style, but when I looked at Prynh and then I looked at Very and Vana, I knew it was time. Since I was updating the visuals of the map, I may as well update the world that is depicted within the map as well. So Prynh became Viru.

Welcome to Viru, everyone. May your stay be one marred with delicious tragedy, awesome adventure and incredible memories.