The Decachord
The Decachord is a fantasy world I am building to carry novels, tabletop and computer roleplaying games: a setting that is open, holds together, and can grow without contradicting itself. It is published at joetjen.net/The-Decachord.
The world
It is a world of epic stories: heroes and monsters, magic that is seen and feared, elder ruins full of treasure and the dead, gods close enough to answer, and planes and zones where the laws of the world bend. Beneath the wonder, everything follows fixed laws with costs and limits, magic first of all.
- The universe is a finite bubble of Order in the Nothing. Ten Primes, impersonal forces, define what is stable; Stewards guard its laws and thresholds, Resonants are the gods that worship and fear give a shape, and the Dark Entities threaten all of it.
- Magic moves, converts and reshapes energy that already exists; it never makes it from nothing. Every living being carries lifeforce, which shapes healing, affinity and what a spell costs.
- The first full era is medieval Caeldon, around 1,350 CR: a high-fantasy age of old roads and elder ruins, where order rests on custom, oath and kinship, and the drama is less one world-ending crisis than the struggle to belong, to keep, to remember and to rule.
The books
The world is told in the series The Chromatic Chord: The Writers’ Guide to the Decachord, free to read online and to download as PDF and EPUB:
| Book | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1 · Foundations | The ground every era stands on: the cosmos, the powers, the laws of magic, the peoples as kinds, and the deep past. |
| 2 · The Medieval Era | Caeldon around 1,350 CR: its peoples and powers, sickness and remedy, an atlas region by region, and how its present was made. |
| 3 · A Bestiary of Caeldon | The beings that are not peoples: animals, plants and fungi, the natives of the planes and zones, the hosts of the Dark Entities, constructs and the risen dead. |
Next to the books, the Reference is a wiki of the same world: every power, plane, people, place, faith, spell, creature and age, with links to the chapters that tell it.
Using it
Anyone may read the material, use it for their own stories, games and campaigns, and share it unmodified and free of charge. Works of your own set in the world (novels, adventures, game systems, maps, art) may be published and sold. Only copies of the books themselves are kept back: they are not to be sold or shared in altered form.
The binding terms are the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence together with the Decachord Creators’ Permission, which grants more than the licence does on its own; both are on the licence page.
How it is made
The setting lives in a public repository as about 1,100 AsciiDoc documents across eight shelves (cosmology, the divine hierarchy, magic, timeline, people, places, bestiary and ailments), with registries for names, places and dates. Elixir scripts audit the cross-references and the timeline, and Asciidoctor turns the same sources into the books and the website.
Questions, ideas and contributions are welcome on the Discord server or at decachord.stoppable990@passmail.net. Only material accepted into the repository counts as canon.