It's time for another devlog. This time as a tie-in with AdventureX 2025 which Esoteric Ebb is taking part in! Check out the page to find a bunch of other cool narrative-driven games. And what kind of Esoteric Campaign Devlog have I written to celebrate this momentous occasion? Lore. Let's talk the worldbuilding of Esoteric Ebb.
The Esoteric Coast is a setting in which you cannot make an accurate map. Not in the typical fantasy-style you're imagining. You can absolutely map out a city. Or show which roads lead where. And the Coast itself too, in general.
But the further inland you go, the less things follow any type of physical rules.
Ebb takes place in the city of Norvik. It's the last bastion of humanity in the world, after the world-spanning 'Coast War' ended up with the destruction of ~90% of all humans. This war ended 57 years ago, and Norvik was founded just a decade or so before that. It's a young city, in an ancient world.
The City of Norvik, ca. 27 Post-War Era.
Just how ancient? Well. Not that ancient. Relatively speaking, when comparing it to other fantasy-lands, it's positively newborn at a meager age of ~5000 years. It's to the point where a fair amount of creatures (so-called antesepalians) are older than the realm itself. Despite this, the lore surrounding the ORIGIN of this world isn't exactly clear. What most modern scholars agree on, is this:
Someone or something called JOR created a pocket dimension. This JOR, often depicted as a wise (or crazy) old wizard, used immense magical power to craft a perfect world. An artificial world. One that was balanced in perfect harmony, in excellent alignment, wonderful esoteric health, et cetera. Why? You tell me. Maybe JOR wanted a realm of his own, away from the gods. Maybe it was a bet gone wrong. What matters is that eventually, JOR invited people to this empty, perfect world. The first guest was a whale, if you trust the myth. Then came the rest of the Beasts of Jor as we call them today - various sentient creatures from across all manner of other worlds.
Other fantasy-lands, that is. The pitch behind The Esoteric Coast as a setting is that it could contain anything the DM and the players prefer, simply due to this origin story. It should all be re-flavored and molded to fit the current Era of course, but the whole point of this setting is that (almost) no creature is native to it. It is a fake world, only filled with things from other settings. For entirely legal reasons I will never tell you exactly which settings, and the point is for it to always be open-ended. Which universe did the dwarves in Norvik come from? Who knows! Maybe they're a mix of different dwarves, from different worlds. But look at it this way: if you make your own homebrew setting, and you put ORCS in it, what kind of orc are you using? Tolkien? Warcraft? 40K? You're always going to be inspired by something. You're never going to be wholly original. When I made my homebrew - The Esoteric Coast - I simply wanted a reason why nothing was original, and find originality in that reason.
So it's a bit like Planescape (which I'm obviously heavily inspired by) but slightly more grounded. But only slightly- because once JOR had invited all of his guests, that suddenly created a giant bullseye on his fresh realm. By whom? The gods. Which gods? Good question. Scholars seem to be aware of at least a few hundred named ones, but probably even more undiscovered outsider-gods, all of which attempted to invade JOR's realm. Thousands of angels and devils. Even more mortal servants from across the planes, all emerging from an endless supply of Gates - some opened by JOR, some by these foreign gods. All of which flooded the Coast with Giants and Dragons, Hags and Nymphs, Aberrations and Seagulls. Every typical fantasy creature you can imagine. There's a list to be made of which creatures were invited by JOR and which came with the gods, and which simply snuck on by - but in short: everything ended up here. Partly because it was a fresh, wonderful world (and who wouldn't love to invade that?) and partly because it was also very filled with resources. JOR filled his realm with lots of riches to make his guests happy after all. Now, those same riches began a series of conflicts which modern people just call the Gate War.
A snippet from the original homebrew document I wrote years ago.
It more or less ripped JOR's realm apart. By the end, the Strings (JOR's customized leyline system) which held this realm together had clearly begun to unravel and everything was falling apart. Ultimately, after a couple of hundred years (up to a millennia, if you believe some accounts) of crazy divine warfare, JOR ended up closing all his Gates. In the process, most of those angels and devils and dragons and etc all, more or less, got STUCK in this foreign world. And that's the state still in place on the Coast at the time of Esoteric Ebb. Inter-planar travel is, while not impossible, extremely rare. The world is filled with relics of this pre-closing period (the Gate Era) both alive and dead, and the esoteric not-quite-stable nature of the setting is owed to those Strings never being healed. Because JOR died. Or disappeared. Or maybe he got bored and peaced out. Either way, the Coast was left without its wizard creator and without the direct meddling of outer gods.
That's the basic origin story of the setting. Humans were actually one of the few creatures who arrived after the closing of the Gates, and were brought in (i.e. kidnapped) by the dragons during the Fade Era to act as servants. Two Eras later, and human wizards (Arcanists) basically took over the entire world by doing what JOR did, almost as good as he did. They sort of skipped right to the industrial revolution with magic, and then eventually turned on each other, starting the Coast War.
I could go on for hours, but it's honestly not necessary to understand Esoteric Ebb. It certainly gives some historical context, and is an interesting view into my world building habits, but just like with lore in-game, you can skip it all and still have a great experience. Low INT players are very valid. However, now that I've gone over some basic lore, let's talk about more practical information. Stuff that actually helps you orient yourself in this setting. Like a map.
Take a look at this 'map' here:
The center is water. Everything else is sort of not-water.
One ocean. One Coast. Eight Bands. That's it, that's the whole setting. Feels pretty small and compact when you dot out a few lore-locations in approximated places and draw some straight lines. But to put it in perspective: the Coast-line of Askan (or Askanii) is measured at around 2000km. That's about the distance from Cornwall to Estonia. While Reeds (called Diminor pre-Freestriders) is around 4000km. Which is... the width of the United States, kind of.
And see how the map sort of flares out the further away from the Coast you go? Well that's not exact. In fact, it's impossible to measure anything geographically even just a few dozen kilometers away from the Coastline, because everything keeps changing. Distances between settlements can vary with the seasons. Esoteric Pockets can create time dilatation. The hills and mountains can literally move if enough people don't populate any given area. Merchants traveling between Urthport/Muletown (the most inland Norvikian settlement along River Torna) and the Vyz-Kha Valley (home of the Exiled dwarves), are fully aware that their journeys can take anything from a brisk afternoon walk, to several months of harsh travel, all depending on the skill of the navigators and the roll of the die. Then if you travel far enough inland you end up in the no-one-ever-returns-from 'Endless Wastes' and if you fare by boat close enough to the 'center', you'll end up eventually dying to some esoteric storm. Though people also say there's a ton of cool loot to be found in those directions, so maybe your party would make it back alive.
There are a few maps to be found in the game. One of them is in this collapsed chamber: showing a slice of Askanii along with the edges of Divinii Torum and Reeds.
It's a bit of a shit show. As you can guess, most civilizations in this world developed along the Coast. Thus most people refer to this world, their world, as 'The Coast'. Then you've got these eight pieces. The Bands. Each has unique esoteric rules, to the point where crossing over the boundaries can be extremely jarring: famously there's a mountain found on the border between Kargamesh and Fell Tire that is quite literally cut in half, being magically supported as if 'held up' by the actual border between the bands. Of course, a type of dwarf have built a city in that sliced mountain, and there's a famous café in one of the top-caverns with large glass windows overlooking Fell Tire's red fields. Supposed to be quite the sight.
Each Band has a unique biome-set as well. In short:
Reeds (Old Diminor) – Temperate, a mellow and heavily forested band. (Before the Coast War.)
Vourgeni – Montane, a varied and wet highland. Lots of massive floating rocks too.
Hae’Xi – Tropical, warm and verdant. A vast esoteric jungle with deep 'biome pits'.
Kargamesh – Xeric, mixture of vast deserts, rocky landscapes, and inland lakes.
Fell Tire – Temperate, vast fertile, red fields split up by broken, cursed architecture.
Ym – Tropical, a deeply esoteric, forested landscape with a big living wall around it.
Divinii Torum – Temperate, seemingly one endless slope up 'The Mountain'.
Askan(ii) – Taiga, the coldest band. The Wild Band. Has the longest winters (they all have different seasons too by the way, just to be even more complicated) and the least fertile lands. Lots of hills, icy mountains, and deep forests. Even the Arcanists did not develop any major colonies here. For a good reason.
Each band has a unique history, most of which is only briefly touched upon in Ebb. If you're the type of player who's interested in finding out more, I suggest playing high INT, and clicking on every glossary hotlink you can find.
Oh, and if you travel below the earth, between 3-5km, then gravity will flip. That's called the... Gravity Flip. If you then travel upwards (from your new perspective), you'll end up finding the underside of JOR's Ocean: The Undercoast. This is a massive underground cavern, which while not quite as wide as its upper-coast equivalent, still makes up for it with an insane amount of tunnels and caverns burrowing through seemingly esoterically endless layers of rock. Barely a tenth of sentient creatures live down here however, due to monster-related reasons.
In Esoteric Ebb you get to explore only a tiny part of the world below the surface. Thank the gods.
In summary, Ebb is a weird fantasy setting where anything can happen and dreams can come true. There could even be an election! And more specifically, the modern day setting on the Coast is extremely fun to write. There's endless fantasy tropes to explore, all employed in absurd realism. A deep history, with an uncertain future. And a cleric who - ignoring his magical talents and messy personality - is just another cog in the machine.
-Christoffer Bodegård