Welcome to Sildair

A Land of Magic

Welcome to Sildair, a high fantasy world for use with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, and other roleplaying games. This wiki will contain lore of the world, its inhabitants and its history, as well as the ocational house-rule or statblock for use with 5e. Sildair attempts to dial back the high fantasy tropes of D&D a little bit, making the world slightly more grounded in medieval history, but this is only slightly. Sildair is still a world full of magic, and of colourful creatures and myths. The adjustments are only there to satisfy my, the author's, personal preferences.

The Rapier Problem

One of these types of adjustments is what I call "The Rapier Problem". It goes something like this: Sildair is supposed to be a world that is superficially analogous to 12th century Eurasia, and nobody could make a rapier until hundreds of years after the 12th century. A rapier is nothing more than a one handed sword, made much better, with better techniques and materials than what they could do half a millinium earlier. So it simply does not fit into a world where more simple, crusiform swords are also around. Its the equivalent of assault rifles during the Napolionic wars. That is, according to my personal tastes, that particular anachronism can't stand. Your milage may vary, and certainly, I am not consistent in my application of changes that I make because I don't like something, I just don't like rapiers alongside 12th century arming swords. What I don't have a problem with at all though, is martial finesse weapons that deal 1d8 damage. It's just that in Sildair, that is simply called: A particularly fine and well-balanced sword. If a character is proficient with rapiers, or a magical weapon I find in some module is a rapier, that doesn't bother me, as long as I can "reskin" that rapier to look a little more 12th century. The same is true of a bunch of monsters in Dungeons & Dragons that I don't much like the look and style of. The rapier problem is different from:

The Teleportation Problem

In Dungeons & Dragons there are alot of spells for higher level spellcasters that makes it possible to teleport from one end of the world to the other. It seems obvious that those are there for the players to have to option of having a campaign take place in many different exotic locales, and also have a sense of urgency built in, when you need to travel far, fast. However, I have two problems with that: the first is that in a world where magical practitioners can travel instantanously all over the world, things end up looking very different. Trade, politics, warfare, everything is affected by such wondreous abilities. The other is that I actually like to present players with the logistics of travel in a medieval world, and I don't like them circumventing them. Once again, my personal problem is with teleportation, and not with other spells, so it's not a consistently applied adjustment. The difference from the rapier problem is that here, I actually change the mechanics of the game to suit my preferences. All the long distance teleportation spells are unavailable in Sildair (at least when I play), though Misty Step and similar spells and skills stay. That's because they are cool, integral to many classbuilds, and they don't break the world the way travel teleportation does. Healing spells and ressurection spells that work on a corpse are available as normal, but they affect the world, because people with money and power now get healed and resurected, so that they get to grow a lot older than people who can't afford it. Resurrection without a corpse is not possible. That raises the stakes of permadeath for characters, but I just don't like the consequences that such spells would necessarily have on the history of Sildair. If a beloved king dies, and you can return him to life, even centuries later, with no corpse, I suspect that would happen on a fairly regular basis. While it is rare magic, that only the most powerful clerics can do, The Most Powerful Clerics are exactly those that kings have access to. There also is just the one plane, so no multiverse in Sildair. That's more of a reskin situation though: a bag of holding need not be explained with other dimensions to exist.

The Language Problem

The final big adjustment that I make from 5th edition is one of language. I like languages, and I like the challenges of communication. Not everyone enjoys that, and besides, sometimes you just want to get on with the story, so I don't want to overdo it, but it does seem that in D&D the language of "common" is just so... common, that trying to communicate or translate is really only ever necessary when dealing with ancient texts. I think it's a shame, when characters so easily can get access to so many languages that they rarely are encouraged by the game to use them. There is still a "common" in Sildair (though it's called Sarkaran, not common), for the simple reason that the characters ought to be able to understand eachother. I'm sure there's a group of players out there who would love to roleplay having to slowly overcome language barriers with eachother, but it doesn't sound like most people's idea of fun. But while Sarkaran is widespread around the world of Sildair, I like the idea of the different characters having to be the interpretors for eachother as they travel from place to place.