So, I’m a week and a half behind on updating the blog. Sorry about that, but I will be making it up by posting three times this week, two for the Sundays I missed, and one on Sunday coming up to square it.

So, this “week” I wanted to talk about what is possibly my favorite D&D setting. So much so that I have ported it to Pathfinder 1e, Hero System, D&D 5e, and to Verse (and very soon, Less is More) over the years. But, what is it, and what makes it so special to me?

Dark Fantasy

The setting has a lot in common with the Witcher, Dragon Age, or Warhammer Fantasy. The biggest difference between it and the closest correlation, in my mind (which is Dragon Age) is that the bad guys have, basically, already won. Or are at least all but victorious. Most of the major cultures are as evil as the majority of cultures in Lord of the Rings are good, and its this flip that makes things interesting.

But, while it could easily slip into grimdark territory, it more feels like your characters have a real chance of changing the world for the better. Instead of holding the line, the players can very much be the valiant heroes that can actually advance the cause of good.

Your victories matter.

Or, at least they can, if you want to tell an epic story in the setting, like that in the Campaign Book. You can also tell many smaller stories of people just trying to survive, if you like. But I suppose I am getting a head of myself and pitching the setting before I really have told you what it is.

Some History

Back in the early 2000’s there were two properties that every geek with business sense seemed to want to get in on: D&D 3e and Magic: The Gathering, and AEG was no different. These days they are pretty strictly a boardgame company, but at the time they dabbled in a few different things, and one of those was there own collectible card game called Warlords: Saga of the Storm. From what I can tell, its unique claim to fame was that it combined those two hot properties.

I’ve never played it, although a close friend bought me some decks off Ebay a few years back because I am such a nerd for the setting overall. The art is cool, and the mechanics all feel vaguely D&D-esque, complete with leveling up and attack damage rolls. Seems complicated, but that is obviously not the reason we are talking about it. See, this was the first published game or information on this setting.

It proved to be quite popular with a very small, niche audience, and there is even a website where you can still check out the cards: https://theaccordlands.com. I’ve heard they even still have tournaments in some areas. Anyway, its popularity lead them to work on the actual RPG setting, which was released in 2006.

It Started With A Plan…

The really interesting thing to me was that the setting itself actually had its roots way back in AD&D as the homebrew setting for a game of evil player characters. Essentially, the players talked the DM into running an evil campaign, and this was the setting they made, and the best part is that the Medusan Lords (the BBEGs of the setting) were actually the players’ characters. Now I can’t really confirm this anymore, but I want to say that it had been posted by an actual developer for the gameline on one of those long gone message boards that used to litter the internet back in those days before Facebook. So take this with a grain of salt.

Anyway, so, the story goes that they did all this stuff, and conquered and pillaged, and then when they retire the characters, the DM pitches them the idea that they should now make heroes and go back and fight the schemes of their original PCs, and thus the heroic NPCs of the setting were born. I don’t know that this is true, but it definitely feels like it when you read through their descriptions. It puts a nice personal touch to the world, not unlike the Dragonlance setting (which I would argue is the opposite side of the coin from the Accordlands in many ways).

The Actual Books

So, when the books finally launched in 2006, they had been delayed several times. Reading them, its obvious they were made for 3e, not 3.5, which means they missed the bus by three years or more. My understanding was that they were almost canceled as AEG was getting out of the d20 space, trying to beat the inevitable bubble pop that was on the horizon, but these are all rumors about a setting that has almost no presence online, so its hard to confirm or deny.

Regardless, they definitely feel like a labor of love, and released as a series of 4 books: The Master Codex, Monsters & Lairs, The World Atlas, and The Campaign Adventure Guide. My spouse worked at the local friendly gamestore back then, and I remember seeing it on the shelf one day when I dropped in to grab her for lunch. It stood out from the glut of other d20 knock-off and cheap cash grabs that were all the rage at the time due to the really awesome art.

And that was it. They came out with very little fanfare as a group and that was all there was. But its really all you need.

The Master Codex

The Master Codex is basically the joint Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. But don’t go thinking that you don’t need to read it. Unlike a lot of d20 knock-offs, Accordlands really delved into the rules and made things their own.

They revamped the races, with even the “classic” races having new and unique abilities. Which makes sense, since all the races are drastically different. The Elves are undead, the Dwarves are desperate but forgotten heroes fighting an unending horde of demons, etc.

They also redid all the classes, and several of which have a distinctly 2e look to them, like the illusionist and necromancer being standalone (and kick-ass) classes. And lets not forget that the Accordlands has what is easily my favorite Paladin in all D&D history, with the ability to consecrate a weapon to their deity and then give it all kinds of cool special abilities, like dispelling magic or summoning it from across the room like Thor (or Luke Skywalker, if you prefer). The fighter is also drastically superior to the 3e fighter, actually having some flavor. All in all, though, they are less powerful than the 3.5 or Pathfinder 1e classes that came after them. To me, that’s a feature, not a bug, though. I prefer the higher flavor and lower power, myself.

The really neat stuff was the way they had race and class interact. Depending on your race and class, you got a series of special additional powers that were unique to that version. You can look at it like sub-classes in D&D 5e, but this was really new and unique at the time, and still sticks out to me as one of the few settings that actually make your race matter.

The rest of the book is your other rules and some setting info that is okay for the players to know (if you are into the “no meta-gaming” rule, my players all have the full set of books). One last thing to point out, though, is that weapons can have different attributes based on their material and design, with things like wave designs and hollow hilts being possible ways to spice up not-magical gear. Especially cool is the Elven bone weapons, and the Deverenian Black Iron, which is a material that interacts in cools ways with magic.

Monsters & Lairs

Some neat stuff in here, but its basically a collection of creatures unique to the Accordlands. Some of these are just reskins of classic monsters, like giants, but a lot of it are wholly new (at least as far as I know), including special dragons, Dwarven gargoyles, Abyssals, and the verdatha dragonsteeds of the Deverenian knights.

Overall, if you’ve seen a Monster Manual, you know what to expect, although the addition of some “lairs” which can be dropped into an adventure for a quick site based encounter is nice.

The World Atlas

This is the best book of all of them, in my opinion. 280-ish pages of setting lore, going through a thousand years of history and breaking each major culture down into 20-30 page write-ups that get in deep with their cultures, but not Glorantha deep. Lots of wiggle room still, and places for the players and GMs to get in and customize the cultures some to suit them without overturning the apple cart.

It also goes in pretty deep on the gods, which is nice, because there are some really cool religions. This includes my favorite deity in all gaming settings, Neus, the tri-part god of Hunters, Farmers, and Scribes, but who is really the god of civilization. The story is that he was a god of hunters, and he saw that his people needed stability, so he became the god of farmers, and eventually they had need of knowledge, so he became god of scribes. The different factions of his followers argue that one is the preferred, and to quiet them, he split his holy symbol into three equal pieces as proof that he was equally good of all three. Just really cool stuff.

It finishes up with thirty pages of NPCs around the setting that the players may run into or that the GM can factor into their plans. Some are powerful, like Slayer the Unkind, this setting’s answer to Mordenkainen, while others are on par with the players, like Bulwark the Dwarf. Its a nice resource for DMs trying to tie their adventures into the overarching lore, but it also tells a lot of little stories about the world which help flesh it out.

The Campaign Adventure Guide

Finally, we have the Campaign Adventure Guide, a full 1-20 campaign in which the players get wrapped up in the Medusan Lord’s plots and work to first uncover their existence and then deal with them. Its a real beast, and it definitely falls under the X-Files style of story design. Only about 10 of the 25 adventures actually follow that main plot, and the rest are just filler episodes.

Having run the thing three times, twice all the way through (once in system in the book and once in Hero 5th edition), as well as a third time in D&D 5e that was more of a “highlights” run of just the plot important adventures, I have to say that the whole thing is awesome in theory… the Medusan Lords are awesome villains, and the handful of setpiece adventures, like the first one and the last one, are a lot of fun.

The problem is that they don’t fit together well, and the DM has a lot of work to do to try and form a cohesive narrative around them. There is a lot of running from one side of the world to the other with very little reason in the adventures themselves.

To me, its a great starting point, and many of the non-critical adventures are actually a lot of fun and let you delve into all kinds of cool territory around the world, but if you can only afford three books, skip this one.

In Conclusion

So, that is some historical setup as well as a rundown of the actual contents of the books themselves. Its a really cool setting that has just the right amount of lore for me, and I actually like the fact that it is just three books. I find that it honestly has a similar amount of actual setting information as more established settings like Eberron, its just much more condensed, with many fewer pages wasted on new gear and spells you don’t need.

As for the future, because I doubt anyone will be running it as written, I will be focusing more on the setting side of things in future posts, starting with the history and cosmology of the world next time. I plan on hitting the races next, doing two at a time after that, starting with the Deverenians and Dwarves, then the Elves and Humans, and finally the Nothrog and the minor peoples. Depending on how I feel at that point, I will probably do one on the deities as well. So, five more posts covering the setting.

And in case I already got you interested, here is a link to the books on Drive-Thru RPG as a bundle. I hope you enjoy!