The Explorers' Guild: Ymra

Ymra is the most popular and most fully-developed world used as a game setting in the Explorers' Guild roleplaying game. It's a high-fantasy world, home to many kinds of goblins, faeries, demigods, demons, and other legendary cretures, as well as human beings and other mortal races.

The Explorers' Guild game is an adventure and roleplaying game that strongly emphasizes storytelling, worldbuilding, and improvisation, rather than the dice, statistics, and tables of data that are common in most roleplaying games. Explorers' Guild, or XG as it is commonly called, has been played since 1974 by a loosely-organized group of hobbyists numbering between two and three dozen. XG and Ymra have always been hobby projects, but several veteran XG players are working on ways to make the game available to more people.

Ymra and XG are a group effort. The main XG caretaker, and the author of most of the rules and supporting materials is mikel evins. For more information about the game or Ymra, contact mikel.

Ymra is not a planet; it's a magical realm that consists of a plane of ocean with several landmasses embedded in it. The ocean extends in all directions farther than anyone has traveled; it's deeper as anyone has dived. The known lands are shown in the map at the top of this page. There may be other lands beyond the known boundaries of the world.

At least two such lands are known to exist, if legends are true: far to the east, farther than anyone has traveled, the land of Dawn is said to lie. There the god known as the Sun arises each morning and begins his journey along the hidden roads that carry him across the sky. His destination is in another legendary land far to the west: the land of Dusk. There, it is said, he arrives each night at a mansion where he rests, eats his evening meal, and takes to his bed, where he dies. When morning comes, the Sun is reborn and awakes again in his mansion in the land of Dawn.

explorers' guild: ymra