If you followed my work or blog before, you might remember my homebrew world, A’astoiya. A’astoiya was, and still is in a way, my passion project. It was strange, dark, complicated and full of things I loved creating. There were old gods, messy histories, horror, mysteries and plenty of things lurking where they probably shouldn’t be. I spent years building pieces of that world, and there are still parts of it that I love very much.

A’astoiya was never just a setting for my TTRPG games. It became a little world I could escape into and explore at my own pace. I could spend hours working out the history of a city, creating a religion, drawing maps or following some completely unnecessary thread of lore simply because I wanted to know where it went. I didn’t need any of it to appear in a campaign for it to feel worthwhile. A huge part of the fun was simply knowing that the world existed and slowly figuring out how all of its pieces fit together.

Some of my favourite memories of A’astoiya actually came from sharing it with my players. They introduced characters, asked questions I hadn’t considered, became attached to completely unexpected NPCs and inevitably wandered somewhere I hadn’t planned for them to go. The world became bigger because other people were allowed to play in it, and I loved watching pieces of A’astoiya develop at the table in ways I never could have planned on my own.

Outside of our campaigns, though, I can look back now and recognize that my relationship with A’astoiya wasn’t always as healthy.

I was struggling heavily with depression, and disappearing into a world of my own creation gave me somewhere else to be for a while. When parts of my real life felt uncertain or outside of my control, A’astoiya was somewhere I could make things make sense. I could decide how everything connected, follow every thread until I found an answer and keep building for as long as I needed to stay occupied.

At the time, I also didn’t know that I had OCD and C-PTSD. Knowing that now has given me a different perspective on some of the ways I approached worldbuilding. I genuinely loved complicated lore and meticulous planning, and I still do, but sometimes that enjoyment became tangled up with a need to have everything settled and right. Loose ends needed answers. Contradictions needed fixing. If I changed one piece of the world, I could end up following every thread connected to it because suddenly I needed to make sure everything still fit together.

A’astoiya gave that part of my brain an almost endless amount of material to work with. There was always another history to establish, another connection to make or another piece that could be refined. What started as somewhere wonderful to escape to could sometimes become somewhere I disappeared into a little too completely.

I don’t say any of that because I regret A’astoiya or think creating it was somehow bad for me. It gave me an incredible creative outlet during a time when I desperately needed one. I made things I’m still proud of, told stories I still love and spent countless evenings laughing around a table with my friends because of that world. A’astoiya was what I needed for a long time.

Eventually, though, my mental health reached one of its lowest points in years, and I stopped creating almost entirely. When I began finding my way back, I realized I didn’t want to force myself to return to A’astoiya simply because it was the world I’d already spent years building.

I still love it. I don’t consider it abandoned, and I don’t think its story is necessarily finished. Maybe someday I’ll want to wander back into it and see what has changed while I’ve been away.

For now, I’m letting it rest.

And in the space that left behind, something much smaller and softer has started to sprout. It’s name is Eidarwild.

✧ A Different Kind of World

Eidarwild comes from a very different place in my life. I’ve always been drawn toward nature, plants, animals, folklore and the changing seasons, but I’ve really allowed myself to explore that love more deeply over the past few years. I’ve been spending more time learning about the things growing around me, watching birds, growing plants and paying attention to the small cycles happening outside whether we’re watching them or not. Unsurprisingly, all of that has started finding its way into the things I want to create too.

When I first started thinking about Eidarwild, I wasn’t trying to create my next big world. I just wanted somewhere that felt fun to play in again: a world inspired by the woodland charm of Everdell, Humblewood and Redwall, filled with little creatures, wild places and plenty of room for adventure. The earliest ideas were simple: a fantasy world populated by animal folk, deeply connected to nature and shaped by the seasons. I wanted old forests and little villages, strange spirits and flower-gods, local folklore and communities shaped by the land around them. I wanted a world that made me curious about what might be down the next path rather than immediately wondering how everything fit together.

At the heart of Eidarwild is the Great Tree, an ancient presence around which much of the world’s life, history and mythology has grown. The people who live beneath its branches are animal folk with traits inspired by all kinds of creatures, surrounded by spirits, strange beasts and gods connected to the natural world. There are places where the boundaries between the ordinary and the magical grow thin, traditions shaped by generations of living alongside the land, and countless little stories that I’m only beginning to discover.

The seasons are particularly important here. Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are more than changes in weather, but are woven into lineage, identity and the lives that came before. Reincarnation is part of the natural cycle of Eidarwild, which means someone’s current life may only be one chapter in a much longer story. How much someone remembers, how those past lives influence the present and what it really means to belong to a particular season are all things I’m still figuring out.

The natural world has its own stories as well. Flower-gods and animal spirits are part of Eidarwild, but I don’t necessarily want every one of them neatly catalogued in a pantheon. I love the idea of beliefs being local and a little messy. A flower that represents good fortune in one village might carry a completely different story somewhere else. An old tree might be sacred to the community living beneath it while someone from three valleys away has never heard of it. Folklore can contradict itself, stories can change as they’re retold, and sometimes nobody actually knows which version is true.

Eidarwild isn’t meant to be a world where nothing bad happens. I still love monsters, ancient mysteries, forgotten places and slightly unsettling things lurking in the woods, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Even in our living world, nature is farm from gentle. There are predators, storms, death, decay and plenty of things with far more teeth than I’d personally like to meet while wandering through a forest.

The difference is that darkness isn’t the foundation of Eidarwild. Nature is.

That means darkness can exist alongside growth, migration, nesting, flowering, decomposition, adaptation and renewal. A story might involve something frightening living beneath an old ruin, but another might be about helping a village prepare for the arrival of a migrating creature, figuring out why the flowers haven’t bloomed this year or settling a disagreement with a particularly stubborn local spirit. I want room for danger and sadness, but also curiosity, silliness, community and the kinds of small problems that matter enormously to the people experiencing them.

✧ Letting Things Get Weird

I’m also building Eidarwild very differently from the way I approached A’astoiya. I still love detailed worldbuilding, and I’m sure I’ll inevitably spend an unreasonable amount of time researching something incredibly specific at some point. I’m not trying to get rid of that part of how I create. What I am trying to leave behind is the feeling that I need to understand everything before I’m allowed to move forward.

This time, I want to build from the ground up. A village can exist before I know which kingdom it belongs to. I can create a creature without knowing exactly where it fits into the world’s history. A local tradition doesn’t need a thousand-year timeline behind it before I can put it into an adventure. Sometimes I’ll create something simply because I thought it sounded fun, and I can figure out the rest when it actually matters.

I’m also deliberately giving up some control by bringing more randomness into the process. I’ll be using tools like Story Engine, generators, roll tables, worldbuilding games and plenty of dice to introduce ideas I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen myself. Instead of deciding exactly what I need and filling in the blanks, I want to occasionally let something unexpected land in front of me and ask, Okay, why is this true?

That’s where I think some of Eidarwild’s personality is going to come from. Random tools have a wonderful habit of putting ideas together that my sensible worldbuilding brain never would. Rather than immediately rejecting something because it doesn’t fit what I had planned, I want to see what happens when I try to make it work. Sometimes the answer might become an important piece of lore. Sometimes it might just make the world a little stranger.

If the dice decide that a village has an annual festival involving frogs, then apparently I now need to know why everyone is so enthusiastic about frogs.

I’m trying to make room for that kind of whimsy and chaos. Eidarwild doesn’t need every rough edge sanded down or every strange tradition justified by centuries of carefully documented history. Folklore can be inconsistent. People can believe things that aren’t true. Places can have traditions that started for ridiculous reasons and somehow survived for generations. There can even be questions that simply don’t have answers yet.

For someone who has spent a lot of time wanting everything neatly connected, that’s a surprisingly exciting prospect.

More than anything, I want Eidarwild to be something I discover rather than something I control. I want to sit down with some dice, cards, tables and half-formed ideas and see where they take me. I want my players to change things, unexpected characters to become important and little ideas to grow far beyond what I originally intended.

For the first time in a long while, worldbuilding feels like playing again.

I don’t know exactly what Eidarwild will eventually become, and I’m trying very hard not to figure it all out just yet. I’ll be sharing pieces of the world here as I discover them: creatures, characters, folklore, locations, adventures, artwork, experiments and probably quite a few ideas that change along the way. Some posts might explore a larger part of the setting or a mechanic, while others may simply introduce you to a weird little guy I made because I rolled something unexpected on a table.

For now, there’s a Great Tree, a whole lot of wilderness and plenty of blank spaces on the map.

I think that’s a pretty good place to begin!