Thool is my homebrewed setting for fantasy roleplaying games. It draws inspiration from a variety of weird fiction and fantasy which has passed into the public domain in the United States, and it's deliberately phantasmagoric and unearthly in many respects. Thool is a "crossroads" world of black dunes, hunting dinosaurs, fungal groves, flying castles, sargassum seas, strange magic, and forgotten technology.
I began work on the Thool setting in December of 2008, inspired by a Schiaparelli map of Mars and a variety of public domain "weird fiction." I've gradually narrowed the literary source canon to the works of L. Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, A. Merritt, and Richard Sharpe Shaver.
I also adapt a lot of material from various sources of fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, so there are many fanciful creatures and features to be found on Thool. As in the source material, there is often a darkness at the core of such whimsies, so traveler beware — there is, indeed, a Gingerbread House on Thool, but as has always been the case, no promises are made as to the good nature or intentions of its residents.
The tone I strive for is “weird fantasy,” with an emphasis on the latter term. There are elements of horror, high tech, and sword-and-sorcery in the world, but Thool is a fantasy setting, and the other genre material is yoked into service with that in mind. I'm still laboring to get the right mix.
I'm not interested in versimilitude. Thool isn't Earth — although it has intersections with our planet — and its geography and societies don't conform to terrene laws. One mountain range is an array of cyclopean faces; across the continent at the center of a vast impact crater is a sentient Great Slime Lake. The largest polity in the initial campaign region is a millenia-old, half-abandoned city-state of baroque towers, Greek columns, whorled spires, obsidian ziggurats, and long-decommissioned Homes of the Future beneath a titanic cracked geodesic dome, with sewers, mushroom farms, subway tunnels, elevators, and even a Dero city beneath its streets. Its economy features fist-sized rubies, abundant gold, and ten coins to a pound. Everything doesn't make perfect sense in a realistic or thematic sense.
I deliberately leave many ambiguities. I like to provide sparse descriptions of a lot of things, but exhaustive details about virtually nothing. I personally work from short, sketchy descriptions and find that mode of presentation most useful when reading other people's material. Too much detail makes it more difficult to work in new cool material I've found or made up, and limits the scope of player creativity. So I keep a lot of space open.
Characters can have the same sorts of adventures in Thool that they have in any other fantasy gaming setting — delving forsaken dungeons, exploring the howling wilderness, and running armies into one another. I try to make it as easy as possible to adapt material from Thool to whichever fantasy game rules one favors. I use Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition, but I started out using the original Dungeons & Dragons rules, and I believe one could adapt the material to nearly any system.
If you see anything you like, please feel free to take advantage of my public domain policy.
