Unknown Shores Campaign Setting

Unknown Shores A world at the crossroads of reality

The world of Unknown Shores is one of profound mystery and boundless opportunity, shaped by both catastrophe and miraculous discovery. At the heart of this setting lies the cataclysmic event known as the Shattering, a magical apocalypse that abruptly halted the flow of arcane energies 700 years ago. For three centuries, the people of Aerith endured chaos and collapse, struggling to survive as the magic that once powered their cities, preserved their knowledge, and shaped their lives was suddenly and completely gone.

It was a dark age in every sense. But from the end of that era rose the Great Umbra, an extraordinary phenomenon that bridged Aerith to the infinite realms of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. Over the last 400 years, Aerith has clawed its way back from the brink. Civilization has rebuilt itself, albeit in new and sometimes fractured forms. Magic has returned but forever scarred and changed, but alive once more. And now, with the Great Umbra beckoning, a new age of exploration and opportunity has begun.

Unknown Shores thrives on this spirit of rediscovery. Adventurers seek not only to reclaim their own world’s lost histories and forgotten relics but to explore the countless paths beyond the Umbra. Each step forward is a chance to piece together the mysteries of the Shattering, harness the rekindled arcane energies, and navigate the endless possibilities of the multiverse. It’s a setting where the past is never fully buried, the future is a wide open frontier, and every journey promises danger, discovery, and the chance to shape not only Aerith’s destiny but the fate of the worlds beyond.

Welcome to Unknown Shores

You Look Lost

The world remembers that it was once greater, even if it can no longer agree on how. The oldest ruins predate their own legends, and the magic that shaped them belongs to a time when mortals reached far beyond caution. When the Shattering came, it did not simply destroy what existed. It broke continuity itself. Knowledge vanished. Power collapsed. History fractured into competing truths. Civilizations fell without leaving proper graves, and the world learned to endure without understanding what it had lost.

Unknown Shores is about adventure as the act of peeling back the familiar and discovering that your own world is far larger, older, stranger, and more interconnected than you were taught to believe. Exploration is not driven by leaving home behind but by realizing that home was never fully known in the first place, that its history is fractured, its maps incomplete, its cultures layered over older truths, and its myths rooted in real wounds. Ruins are not relics of a dead age but evidence of cycles that keep repeating. Roads lead to places people stopped talking about for a reason. The multiverse exists, but it serves mainly to emphasize how porous reality already is, how ideas, peoples, and catastrophes leak inward and reshape the local world in quiet ways. Adventure is about curiosity colliding with buried reality, about rediscovering your own land as something unfinished and unresolved, and about realizing that the greatest frontier was never elsewhere, it was always the ground beneath your feet.