Ytherra began as a personal project to develop a detailed, believable setting for fantasy role-playing games.  I had Rolemaster in mind specifically, but as work proceeded I began to add elements that did not fit particularly well with that system (an early attempt to run a campaign using Rolemaster ended in utter disaster.)  As the setting evolved I came to the realization that no extant ruleset would support it very well without serious modification of either mechanics or setting, neither of which I was willing to do.  So Ytherra became essentially systemless, an exercise in world design for its own sake.

A large amount of work was done over a period of several years – approximately 250,000 words of bulk text, mostly in a huge glossary of setting terms, places, personalities, geographical features and miscellaneous things of interest, but also including standalone articles on cosmology, astrography (I calculated orbits and surface gravity for every major body in Ytherra’s planetary system,) religious practices and linguistic history, in addition to painstakingly assembled maps, linguistic notes and lexicons, genealogical tables and dynastic histories for the Emperors of Arál Draván.

I first began posting the Ytherra material to the web in October of 1996 (my notes do not include the exact date – I had to dig through ancient, crumbling CD-ROMs to find the backups of the old site to get that date.)  A fraction of the material made it onto the site — much of it was unpolished, and I’d found that once I was “done” with an article, further work on the subject did not inspire me — and if I was inspired, it resulted in a complete (and sometimes dramatic) rewrite.  Around 2003, I started redoing the maps from scratch using Campaign Cartographer 2 and Fractal Terrains, together the best mapmaking package I’ve seen for world-level fantasy maps.  But this reshuffled the geography — the hand-drawn world of the old maps no longer felt organic to me — and with it came a wholesale redesign of the setting.  And that’s where it stalled for a couple of years.

Updates had always been sporadic for various reasons – unpolished or unfinished material, changes in web providers, software packages, new computers that required the reinstallation of multiple pieces of software… the list of excuses runs on.  But in April of 2007 I finally just took the site down.  My motivation for ‘publishing’ Ytherra was primarily to get feedback, and the website was never especially good at that.  But even though the website was often infrequently updated, I never entirely stopped working on the setting.

And Ytherra has never been entirely absent from the creative half of my brain.  It has always been a syncretic setting – you can see in the early material, I think, the influence of M. A. R. Barker, Robert Jordan and Robin Crossby.  Since then I’ve absorbed a number other inspirations, from George R. R. Martin to Steven Brust to Steven Erikson, that will probably be similarly evident as the new material develops.  And a lot of this is new material, containing, I hope, some spark and many elements of the old, but redesigned, refocused and much of it rewritten from scratch.  It’s not actually Ytherra 2.0 – it’s Ytherra 5.0 in my own notes.

Meanwhile, enjoy.  And if you do, drop me a note telling me so.  Feedback is the bread and wine of creative folk, and will help motivate me to keep working on new material.