My journey to create Rhym started about two years ago. It began when I got my hands on the new 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. They intrigued me. I was one of those folks who wouldn't touch 4th Edition D&D. But I could understand why a lot of folks might not like the complexity of the D20 system versions of the game like 3.5 and Pathfinder.
Of course the first thing I did was make a bunch of characters. All of them needed backgrounds of course. And I had been running all my D&D games in the Forgotten Realms since it's first release back in AD&D days. But I ran into a problem. I'd have to convert a huge amount of stuff to work with the 5e rules if I used Mr. Greenwood's realm, because the publishers in their wisdom had not released a traditional style settings book for 5e.
Given all this, and decades of world building experience for many game systems, I made up my first D&D game world since the 1980s. In between I'd created settings for Hero Systems, GURPS, In the Labyrinth, Traveller, and many others. So it wasn't like it was the first time I'd done this. But I did go a bit overboard.
After a few weeks of furious typing and drawing I had around 89,000 words and dozens of maps and diagrams filling around 160 pages. I tried to put them in some semblance of order thinking I'd be sharing with those folks who found themselves playing in any 5e game I happened to be running. And so things sat for a good while.
Then I went to Conglomeration in 2016. I was interested in perhaps doing some writing for the game industry, so I attended a panel where JP Chapleau happened to say that what publishers wanted was work that was finished. On impulse, I spoke to him as we were leaving. "Hey, know any publishers who might be interested in a completed D&D 5e setting." His answer was, "Yes. Me." And thus began our partnership in bringing what I hope is a fun, detailed and slightly twisted campaign setting to the gaming community.
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