This blog/site is dedicated to my homebrew world, Ostiver!

What is an Ostiver?

Ostiver is a fantasy world that I began making a few years ago. I believe it was 2021 or so when my friends and I decided we wanted to give Dungeons and Dragons a shot (the classic beginning to many fantasy worlds). Being stubborn and capable of obsessively daydreaming about things, I took the only logical route available and—instead of running premade modules for my first go at being a Dungeon Master—decided to try and cook up my very own world!

To say it got off to a turbulent start would be an understatement, as I had to cancel our campaign shortly after it began due to lack of confidence in the world. It didn’t feel good enough, and I felt like I had been ill prepared to handle six players running around inside the world. Many facets that I believe are necessary for an intriguing and convincing world were not there, to put it bluntly.

After that I decided to take a year or two to really give Ostiver a purpose. Flesh out its magic, religions, species, metaphysics, and all the other ingredients necessary for a homebrew world to feel alive and breathing. It’s one thing to make a unique world, but I wanted my world to feel truly lived in.

I performed a soft reboot on the Dungeons & Dragons campaign. That campaign continued on for over two years before it was wrapped up in a tidy bow. During those two years, I learned a great deal about what I wanted out of Ostiver, where Ostiver was strong and where it was lacking, and what people (in this case my players) were most interested in when it came to exploring the world.

I started placing heavy emphasis on things like the magic system, religion, and the metaphysics of the universe. These three elements, to me, are crucial for putting the whimsy into a fantasy world, and were topics of high inspection by my players and other fantasy enjoyers I have talked to over the years. There is also plenty of exploration of cultures and how those cultures may influence peoples beliefs, how they live in their environments, and how the addition of different sapient species may impact all of those things.

Major Inspirations

I’ve watched a plethora of fantasy anime, read many a fantasy book, and played even more fantasy games. The lattermost item is the one that drives most of my world building, admittedly.

My favorite game series is the Elder Scrolls. It has naturally influenced a great deal of my worldbuilding in, I hope, positive ways. I am always enamored by how true-to-real-history Elder Scrolls lore is. It has conflicting reports, lost lore puzzles that feel naturally forgotten, and a breadth and depth that rivals almost any other fictional universe. I have much love for the series (the sixth installment can’t come out soon enough…), so much so that I had to try and reign in direct corollaries as much as possible. If I were to amalgamate something, I wanted it to be subtle nods and less direct transpositions from Elder Scrolls to Ostiver.

Other major video game inspiration come from the worlds of: Dragon Age, Divinity, Risen, World of Warcraft, No Mans Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and likely a dozen or so more that I can’t think of at the moment. It has been pretty fun trying to see how I can take pieces of inspiration from non-fantasy worlds and apply them to Ostiver in a way that is still very fantasy. I think the result is getting some pretty cool themes that you don’t typically see in this genre.

I could go on for a bit naming more pieces of media in a verbose way, but I don’t think it’s entirely necessary. Ostiver is the culmination of all the fantasy media I have ingested since I was a child, and that’s probably just the best place to leave it.

The “Vibes” of Ostiver

When I say “vibes” in the header, what I really mean is what kind of fantasy world is Ostiver? If you take even a brief gander around the fantasy genre, you can find loads of difference in feel. Just compare two popular series like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Both wholeheartedly fantasy, but one is more glittering and hopeful, the other more downtrodden and gritty. They share a common fantasy backdrop, but the direction they take is nearly opposite.

You may or may not have heard words like “grimdark” and “noblebright.” These words attempt to indicate the feel of a given world on a scale of cruelty vs mercy, hope vs despair, grit vs cleanliness, among others. Basically, is the world, in general, a place where darkness hides around every corner, has a general belief that people are inherently bad, and war and vice are timeless. Or… is the world a cozy place where the heroes are frequently victorious and rewarded, progress is cherished and encouraged, and the people, in general, think life is pretty beautiful. Those are two extremes of a spectrum that contains multitudes, but hopefully that made at least a little sense.

This tug between fairy tale land and dark brutality had been something I thought about a lot when the world was coming to fruition. In fact, at the beginning of Ostiver’s creation, I did want to make it “grimdark” à la Warhammer 40K. However, I quickly realized that trying to corner Ostiver into a specific niche was a bad idea and probably not a way to start a world I want to seem realistic. The reality is that Ostiver is highly dynamic, just like our world. Some places are almost eternally dark and gritty, others are in constant flux; tugging between darkness and light depending on the point in the timeline. The peoples of Ostiver may be plunged into a hundred years of being underfoot brutal empires. Conversely, there will certainly be times where forces of good usher a nation into a golden age of progress and wellbeing. This is all muddled even further with the addition of god(s) and magic.

In general, I’d say that Ostiver is a world where foulness rises to the surface very frequently. There are dark things happening in Ostiver, and some groups do very heinous things. Those that want to fight against it can, but they will only succeed if they try, try, and try again. Making positive change is hard, but for those with pure of heart and a willpower rivaling a gods, it can be done with sufficient knowledge, skill, and training.

To Wrap It All Up

I’d love to think Ostiver has a home for all or at least most fantasy lovers. I also dually hope that it is a welcoming to learn about place for those that are new to the genre. I tried to make a bubbly stew full of the best pieces from my favorite fantasy worlds, and this is the result.

I am deeply appreciative to anyone who has read this far and also to those that stick with me as we explore the world of Ostiver!