Adapting & Extending
The compendium is the default world, but it is not a cage — it is a foundation. This chapter is about the two directions you can take this project: adding to what is here, and bending the whole thing toward a campaign of your own. Both are supported, as long as you work with the system's grain rather than against it.
Working with the grain
The system's grain is its engine: races and classes and spells and monsters and gear, joined by references, run by classic-style rules. When you extend, ask does this new thing plug into the engine rather than does it alter the engine? A new race plugs in by filling the race fields. A new class plugs in by choosing a pillar and filling its tables. A new spell, monster, weapon, or ability plugs in by being fully specified. The moment your change needs to rewrite how the whole system reads a field to work, you have left extension and entered redesign — redesign is allowed, but it is a bigger commitment and should be deliberate.
Scaffolding a new campaign
If you are adapting this to your own setting, the most rewarding order is:
- Start with the setting's texture in the rules and documents — the pantheon, the factions, the places, the tone. The Deities and Pantheon-style documents and the GM instruction files are where the campaign lives. Describe the world you want before you build its pieces.
- Build the folk. Add or adjust races to match your world's peoples, with traits and level limits that express what they are. If a race in the default set does not belong in your world, leave it out or build its replacement.
- Curate the callings. Your world has its own professions of heroism. A new class or kit is the cleanest way to make your setting feel distinct — a knight of a specific order, a shaman of a specific god, a specialist of a specific craft. Keep each kit on its parent pillar and give it a real job and a real cost.
- Write the spells and gods. For casters, the schools and spheres are the vocabulary of power. Give your deities their own sphere access — the war god who grants combat and protection, the sea god who grants the elements — and new spells that serve your world's flavor.
- Stock the deep dark. Monsters are where your world gets its teeth and its legends. Build the horrors that haunt your setting's corners, each with a full ecology and a fair threat.
- Hand out the gear. Weapons, equipment, and magic items that feel native to your campaign — the two-handed greatsword of your knights, the bauble that only your setting produces.
Each step plugs into the engine, so by the end you have not a pasted-over copy but a real second world standing on the same honest foundation.
The referee's layer
Remember the split this project honors: players get the Player's Handbook; the refereeing layers — adjudication, encounter building, treasure, the secrets and the running of the game — belong in the GM instruction files and the rules documents. When you build a campaign, enrich that hidden layer as much as the public compendium: the referee is the one who will carry your world, and the more their tools are stocked with your setting's decisions — what is found, how it reacts, what is at stake — the more your world comes alive at the table.
Keeping proportion
There is a natural size for every addition. Twenty focused, well-specified new entries that fill real gaps beat two hundred terse placeholders every time. A campaign's flavor comes from a handful of signature pieces — the pantheon, the folk, a few homelands and horrors — woven through the game, not from sheer volume. Add what earns its place, fill every field it needs, and resist the urge to inflate. The compendium is already vast; your job is to make it yours, which is a matter of choice and quality, not count.
When you finish
Ask the questions this whole manual has been teaching: Does the new race/class/spell/monster/item build honestly into a character sheet? Do its references resolve? Is it fully specified so the referee and the table never have to guess? Is it written in original words that keep the project safe to share? And — the final test — is it something you and your table would genuinely want at the last session you ever run? The project is a toolbox and a promise. Built with care, it will serve your campaigns for years; that is the whole reason it was made. Go make the world your own.