What is Gal Hadre?

So one of the first posts I wrote was about my primary fantasy setting that is called Gal Hadre.  Technically Gal Hadre is just the name of the primary continent that most things have focused around. The only other setting name I have really considered so far would be the World of Dragon Heresy, but that suggests dragons would be very central to everything and while dragons are important, they aren’t always in the foreground.  That blog was written in early 2021 and the setting has developed considerably since then, it is probably not a good representation of the current version of the setting.  And this post will not be able to go into things in any significant detail, many of the earlier focused blog posts are still very accurate.

Gal Hadre

So what is Gal Hadre?  It is a dark age/early medieval fantasy setting.  At this point, it has a well detailed primary continent, Gal Hadre.  Portions of three other continents, Kreos Phal, the Wilds of the West and the Southern Continent, also reasonably detailed, usually in the regions that most directly interact with Gal Hadre and getting less detailed as you move farther out.  There is probably at least one more continent south-west of Gal Hadre, along with the Land of endless Ice in the arctic that have little or no detail.

The setting originally started because I was unhappy with the way D&D especially, but fantasy rpgs generally tended to handle magic.  There was just a huge list of spells that you could pick from with no need to specialize or justify how you got a high level fire spell when you had never used fire magic before.  So I started dividing spells into different lists and thinking about what kind of setting would have more limitations on magic; those lists eventually informed what would become the eight paths of dragon magic.  Magic that while it can be used in many powerful ways, is far more restrictive than any D&D style magic spell list.  At the same time, it is more flexible, and two mages who focus on the same path could use their magic to achieve wildly different things.  One key choice many mages have to make is if they focus on one path or learn several and the choice largely comes down to do you want flexibility or power?

 

Kreos Phal

Partially because Gal Hadre’s initial roots are as an rpg setting, it has multiple sentient species.  But when I was developing what would become this setting in its early days I didn’t want to just use generic fantasy species.  So there are no elves, dwarves or orcs; though you will find creatures that generally fill the same niches as them.  To keep things somewhat reasonable, different parts of the world have different species in large or smaller numbers.  Imbrar and Jotun are relatively common in Kreos Phal.  But they aren’t common anywhere else.  Bratun and Carvax are dominant in much of the Southern Continent, but rare everywhere else.  The only common species everywhere is humans.

Gal Hadre has four or five (depending on how you view the Vrak) non-human species in decent numbers.  The Tund, incredibly long lived, fallen angels with sensitive skin.  The Werd, bipedal beetles that are primarily caste based.  Trollkin, magically fused creations of human and troll origin.  Peshtar, lion-men that are very clan based.  Lastly the Vrak, undead that seem to just naturally occur sometimes.  I have written articles on all of these species and more, please look at those if you want more information about them.

 

the Southern Continent

Eventually, the idea of Gal Hadre was getting too much to be a D&D setting with a few tweaks to some rules.  I was also playing a lot of not-D&D games, primarily the warhammer 40k rpg Dark Heresy.  So I started working on a set of rules pulling from all these different influences with Gal Hadre as a setting designed from the ground up to work with those rules.  As a temporary name, I called the project Dark Dungeons & Dragon Heresy drawing from both its primary influences.  That of course created a question in my mind, why/how would “Dragon Heresy” be a thing.  Dragons are awesome, definitively fantasy creatures, but rarely associated with anything like heresy which implies religious things.  Thus came the Neverborn, the first eight dragons and first creations of the gods.  Dragons who revolted against the gods millennia ago and became effectively an evil pantheon.  Their descendants still cause considerable problems, especially when they gather in dragonstorms.

Eventually I started writing fiction set in Gal Hadre, initially it was to help me further develop the setting, but I started in early 2019 and had gotten enough momentum going that when covid shut the world down a year later it was one of the things I did to keep busy.  And writing about things in Gal Hadre has certainly helped, even in 2021 when I last wrote about Gal Hadre generally, a lot of ideas only really existed in my head.  Now I use Obsidian, a free program that lets you build an offline wiki, and the file associated with Gal Hadre has nearly 800 articles and over 120,000 words.  Thus the setting is far better established and many ideas that were vague in my head are now fleshed out.  Every region of Gal Hadre and probably a score beyond now have enough detail that I can refer to them in a story and have a good idea what the region is like.  I have also mapped out the setting far more extensively, as you can see from the maps that I have added to this post.  It is amazing how mapping out something clarifies so much about it.

 

the Wilds of the West

So that is the basics of the current state of Gal Hadre.  What do you think about it?  Is there an area of the setting I haven’t written a blog post about yet that particularly interests you?