Kethos as a Universal Fantasy Setting
One of the core design goals behind Kethos has always been breadth without fragmentation. Rather than locking the world into a single fantasy genre, the setting is built as a complete planet, large enough and internally consistent enough to support many different play styles without splitting them into separate continuities or incompatible sub-settings.
If what you want is traditional European fantasy, feudal politics, ruined castles, border wars, dungeon crawls, and early gunpowder intrigue, the Kehler Lands, presented in Kethos Book I, are designed as a broad foundation. Pike-and-shot era conflicts, religious tensions, decaying imperial authority, and frontier violence all coexist. The same book also supports Roman- and Byzantine-inspired campaigns, as well as forest-frontier adventures against fragmented polities and non-human threats. It is intentionally large to serve as a primary entry point.
For campaigns focused on steppe societies, caravan routes, imperial bureaucracy, religious courts, and Middle Eastern or Arabian Nights–style intrigue, the Perashdan Empire, detailed in Kethos Book I, provides a very different tone while remaining part of the same geopolitical system. Its cities, provinces, and internal conflicts support everything from courtly maneuvering to desert warfare and long-distance trade campaigns.
Groups interested in stranger material, lost cities, cursed ruins, eldritch forces, and pulp-era weirdness inspired by Robert E. Howard or H. P. Lovecraft will find that tone supported in Kethos Book II. This volume focuses on regions where the world behaves strangely: jungles hiding dead civilizations, ancient horrors that never entirely left, and cultures shaped by proximity to forces that do not conform to normal reality. The same book also supports maritime and oceanic campaigns, including Pacific and Polynesian–inspired cultures, exploration, and naval power.
For medieval African–inspired stories and campaigns centered on East and Southeast Asian cultural models, Kethos Book III expands the setting south and east. Hyaras provides space for large empires, religious authority, trade networks, and internal reform movements, while the Taohuan Realms support campaigns built around different philosophies of power, warfare, and social obligation. These regions are not thematic sidebars; they are fully integrated parts of the world’s history and politics.
Later books narrow the focus to support more specialized campaign styles. Kethos Book IV concentrates on city-states, trade leagues, swashbuckling politics, assassins, and court intrigue, drawing inspiration from places like Venice without reducing them to pastiche. Kethos Book V supports campaigns centered on highly structured martial societies, samurai, ninja, shogunate politics, and the tensions between honor, obligation, and covert violence.
The important point is not simply that Kethos contains many fantasy genres, but that they all exist in the same world. A party can move between them by ship, by caravan, or by magic. Empires trade, collide, and destabilize one another. Conflicts in one region echo elsewhere. A campaign can remain tightly focused on a single book and location, or expand across continents without ever leaving the setting behind. Kethos is designed to give you a world that can support almost any kind you want, grounded, strange, political, martial, or exploratory, without breaking continuity or forcing the setting to reinvent itself every time the tone changes.
