The Norwold Campaign Compendium

Norwold is the vast, half-tamed subcontinent at the northeastern corner of Brun, north of the Known World and east of the Borean Valley. It is larger than the whole Known World and almost empty: deep evergreen forests, river valleys, tundra, and three great mountain walls, dotted with frontier dominions whose rulers won their land by the sword and the royal charter [Neri-TG] [RC].

This compendium gathers the canon and the best community material into a single cited reference for running a major campaign in Norwold, levels 1-12, in the Mystaran Almanac era (AC 1014-1019).

The era in one paragraph

Alphatia, the island empire that claimed Norwold, sank beneath the sea in AC 1009 during the Wrath of the Immortals [WotI]. Its surviving colonies and fleets regathered as the New Alphatian Confederate Empire (NACE) by AC 1014 [Alm-Alpha]. King Ericall, a son of the drowned empire’s empress, held on to his northern kingdom, renamed it “Alpha,” married the mage Queen Christina Marie Alanira in AC 1014, and now rules a reduced realm inside NACE [Alm-Alpha]. To the south and east the Heldannic Knights seized their chance: they invaded in AC 1010, took Landfall and the Kamminer Bay coast, and briefly held Oceansend until a coup threw them out in AC 1015 [Alm-Oceansend] [Alm-Kamminer] [LoZ-WarCrown]. The dozens of small dominions carved out in Ericall’s Great Land Rush a generation earlier now stand as a patchwork of baronies, counties, and duchies, many only loosely loyal, some openly independent [Gander-Dom] [Neri-LandRush]. It is a frontier with a power vacuum: exactly the country a band of nobodies can ride into and make a name.

Why this era suits a 1-12 campaign. The canonical Norwold adventures (CM1 Test of the Warlords and its sequels) are Companion and Master tier, roughly levels 15-25, and they assume you already command a dominion [CM1]. A level 1-12 campaign sits below that: it is the story of how a party rises from hired blades to landed powers. The Land Rush is the engine. By the time the characters reach name level (around 9th), earning a charter of their own is the natural capstone, and it hands cleanly into CM1-style domain play.

How to use the sections

Realms, the political map of AC 1016: the Kingdom of Alpha, independent Oceansend, the halfling Shire of Leeha, and the regional groupings of Land-Rush dominions, with rulers. Start here to place a home base.
Geography, the physical land, climate, travel, hazards, and a full alphabetical gazetteer of named places.
Peoples, the cultures: Heldanners, the Finnic Jääkansa and Lapp Vaeltajat, the Slavic Vatski, the Ugric Viaskoda, the Norse-styled raiders, plus the halflings, elves, dwarves, and the dragons of the Wyrmsteeth.
History, a cited timeline from prehistory to AC 1019 and the post-sinking political aftermath.
NPCs, King Ericall and his court, the dominion-holders, the villains, the dragons, and the monster-queens of the ice.
Campaign, the cohesive 1-12 arc, four ready home bases (Alpha, Oceansend, Leeha, Two Lakes Vale), tier-by-tier adventure seeds, and the cross-campaign plot threads.
Maps, an annotated index of the fan and replica maps, with local copies for offline use.
Sources, the master bibliography. Every claim is tagged.

Reading the citations

Every factual claim carries a bracket tag like [CM1] or [Alm-Alpha] that resolves in Sources. Canon is cited, never reproduced. Community work is credited to its author with a link. Where sources disagree, both are noted and the guide states which it follows. For the political snapshot, the Mystaran Almanac entries win; for deep lore the MMB regional gazetteer [MMB-Region] and Simone Neri’s Threshold articles [Neri-TG] are the spine.

A word on canon versus fan material

Norwold is thinly detailed in canon and richly developed by its fan community. This guide marks the difference. The MMB gazetteer explicitly tags each feature as canon (with a module) or fan invention [MMB-Region]; those tags are carried through here. A DM who wants a strictly canonical game can filter on the module tags; a DM who wants a full, living region can take the community layer whole. It is built to support either.