Imagine an ancient forest known as Myrwoods, where treants (fictional tree creatures), the undead, knights, and other characters dwell in a forest setting with treetop villages and underground shrines, and St. Myrna—a verdant tiefling with antlers—born from the largest tree, the world tree, is the legendary folk hero of Myrwoods.

Myrwoods is the world Deckard Manne has created in his upcoming Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 5E campaign setting—a series of fantasy roleplaying gaming adventures in which players create their own characters and travel through mythical worlds. He says much of his inspiration is taken from Arthurian legend, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and games like Elden Ring, and Legend of Zelda.

Manne’s Myrwoods campaign launches on Kickstarter this coming Tuesday, April 2.

Dungeons & Dragons, originally created in 1974, has long been a favorite roleplaying game, with the current fifth edition released in 2014.  Manne explains that while there is content that explains how to play the game, gamers like Manne then release supplement books, or source books.

Myrwoods“Source books are full of options for play,” he explains. Say you want to play a knight—the source book gives you certain types of knights to play. It has monsters you can fight with, with stats like their health and things like that, and magic items. Then there are campaign settings for your campaign to take place in, which has characters, locations, enemies, objectives, and quests.

“Myrwoods is a campaign setting mashed with a source book,” Manne continues. “So a group that wants to play a D&D campaign will buy this book and the Dungeon master will use it as the world they present to their players.”

Manne, 23, first took an interest in D&D when he was in middle school in Cleveland Heights and some of his friends were playing. “So I ordered the third edition book out of the library, and I remember taking that book with me on vacation in Myrtle Beach and reading it.”

He was hooked and has been playing ever since then­—serving as Dungeon Master since his freshman year in high school. “I've been the Dungeon Master for about nine years—pretty much every week except a few gaps,” he says, noting that the role takes a lot of time.

“It's more [work] than people expect. Some people run it kind of light and improv it, and maybe they only prep for like an hour,” he says. “I really like to spend time writing it, because game design and game writing and narrative is my passion.”

In fact, Manne majored in games and simulation in the Emerging Technology and Business Design (ETBD) department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

“I started in computer science, but it wasn't my passion,” he recalls. “I pretty quickly found my way to games, which is always the thing I'd been doing as my hobby, but I decided to pursue it full time. It's like a video game writing major.”

Manne, who graduated in 2023, says he’s been working on Myrwoods for about three years now. Although he was creating a game, the process was quite a bit of work.

He wrote the entire campaign and worked with a team of artists to produce the completed guide. “All of the writing is mine,” he explains. “That's why I'm doing what I do—I love the game writing. I love the game design, mechanic design.”

He says he did some of the layout design and formatting as well. “But all the actual illustrations are all done by a group of a few talented people I know,” he says.

Myrwoods stemmed out of a game campaign Manne created and ran three years ago for his D&D group. He then saw the potential to turn it into a more organized project.

Myrwoods image of Treetop Village“I spent about a year running through the campaign that I built from scratch,” he recalls. I took some time off from it, and then after I graduated, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to do. I decided probably about four or five months ago to start going full time, 50 hours a week, turning my campaign into a book you can [now] get.

Manne says part of the work is making sure the story line is cohesive, understandable, and enjoyable to play. Then comes a lot of cutting and editing.

“It was a little bit of work for about a year, and then for the past five months, it's been full time, full steam ahead,” he says. “It kind of felt like I was doing an adaptation of an existing book. I kept some things and had to throw [other] stuff away.”

Manne says the Myrwoods campaign should appeal to both D&D players and those who are into fantasy stories.

The book is still full of lore and characters, history, locations. It's like learning about a world…describing it,” he explains. “There's a ton of content in there that's just descriptive flavor—describing a world, a setting, a bunch of characters, something to get invested in even if you never play the game. A lot of people buy these sorts of books and skim through the pages, look at all the cool art, and put it on their shelf and never to play it. But it's cool to have.

For D&D players, Manne assures there is plenty of information and tips. “There are a bunch of options for players and Dungeon Masters,” he says. “It's definitely made for both beginners and veteran players. Veteran players will hopefully look at it and be like, ‘oh, that's a cool new idea.’ For beginners, everything's a cool idea and new.”

Additionally, Manne says even non-gamers can enjoy his campaign. “If they're not into DND, it's a game about rolling dice, improvising with your friends, and killing monsters. So if you like the idea of a board game but maybe get a little bored, or like the idea of a video game but want to hang out with your friends at the same time, that's what D&D is for.”

The Myrwoods Kickstarter campaign launches Tuesday, April 2. Prices are $20 for a PDF version or $40 for a printed, bound version. Manne says those who back the project in the first 48 hours will receive a 20% discount. Funds raised help pay for the production of the book itself and the artwork.