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The World
The world in this campaign consists of two large continents, refered to simply as The Northern Continent and the Southern Continent. The realms of the North tend to have a very European feel to them (plus one realm which is based on Egypt), while those of the South draw more upon a mixture of Africa, Middle East, and India. Things were not always this way, however...
Brief History
In The Beginning... <I'll put more in later>
Religions
The religions include Egyptian, Norse, Greek/Roman, Celtic, Persian, and several others I can't remember as I'm writing this.. Have to check up on that. *grin*
Magic
Magic is of course an important aspect of any fantasy setting. In this particular world, Mana, the power of Magic, is also the essence of everything. I use it as sort of a fantasy analog of the Einsteinian concept of Energy and its relation to Matter. This yields interesting things.. such as Death Magic. Any destruction will release the Mana bound into material form. Battle Magic becomes much more potent.. and potentially more tricky. I also adhere to the belief that fairly common use of magic will, to some extent, take the place of technology. Thus we find one particular city built upon a maze of canals where small water elementals are used for keeping the waters clean (except in the slum region.. not even the water elementals like to go there!). While they tend to be rare, we do have magical analogs to matches, flash lights, first aid kits, and other simple wonders of the Technological Age.
("Oh, Lord, bless this, thy hand grenade, that with it Thou may blow Thy enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy" - from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail")
Races
The various races have undergone some psychological changes from the norm. Shapechangers have also undergone a few physiological changes, but that'll be described in the Rules pages. All in all, I've tried to both make use of stereotypes and avoid them (neat trick, eh?). Take Elves, for instance. For the most part, they are Good Folk. But aside from generic elves, we have the Sea Elves, who are, well, let's face it - they're pirates, ruling the waves of the Inner Sea from the decks of their War Catamarans. There are the Mist Elves, who charge into battle without armor, skin painted blue, wode run through their hair to make it stand straight up, screaming like Banshees. Sound familiar? Picture Celtic berserkers with pointy ears.
Actually, the campaign has taken an interesting turn of late. Instead of usually running afoul of Orcs, Trolls, and other dread beasties like in the Good Ol' Days, the adventurers have actually gotten involved with an (arguably) evil Elvish bandit-prince, and they've been aided by Orcs and Trolls. Weird stuff! I've also been changing a number of the creatures so that while the players are armed with info from the book, they occasionally get a little shock as they discover they don't actually know just what to expect. Zombies, for instance, have become a bit more Hollywood. See my rules section on how I'm treating the lesser undead now. They are no longer wimps, but truly fear inspiring.
Languages
The dominant language is that of a Northern realm which had once lorded over an empire that stretched across most of the Northern Continent (well, actually about a third, but you know how these emperors exagerate!), and partly into the Southern Continent. This is, of course, known as Trade Common, or more popularly just Common. A number of the other languages use draw heavily on historical languages as well as (very heavily) Tolkien. I've found a number of good sources online, which are listed in my DQ Links section.
Calender for Campaign World (PDF)