Dungeons & Dragons Worlds & Realms: Adventures from Greyhawk to Faerûn and Beyond

By Adam Lee and Official Dungeons & Dragons Licensed

Celebrate fifty years of the spellbinding settings and planes of Dungeons & Dragons with this beautifully illustrated exploration of the multiverse.

“A wonderful collection. This incredible journey through the fantastical realms that inspired countless tables to roll dice together is both an educational and a visual treat!”—Matt Mercer

Worlds & Realms is an illustrated, story-driven retrospective celebrating the immersive worldbuilding of D&D since the iconic game’s inception in 1974. Legendary mage Mordenkainen takes adventurers on a fantastical journey through the multiverse, delving into memorable and fascinating lore and locations across all five editions of the game.

With Mordenkainen’s guidance, readers will revisit worlds that have come to define D&D over the decades, from the familiar realms of the Material Plane to lands beyond the Astral Sea. Mordenkainen’s philosophical musings provide a mage’s-eye view of the worlds’ unique features, creatures, and characters, captivating readers’ imaginations as they learn more about the history and mysteries of the multiverse. Additionally, readers will join adventuring parties with inhabitants of each realm through exclusive short stories by award-winning contributors Jaleigh Johnson, Jody Houser and Eric Campbell, Jasmine Bhullar, and Geoffrey Golden.

Full of exciting and enchanting artwork showing fifty years of gameplay evolution from vintage D&D through the present, with original cover and chapter-opener illustrations, Worlds & Realms is a spellbinding tour of the strange and wonderful worlds of the multiverse, appealing to both new and long-standing fans alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
• Release date: Oct 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593835517

Book preview

Introduction

I am Mordenkainen, Lord Mage of Greyhawk, architect of myriad spells and walker of worlds. You have in your hands a collection of observations and insights gleaned from my extensive travels throughout the multiverse.

As a scholar of the arcane and a wizard of renown, my fascination with magic at first compelled me to discover how magic works and whether its ultimate purpose can even be known. Although my love of magic has never waned, my path has expanded my view to encompass the workings of the natural world and the Great Cosmic Wheel: I have come to realize that despite the presence of gods and beings of immense power whom some may look to for salvation, there is no guarantee that the multiverse will continue to evolve and exist. There are powerful forces at play that believe their way—whether it be Law or Chaos—should be the way of all beings. This, I have seen, is sheer folly and would cause the Great Wheel of the multiverse to tip out of what I call the Balance and spin into catastrophe.

The Balance is something that I have come to understand as I watched the forces of Law and Chaos battle for supremacy on every world and within every heart and mind. I have seen that these polarities are like two sides of the same coin, and if either Law or Chaos is allowed to grow and dominate unchecked, it will inevitably and inexorably lead to its most extreme expression—stagnation or destruction—either of which is death to living, sentient beings.

There was a time when I thought my powers were sufficient to grapple with and ward off these forces that pulled the multiverse toward lopsided madness, and that these powers that caused major imbalances were relegated to several key worlds and a handful of misguided beings. But I now know that keeping Law and Chaos in equilibrium—maintaining the Balance—is a quest that I cannot by my own powers fulfill. I must reach out and inform other adventurers of this in the hope that they are inspired to drop their small-minded pursuits of glittering loot, carousing, and fame to join me on this greater quest of protecting the multiverse, to one day perhaps reach beyond the boundary of their own world, venture through Wildspace, and be wardens against all forces that would tip the Balance. As an archmage, I have no greater task than to snuff out these fires of doom, and as a scribbler of words, I hope this humble tome will ignite the heart of a hero or two who dreams of a life with a higher purpose—to create a world free from tyranny.

Map of the Elemental Planes.

The Mysteries of the Multiverse

Though I have confounded archdevils, banished lich lords, thwarted tyrant kings, and refused many a stern command from the haughty hosts of Mount Celestia, some still fear and revile me, and many more think me mad. Despite all the wrath and indignation, I maintain my duty to the Balance. My guidance comes from the beacon of my curiosity, which pursues above all else the mystery of the multiverse. Gods have immense power, yet I feel their power pales in comparison to the magnificence of the multiverse. I have directly observed with my own arcane eye the organic geometry of how a flower grows, the spiral of a snail’s shell, the shapes of the modrons, how ice forms into crystalline patterns—all of these speaking to some magic-infused equation that is woven into the fabric of the multiverse. Are these the fingerprints of the greatest of all the gods? The signatures of the architects of the multiverse? Or are they artifacts of randomness and chance or the artifice of some infinite machine?

Without interference from a force such as a demon lord or mad demigod, this weaving of the multiverse continues in a seemingly perfect balance of Law and Chaos, creating a masterpiece of life in its wake that can be investigated, and perhaps even decoded and read like deciphering the most cryptic book in the greatest of all libraries. To this mysterious ordering principle of the multiverse, I as an archmage of some renown am its most devoted scholar.

Visualizing the Planes

Plenty of seers and visionaries have tried to explain how the planes are arranged in ways that our minds can comprehend. Some fashioned exquisite orreries, and others drew elaborate maps, but how the planes intersect and are organized is quite beyond our ability to visualize, at least in our present state of consciousness. The best maps are from the great elven mystics, who did their best to translate the inscrutable vastness and complexity into a two-dimensional representation that most minds can grasp, and from these source maps, the druids and wizards have created a workable representation that has become known as the Great Wheel.

But how did I learn about the multiverse? What put me on this path to encountering the cosmos?

Representation of the Great Wheel.

Defending Oerth

I was first exposed to the mysteries of the arcane as a youth. On my home world of Oerth, I witnessed the various forms of tyranny and how they all led to bondage of mind and body. Had I not, I might have—like so many others—fallen into lockstep with any number of so-called authorities and saviors that professed to know, in their very loud and dogmatic manner of speech, that they and their ideals must be followed. The ascendance and defeat of these tyrants is a tedious, repetitive process, I must add, which has been happening for untold millennia without any qualitative change.

But some godlike power put a strange spark within me—a facility with magic, a desire for justice, and a keen, discerning mind that set me on the path of independence and epic adventure. The more I walked this path, the more I believed that I could bring peace and order to my troubled home world of Oerth. I sought a solution through increasing my own powers and gathering other wizards and adventurers to my side. Together we were known as the Circle of Eight. With my companions, I sought to save Oerth from all the catastrophes that were poised to devour it, and through studying magic, I felt we could win.

Awakening to the Multiverse

Driven by purpose, I increased my understanding of magic with such fervor that I pushed through the boundaries to ever larger realities in hopes of finding that one item, that one word of power, that could defeat evil and restore harmony. But this search for answers culminated in breaking through the boundary of Oerth to behold an interconnected cosmos of worlds spinning around one another in an endless dance, influenced by forces greater than the gods themselves—the multiverse.

As I beheld in awe this immense chaos of perfection, I also realized that each world was in danger of being corrupted. The forces of Law and Chaos were being manipulated in every corner of the multiverse, whether by leading the gullible, fearful masses into a deathly stasis of law-bound autocracy or dividing and provoking them into never-ending cycles of aggression and war. It was then I knew that my wizard’s work would not only be for Oerth, but for all other worlds as well. I would have to grapple with the foundations of reality, inspire companies of heroes, and invent new spells to help all sentient beings become champions of the Balance.

Do these words ring true or are they ravings of a madman? Find out! I can only hope that they light a fire in your heart, and that you join me in this heroic quest to maintain the Balance and defeat evil in all its guises.

Part I

The

Material

Plane

The Material Plane is home. It is the realm of mortals and matter, mind and magic. Some would say that it is also the realm of the mundane, but for those who look closer, there is glory in the ordinariness of a pastoral life, and immense majesty in watching an eagle in flight. Although the Material Plane is infused with magic, it is the spark of sentience—what a cleric of Pelor would call a soul—within the eyes of mortal beings that makes this part of the multiverse special. I have looked into the eyes of angels, empyreans, and solars, and I have not seen the earnestness, warmth, and tenderness that I have seen in the eyes of a human being. So many eternal beings that I have encountered may comprehend the most abstract and erudite mechanics, but they lack this zest and curiosity for life that infuses the realm of the living. Perhaps that is the gift of birth and death, this lamp of the soul that lights our exploration into the unknown down an ever-changing river that flows to a universal ocean. In this way, the Material Plane is like a dungeon filled with treasures—the mysteries of life—and we are all adventurers who must use our wits, strength, and will to pass the myriad tests and trials that await us on this greatest of quests.

The eternal dreamscape of the Astral Plane or the bewildering magic of the Feywild may seem more extraordinary and more intense by comparison, yet there is something vital here in the Material Plane, more soulful, that exists nowhere else in the multiverse. It is as if we mortal beings are at the cutting edge of a grand cosmic experiment of great significance; that all our actions reverberate throughout the planes, shifting the mechanics of the Great Wheel ever so slightly toward a new destiny. Although I am still attempting to comprehend this immensity (and perhaps it is a futile task), I must follow where my intelligence and my heart are directing my awareness. All evidence points to the possibility that every human, elf, dwarf, and halfling plays their role, no matter how seemingly small, in this magical cosmic clockwork. And the truth is this: each of us is a cog in this clockwork whose actions can change the time and tempo of the multiverse.

Greyhawk

The world closest to my heart and mind is Oerth, or as many now call it, Greyhawk.

Greyhawk is my birthplace, and even though I have spent years wandering far and wide across its lands, it still carries an allure of adventure for me, a yearning to unravel more of its mysteries. Greyhawk is raw and real, with an earthiness about it—the castles are not always smooth and finished the way they are in Faerûn, nor are the roads always paved with well-quarried flagstones but are worn into the earth by wagon wheels and bootheels. There’s weather here, both in the skies and in the people, a wildness that you can feel brewing under the surface or just beyond the horizon. Oerth’s magic is cut from the same cloth, and as in most every world, the magic here has its own character, eccentricities, and peculiar ways of flowing. For example, there’s a smoothness to spells on a world like Mystara, where fire flows cool and easy from the fingertips and conjuring anything from a bumblebee to a bear feels like the mathematical unfolding of a flower. But on Greyhawk, fire can burst into being with a bang, snorting and spitting like a horde of bugbears, and conjuring can feel like trying to open a rusty hinged door that squawks and shudders when bringing forth even the smallest creation. But to me, all this feels like home. Perhaps it is why a wizard who perfects magic here can work wonders on any other world. When I created my first extradimensional space, with a spell that would become Mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion, it was as if Greyhawk required me to hew it by hand from the fabric of reality itself, and as I did so, I could hear the iron-wrought voice of my uncle in the back of my head saying, You’re gonna have to work for what you want, boy; the Yatil Mountains don’t give two hoots of an owlbear about idle hopes and dreams.

Wild and Unknown

Even though most of Greyhawk has been mapped, what lies beyond the gates of any city or town is largely unknown to most inhabitants within. While having a glass of Bisselian port in Greyhawk’s popular Green Dragon Inn, I’ve seen fledgling adventurers poring over a map as if it had some magic power to protect them. Just because there’s a map that shows an area does not mean that it is known, and most of Greyhawk is simply that—a blank space of uncharted wilderness between the small outposts of civilization marked on a sheet of parchment. Thus, on Greyhawk more than any other world, traveling from one city to another is a serious affair, and one must always be prepared for unexpected trouble on even the briefest of journeys. A map, especially an old map, is unreliable at best and a misleading death trap at worst. Nefarious forces are always at work on Oerth—what was once indicated on a map as a place of rest can change over time, and sometimes overnight, to become a spawning ground for all manner of danger and wickedness. I daresay that bumbling Faerûnian bard, Volothamp Geddarm, would now be a pile of bleached bones on some lonely hilltop if he were to take one of his famously inebriated jaunts in the wilderness of Greyhawk.

2 Images of White Plume Mountain.

A Tale of Tsojcanth

What manner of treasure could compel a gathering of fortune seekers to risk near-certain death in obtaining it? Most innkeepers know tales of crates of gold lost at sea or fabled dwarven mines long overrun by monsters; tales that keep the adventurers coming to buy an ale and listen to another yarn of a fortune just waiting to be found. However, the promise of riches must always be weighed against the likelihood of surviving to enjoy the spoils of a dungeon delve.

But then there are treasures that turn the heads of nations.

Not mere piles of gold and gemstones, but treasures of magic powerful enough to turn the tide of a war. Magic powerful enough to crack through the planes and level entire armies with the utterance of a single arcane word.

This is what lay within the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.

Rumor reached me that a witch queen named Iggwilv had been plaguing the Marches of Perrinland. At first, I was not concerned—many witches, wizards, and other such miscreants have plagued Greyhawk with schemes of little consequence in the end, but then I learned that Iggwilv had summoned Graz’zt. The presence of a demon lord cannot be ignored by those of us who know the power of such beings.

Now, the details are murky about what exactly took place. Almost certainly they had a torrid affair; some say it ended dramatically with a terrible battle in which Iggwilv was mortally wounded, and others say that Graz’zt was defeated and vanished back to the Abyss as demons do when they’re killed on the Material Plane. (This has always fascinated me about demons—they may survive permanent death but they’re still not happy about it. Actually, they’re never happy about anything.)

Regardless of what happened, Iggwilv took her treasures, namely two objects of immense power—Daoud’s Wondrous Lanthorn and her own grimoire known as the Demonomicon of Iggwilv, a horrid text filled with powerful spells and a treatise on the fiendish creatures of the Lower Planes—along with her minions and her sizable hoard of gold, gems, and other riches. Together they all disappeared deep into a secret lair within the Yatil Mountains—itself a place of great peril.

How knowledge of Iggwilv’s hoard got out into the world is anyone’s guess, but in her complete, myopic dedication to satisfying her thirst for power, she brought to Greyhawk not one, but two items with the power to divert the path of fate and change the destiny of a nation.

And that is what kicked off quite possibly the greatest treasure hunt in the history of Greyhawk.

Powerful spells can be cast through each face of Daoud’s Wondrous Lanthorn, but it is fueled by only the most rare and brilliant gemstones. In the hands of a wizard wealthy enough to satisfy its insatiable need, the lanthorn would be a potent weapon that could be used to win wars and turn the tide of history. Few who crave its power know that if its fuel is exhausted and the light of the lanthorn goes out, so does the soul of the one who wields it. A small detail that is often overlooked by maniacs.

Although I am loathe to admit it, the Demonomicon is a testament—albeit a foul one—to how accomplished a witch Iggwilv was. It is said to include the true names of some high-level demons—an epic feat of procurement that has all the hallmarks of Iggwilv’s immense charisma and guile stamped all over it. Together with the spells it contains, it offers those foolish enough to read it the power to control and coerce beings of Chaos and would be disastrous in the wrong hands.

To my knowledge, Iggwilv’s treasure remains hidden in the lost caverns. Most who entered became lost themselves. Some never made it through the Yatils, which were notorious for avalanches and rockslides that could wipe out an entire party in one devastating rush of earth. Some were turned back by hobgoblin war parties or were crushed by playful stone giants who break their flesh-bound toys like massive toddlers. Even so, some reached Tsojcanth and experienced the labyrinth that Iggwilv had set for any who should find her lair. One party—Ethelrede, Flemin, Dunil, Weslocke, and a few others—returned with wild tales of encounters with monsters never before seen on Greyhawk, narrow escapes from an odd being from another plane, and a bewildering series of traps, tricks, and teleportations—all part of Iggwilv’s eclectic repertoire of witchy madness.

It was an exciting and perilous time in Greyhawk’s history, another moment when the Balance could have tipped in any number of ways. Should those items of power have fallen into the wrong clutches, it would most certainly have taken Greyhawk on a path laden with corpses and forced the Circle of Eight to unite once again and do battle with the forces of evil.

A Dangerous World

Now, there are dangers on every world in the multiverse, but Greyhawk is especially perilous because it is home to a high concentration of evildoers capable of irrevocably changing the world if they somehow get the upper hand. It is also still recovering from a magic cataclysm that took place in ancient times—an apocalyptic event of such power that it ended what some considered a golden age and began Greyhawk’s modern era. I believe this event caused cracks in the Material Plane that allowed the aforementioned evil to seep in from various dimensions, triggering a cascade of consequences that echo to this very day.

Enemies of Oerth

The enemies of Greyhawk are many and varied. I know not why they are here in such force save my own speculation about the myopic and outright foolish use of cataclysmic magic in ancient days, magic powerful enough to set the threads of fate weaving a new pattern for the tapestry of Greyhawk. The preponderance of bizarre and otherworldly monsters here speaks to the possibility that the ancient spells also created dimensional crawl spaces that allowed multi-eyed, gibbering creatures from the Far Realm to slip through the cracks and onto our plane.

Tharizdun

First, I must talk about the threat of the nihilistic entity known as Tharizdun. This elder evil can rise up anywhere in the multiverse, corrupting thoughts and polluting the land with its alien contamination, but it seems to have a particular obsession with Greyhawk for some inscrutable reason. Minds that are imbalanced gravitate to Tharizdun’s thought-warping ululations, building temples and grottoes dedicated to its foul practices. Even the mind of the demon queen Zuggtmoy has been made subject to Tharizdun’s will. Such is its power.

Is Tharizdun a single being? A collective? An object? A location? Many have speculated, but all who get too close in their attempts to uncover the secrets of this entity run the grave risk of being corrupted or consumed by its malevolent power.

I cannot overstate the danger of Tharizdun; my own Circle of Eight has faced this entity and its minions with dire cost. Although I have used everything in my power to know where Tharizdun will strike next, I have not been able to pierce the arcane darkness that surrounds it. It would seem that Tharizdun is cloaked by its unknowable nature, that it one moment exists and the next vanishes from existence leaving only the stain of its shadow on the land. Only the vigilance of heroes who know the telltale signs of its corruption and influence can sound the alarm in time and stop the rot of Tharizdun from spreading.

Vecna

Next, I must talk about the scheming and relentless lich known as Vecna, another plague that has escaped the confines of Greyhawk to become a multiplanar menace. The sheer number of epithets that Vecna has collected tells a great deal about his incalculable ego, but suffice to say his main moniker is the Whispered One, for the whispers of Vecna can instill madness in those whose hearts throb with the desire for power. It would seem that this is a pattern for the influence of evil—if there is a seed of evil within us, it will hatch