Ysterra is a world built for play.
This guide exists to help players and Storytellers understand that world — its history, its peoples, its geography, its faiths, its conflicts, and the strange and often beautiful things that live in the spaces between those categories. It is not a rulebook. It contains no specific instructions for character creation, no mechanical systems, and no tables for resolution. What it contains is the setting itself: the accumulated knowledge, myths, rumors, and records of a world that has been evolving for a very long time.
Whether you are a player preparing to set foot in Ysterra for the first time, or a Storyteller building a campaign, this guide is intended to serve as your reference — a primer for what the creators of the setting can offer as a base for your own creations and interpretations of an ever-changing world.
The articles in this guide are organized into the following broad categories:
The World of Ysterra is an interactive map of the setting — a geographic reference for the continents, regions, and landmarks that appear throughout these articles.
Cosmology & Geography covers the physical and cosmological nature of Ysterra itself — its binary suns, its three moons, the continents that were scattered by an act of divine creation, and the forces that continue to shape the world today.
The Ascendent describes the powerful beings who carry the essence of a dying celestial entity — Ysterra's oldest guardians, and one of its most complicated forces.
Time & History covers the calendars and timekeeping systems used across Ysterra, as well as the historical record of the ages that shaped the world into what it is today.
Peoples of Ysterra introduces the many ancestries and peoples that inhabit the world — a broad survey before the more detailed accounts of specific cultures and societies that follow.
Civilizations covers the many cultures and societies spread across the world's continents, many of which developed largely in isolation from one another over thousands of years.
Culture & Society explores the customs, traditions, pastimes, and shared practices that define daily life across Ysterra's many peoples.
Notable Organizations covers the factions, orders, institutions, and movements that operate across civilizations and borders.
Notable Places details specific locations of significance — cities, ruins, wilderness regions, and the many even stranger locales spread across the world.
No single article tells the complete story of anything. That is intentional. Ysterra is a large world with a long history, and any honest account of it contains gaps, disputes, and perspectives that contradict one another. When you read about this world, fill in those gaps with your own creations, and let the rest inform how you would like to use Ysterra in your own games.
This guide carries no assumption about which game system sits beneath it. Ysterra is designed to accommodate magic, martial conflict, social intrigue, exploration, and artifice — but how those things are resolved mechanically is a choice that belongs to the Storyteller and players at their table. The setting has been played and developed across multiple systems, and it is written with the expectation that it will continue to be.
How This Document Is Organized
Articles in this guide use two distinct voices, kept structurally separate.
The main body text is neutral and encyclopedic — it describes Ysterra as a real place, without the perspective of any single inhabitant. It is the document's primary voice.
Quote blocks carry diegetic perspective: attributed passages written from inside Ysterra — a scholar's contested theory, a merchant's observation, a fragment from a letter whose author preferred not to be named. These are not decorative. They introduce friction, bias, and lived texture that the main text cannot. When a quote block contradicts the body text, that contradiction is usually the point.
Callout blocks — like this one — carry the authorial voice. They are the only place the document acknowledges itself as a document. They appear sparingly, used for scope notes, cross-references, or moments where the document's structure itself needs a word of explanation.
Expand blocks contain information that may be considered a spoiler for players who prefer to discover the world through play, as well as deeper context intended to help the Storyteller guide that discovery. Players who want to protect their own experience are encouraged to leave them closed.
Most articles also include a sidebar containing contextual information about the page — including, where applicable, attribution for artwork and original writing contributed to Ysterra by collaborators who have helped build the world. Their work is credited there.
Change is the central force of Ysterra — in its history, in its peoples, and in the age it currently occupies. What this guide offers is a foundation: a world mid-transformation, with deep roots and an uncertain horizon. It is not a ceiling. The gaps in these articles are not oversights — they are spaces deliberately left for the people at your table. Take what is here, build on it, contradict it where your story demands, and make Ysterra your own. That is what it was designed for.