Velthuryn — World Atlas

Velthuryn is a fractured, high-magic world built for heroic and emotionally resonant stories in the Daggerheart RPG system. Slightly smaller than Earth, it turns slowly beneath its star, Solivar, completing a full axial rotation every thirty-six hours. Each cycle is evenly divided into eighteen hours of radiant longbright and eighteen hours of luminous deepglow. Night is never truly dark. Two highly reflective moons, Tasserin and Cassanda, travel the sky in differing cycles, flooding most nights with silvery light that feels closer to dusk than darkness. A full year lasts 428 days, and time itself feels patient, heavy, and deliberate. Velthuryn is a world where memory lingers, where lands seem aware of what has come before, and where heroes are shaped as much by emotional consequence as by steel or spellcraft.

The modern age of Velthuryn is defined by the Aethergrave, a vast and unresolved wound in reality whose cause remains unknown. Its emergence shattered landscapes, rewrote oaths, bent time, and scattered griefglass across the world. Griefglass, born of loss and resonance, is now central to magic, religion, law, and war, revered by some and feared by others. The Aethergrave set the world humming with resonance, a force that binds memory, emotion, and place. Forests remember their ancestors, rivers carry emotion downstream, deserts whisper of futures never lived, and fortress-states compress truth until it becomes dangerous. Alongside beasts of flesh and blood, Echo Adversaries now arise, manifestations of suppressed truths, unresolved choices, and histories that refuse to stay buried.

Velthuryn is divided into fourteen distinct states, each shaped by how it responds to resonance rather than by simple borders or lineage. Across these lands exist diverse ancestries, communities, and eight complex religions that interpret the world’s wounds in sharply different ways. Some cultures adapt and listen, others suppress and contain, while still others exploit resonance for power or profit. Hope and Fear are not abstract ideas here, but forces that visibly shape outcomes, relationships, and geography. Velthuryn is not a setting of rising and falling empires, but a living world learning, imperfectly, how to survive its own memory.

Geographically, Velthuryn is bound together by breath, tide, and stone. Its two great continents face one another across the warm Bangrave Sea, a central gulf that cleaves the realm in twain. To the north, the Smithsoll Sea gathers the Bangrave’s outflow into cold, echoing waters that scour the Torral promontory and the mist-laden coasts of the Velkar Spires. To the south, the Waters of Tunneau lap against Lexharrow and the Sunlash Coast before mingling westward with the storm-fed Mellheiller Ocean. Inland, the Sea of Lir and the Gulf of Wakewall shape the western continent’s shores, their tides carrying trade, memory, and consequence alike. For players and GMs, Velthuryn offers a setting where every journey leaves a mark, every choice echoes, and the world itself is always listening during the longbright and the deepglow.