Dragons of Tirenia

 When designing Tirenia, I knew I wanted it to have a different feel to your standard fantasy RPG campaign. In many of them, all characters are exceptional, magical beings. This is a wonderful, empowering thing, and something that I wanted to keep. What I wanted to change was how magical the world around them was. If magic is commonplace, commodified, and readily accessible, is magic really magical? Citizens of a standard D&D world might not be surprised to see a monster in a zoo or circus, while historically Florence went crazy when they got a giraffe! There's famous essays out there which you can search up about how even Gandalf, one of the greatest wizards in fantasy fiction, only needs to be about 5 th level, and he's regarded with awe by everyone around him. It's the intention of Tirenia to be more strongly inspired by history than a typical game, with magic that's rarer but more powerful when it shows up. Keeping the game at low levels lets the players feel...

  It all started when I worked at a local hobby store, running Dungeons & Dragons night. We’d done all the Adventurers’ League modules to which we had access, and now we wanted something new. I had the idea of having our own consistent world in which our players could adventure and leave their own stamp upon. I surveyed our player base to find out what they wanted: something European, but different from the medieval English pastiche; something where all the rules they knew still applied, but where the flavour had changed to make things different; something that could be explained easily, but with the depth to sustain multiple campaigns by different Dungeon Masters. My wife and I went out to dinner and came up with the basic idea: a world inspired by the Italian Renaissance, a highly civilized world with feuding city-states, each led by a different type of dragon. The players would be elite mercenaries, free to travel across the land fulfilling contracts, while secretly working...