About Tales of Penumaria
What is Penumaria
Penumaria is my own Campaign Setting for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, which I’ve been developing for a couple years, especially during the pandemic-related shutdown of 2020, as a sort of laboratory for me to tweak existing campaigns published by Wizards of the Coast (and others) in a setting I won’t have to worry about breaking. I’ve done so many bad things to the Sword Coast that I got ultimatums from the deities there, swear to God.
Penumaria is set between two multiverses so that they can be kept separate: The real world (which you live in) which is called Gaia, and the entire combination of D&D campaign settings (including the ones from both Wizards and TSR Hobbies) known as “The Realms.” Created as a patchwork quilt with bits of every existing realm in its own simplified cosmology, it also includes people from the real world who found their way there, either as a form of purgatory on the way to their afterlife—or as their afterlife—or stumbling into the world through a crossing, or even discovering that you must go through Penumaria to get from one realm to another. You’ll encounter a melting pot that combined just about every setting you can think of, from the sword and sandals to the futuristic, and the stories and campaigns can cover just about any style and topic imaginable.
I have so many things and ideas floating around there, I felt it was time to put them all into a presentable format, which comes in two forms: Fiction stories set in the world of Penumaria, and the campaign setting set in a publicizable format.
That is why this Substack site was created.
What will “Tales of Penumaria” consist of?
At the first, you will find text stories, with some illustration, about some of the heroes and heroines in the setting, starting with Amber Merichello, who is introduced in a story where she spent some time in Gensokyo. Amber is a girl who got isekai’d over to Penumaria where she was taken in by a grandmotherly witch as her apprentice, and she learned how to emulate Touhou shooters with her magic.
Other characters can be listed here, from celestials to rogues to nobles to night-errants. But that would be spoilers, of course.
Once I get these stories rolling right, I’ll have a premium level that deals with the worldbuilding, the campaign creation, and ultimately a setting publication that will be published for Fifth Edition. There will also be a Guilded-based server where we will hold sessions.
We’re still starting small with this publication, but the optimism is high and the subject I have has garnered enough interest for me to continue doing so. It is my hopes that this becomes something big that I could cement my place in the RPG community on.
Who is David Foxfire
I’ve been an off and on internet personality from the 1990s onward. Whatever or not I was famous or infamous depends on the day of the week it is. (Let’s not beat around the bush, there was a time when I was a total lolcow, but I’ve fortunately outgrown that stage in my life.) I’ve used to do comic strips on DeviantART until both the site and the comics scene as a whole grew too toxic for me—as would most people—to remain there.
Fortunately, I managed to get into D&D when I was getting out of Comics. I started at the latter stages of Fourth Edition and then jumping on Fifth Edition at the first change I got. I went on from being a player to a Dungeon Master and now I’m getting on content creation using my own customized variant of Fifth Edition, which I call Swifttail OSR D&D 5E. You will know more about this fork eventually here.
While I remained mostly on my own web site for my exposure, that exposure has become significantly reduced in the current year. The sociopolitical environment and the ban-happy way some supposedly ‘platforms’ can get had scared me off almost every social media sites and for that manner most outlets, even though this work is not going to be political at all. It’s just a bunch of stories and adventures set in an original RPG world. When you tend to speak your own mind in some subjects, have a purple political stance, require an Overton Window as wide as the law permits to create, do not intend to get political here—and have a past that is easily reached form Google, you tend to get scared of Cancel Culture. (For the record, I am not woke. I am, however, based.)
Fortunately, at least for me, Substack has proven to be a very open and inclusive platform for me to use for a project as big as this one. It has a nice draw of various other creative minds who want to bypass the gatekeeping and toxicity that plagued other places on the internet and put out the things they wish to put out in the way they wished. That is a major draw for someone like me who is needing an outlet for their work which won’t be pulled out from under him after six months because of something that happened twenty-five years ago.
What do you get by subscribing:
There will be an initial post that will announce the start of this publication, after which there will be episodic texts of the first story, Amber of the Woods. Episodes will be every other week. They would be roughly 25 pages (by Microsoft Word using Calibri at 11 pt) long, not including header and footer. A link to a PDF will also be available in the event that the post would trigger the Gmail size limit.
Things will increase regularly, once I get a decent pace going, have plenty of episodes buffered up, and I get more readers and cultivated a good-sized audience. I do not know when that timeline is right now; I’ll keep you posted as things develop. I will also allow access to the Guilded server, which will be set up alongside the initial post. Eventually, I will provide a premium level here which will allow for worldbuilding, discussion threads on various related subjects, and even offer priority seats to the inevitable sessions of adventures in the setting.
You can, of course, subscribe now, but things are still under construction and there would be a ways to go before I have everything ready. But it would mean that you’d be the first to know when this publication is official when that first post is made.
I look forward to seeing you here when Amber of the Woods starts, and I hope that it would be a start of something you’d enjoy reading as much as I would writing it.
