My original Eurocentric dark-fantasy D&D setting, built and expanded since 2015 through years of worldbuilding: lore, characters, regions, factions, questlines, big bad evil things, heroes and probably far too many npcs to ever use them all.
Welcome to Düsterbruch.
What started as the backdrop for a campaign got a little out of hand.
Over time, Düsterbruch grew into its own world, with different regions, cultures, conflicts and histories — from the foggy lowlands of Westbühl and the Marschlande to the Flüsterwald, the Wyrmsea and old dwarven kingdoms buried deep inside the mountains.
It all started years before AI came around.
A lot of Düsterbruch was built by teaching myself whatever I happened to need next.
Traditional cartography, plot writing and adventure economy during lunch breaks. Political and theological systems. Pagan rites, folklore, mythology and online discussions about how a river flows and where wetlands typical lay — in the evenings.
Not because I wanted to recreate any of it faithfully. Quite the opposite. I wanted to understand enough to make informed decisions, mix things together and turn them into something that felt like its own thing.
And that’s actually pretty close to how I work professionally. I like going deep into topics, reading studies and white papers, collecting cultural references and following connections that initially have very little to do with each other.
I lovingly describe it as a fairly substantial need for constant flow of input/output. My ADHD definitely plays a part in that: there’s usually a corner in my brain filled with references, facts, observations and completely unrelated things bouncing around and throwing sparks into whatever I’m working on.
Düsterbruch is probably the most excessive example of that.
From hexmap to a heck-of-a-lot more.
The region of Düsterbruch started as a hand-drawn map, redone in a simple hexmap editor and reskinned with almost 1TB of real world satellite imagery (thank you NASA archive).
With each new recreation, the world grew into a setting of its own, with distinct regions, cultures and conflicts — from the foggy lowlands of Westbühl and the Marschlande to the Flüsterwald, the Wyrmsea and the old dwarven kingdoms buried deep inside the Düsterbruch Mountains.
The tone has always been more grounded and mythic than high fantasy: old ruins beneath newer civilizations, restrained magic, contested faith, forgotten wars and the feeling that the world has been around for a very long time before the players ever arrived.
Over the years, I kept expanding it through lore writing, factions, rulers, myths, monsters, magic, adventure hooks and in-world texts — curated in the chronicles of Alfred Marian Harrowell, a travelling observer who became one of the main voices through which the setting is documented.
100,000+ words later…
At this point, Düsterbruch spans well over 100,000 words of lore, hundreds of characters, creatures, places, factions, myths and questlines, plus years of maps, notes, research and campaign material. Before I even started visualising it with AI, I had already collected roughly 9,000 references on Pinterest trying to pin down its look and atmosphere. Midjourney finally gave me a way to turn all of that accumulated worldbuilding into something that actually feels close to the version of Düsterbruch I had in my head.
