Do you want to deepen your worldbuilding in Azuria? The Age of Azuria epic fantasy series is the perfect companion to the Land of Vampires duet 5e campaign!
Let me start by saying that 2024 has been an incredible year, stretching and growing us in ways we couldn’t have imagined. February saw our first Kickstarter for Land of Vampires, our full-length duet campaign, successfully funded! My heart still swells in my chest when I remember the box full of Land of Vampires books arriving at our house and the packing party we had to send them out to all of our amazing backers!
Fulfilling the Promise of D&D Duet
But for the purposes of this post, I’m being a bit more vulnerable than a standard advice posts might ask me to be. I want to give you a peek behind the scenes.
The promise of D&D Duet was to help you create a whole world, just for two. That message was at the top of our page when we launched in 2019, and it remains our mission in our sixth year of bringing you one-on-one adventures and advice.
Jonathan and I desperately want that mission for you: the depth of worldbuilding, connection with a partner, shaping the world around the mission and gifting of a particular PC, etc.
Some of you reading this have already created incredible worlds for your duet partner to swim around in (figuratively and perhaps literally). [Now I’m picturing a mermaid campaign and really want to play!] But some of you may be thinking that you don’t have time to create an entire world. Or you aren’t sure where to begin, have gotten stuck creating a world before, or might simply find it uninteresting as a prospect.
The Promise of Azuria
What has been hard for me to say but has increasingly become necessary and true at the same time is that we’ve created that world for you already. 2019 Beth and Jonathan didn’t know that’s what they were doing. I hadn’t even started my first novel when we launched D&D Duet in January of 2019, and I’m currently revising my sixth!
It’s felt presumptuous for me to say that we have the world part taken care of for you. That we’ve built a fully immersive world that’s detailed and intriguing but still has plenty of room for adventure, exploration, and personalization. Our dream has grown over the last several years of creating D&D content for you in part because we’ve come to better know you. I love receiving your emails, listening to what you need, answering your questions.
The questions I’ve been getting, especially after the Kickstarter, have been asking for more details about Azuria. More worldbuilding, more lands unlocked, more places for adventure.
It feels strange to be typing out that those questions have been so scary because they were exactly what I was hoping for. How do we not share more often how scary it is when your dream comes true, even better and more vibrantly than you could have ever crafted it in the first place?
Worlds of Adventure in Azuria, available right now!
I am incredibly grateful to those of you who have been asking for more details about Azuria, the wave after wave of requests for more information about this world that I love, this world that’s so incredibly special, near and dear to my heart. The world Jonathan and I created, at our gaming table, together, and get to share with you.
It was one such question that led to the creation of this post, and I’m going to answer that question below.
How does the timeline of Land of Vampires overlap with the Age of Azuria epic fantasy series?
I love this question. To answer it, I’m going to provide a bit of background for both the series and the campaign and connect it to adventures that I think it likely you’re already familiar with. If you are more curious about the answer than the context, scroll down to the next section.
Inspiration behind Age of Azuria and its connection to duet gaming
Age of Azuria emerged out of our home game, with the core storyline coming from the same duet sessions that inspired First Blush. (Many of the events in Buried Heroes, the first novel, will be familiar to fans of First Blush which, it is my deep hope, will deepen the enjoyment of the reading experience for you!)
At its core, Age of Azuria emerged from my desire to spend more time in our world and with our game.
A very close second was being able to share our game with you.
When we first started D&D Duet, there were still plenty of people who were dubious about playing D&D with just two people. (However unbelievable it may sound to you as part of this amazing community, we in fact had a lovely and kind local gaming store owner repeat this exact sentiment to us yesterday. We made sure to leave her with a card and a link to a free copy of The Penshaw Poisonings.)
Bonus reason #1: What’s possible
I wanted to share what was possible for duet gameplay. If someone has never experienced
- the immersive depth possible in duet RP,
- the heartpounding stakes of combat when you’re outnumbered and outmatched and its truly up to your wiles and creativity to win the day,
- the empowerment of knowing that you can go wherever you want and do whatever you want in the world, all you have to do is ask
then I get how one might disbelieve that not only is duet D&D possible… I would even say it’s better.
Bonus reason #2: Inspiration
In sharing our game, I also wanted to inspire GMs for one-on-one, who are among my very favorite people on the planet. Your creativity and care for your partner, your desire to spend time with them in such an intimate, thoughtful way, not to mention the fun and empowerment you’ll experience together, is a daily source of inspiration to me. I want to return that as fully, as often as I can.
Connecting Age of Azuria with Land of Vampires
Buried Heroes, book one in AofA, follows the adventures of Linolynnian noblewoman Iellieth Amastacia after her amulet whisks her off to a snowy cliffside. (Fans of First Blush would be correct in guessing that there’s an ancient warrior waiting for her inside.)
Similarly, Land of Vampires starts in Linolynn where children have been disappearing from the streets and from their beds. The PC witnesses the aftermath of one such disappearance and sets out to get to the bottom of it.
Buried Heroes starts about two weeks before Land of Vampires and ends almost perfectly coinciding with LoV. Both stories center around the seaside kingdom of Linolynn.
What’s perhaps even more exciting is that the second novel, Hadvarian Heist, incorporates the storyline for my Land of Vampires character, Briseras, as she hunts the Caldaran countryside for a vampire. (She may or may not be but definitely is ridding said countryside of werewolves as she goes.) If you’re looking for PC backstory inspiration, it’s the perfect place to go!
Like the PC’s journey in LoV, Briseras’s storyline intersects with Nassarq and, from there, crosses into Steymhorod itself. (This makes up one of my favorite storylines in book three, Amber Queen.)
Bonus reason to read Age of Azuria
If you’re looking for a bonus reason to read Age of Azuria, the series does preview some of our upcoming duet campaigns! One of our future campaigns involves the rejoining of Azuria with the elemental planes. Another, the Tree of Silver, delves into Azuria’s deep past, when the world was still known as Eldura, and explores the disappearances of dragons and the threads that weave the worlds together across space and time.
Inspiration for our future direction
In the period before our kickstarter, a great deal of debate was going on behind the scenes here at D&D Duet and Grove Guardian Press—should we write adventures that are setting neutral, so they can be used in any world? Or will we have more fun in the writing process and enable our amazing community to achieve more depth in the playing process if we set the adventures specifically in Azuria?
(I think the answer is obvious in the phrasing of the questions above. 😉 And probably in the upcoming campaigns I mentioned too!)
Getting started with Age of Azuria
If you’re ready to deepen your worldbuilding in Azuria and to find out more about these magical lands, get started with a free copy of Buried Heroes, available here! The rest of the series is available on our shop and at all major book retailers! (We’ll have signed copies up on the shop soon!)
I am also working on an Adventurer’s Guide to Azuria, which is one of our most-requested rewards from the Kickstarter earlier this year! Make sure you’re subscribed to our newsletter for updates on the Adventurer’s Guide release!
And as a final teaser, book four in Age of Azuria, Forest Deep, comes out next year! It has some close ties with our newest adventure, Sacrifice in the Sanctum!
If you like what you’re reading, please consider supporting the blog by purchasing our adventures and supplements in our shop or sponsoring us on Patreon. We appreciate you so much! Thank you for joining us on this adventure! – Beth and Jonathan
We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions!