Avadnu

Avadnu is the magic-corrupted land of Jeffrey Visgaitis' Violet Dawn: The Time of the Unravelling setting, presented to d20 System players in the middle-to-late 2000s.

Violet Dawn was mostly a website; we also got a Denizens of Avadnu Creature Collection. That book was awesome but it didn't sell, so the setting didn't take off. The critter book retailed for $40 right about when the subprime crisis hit, and then 4e came along so... yeah.

At the time V published all this through "Inner Circle Games", so icirclegames.com is where we went to find the lore for this setting. V has redirected it all to Waywalker Studios without the lore, but the Wayback Machine might be able to hook you up.

Wil "Midnight" Upchurch helped V with some of the writing, and it shows. This place is not a retirement community. Several reviewers compared it to Dark Sun but Cthulhoid.

The backstory here involves the usual titanomachy fluff: Telumea was the creator, his children the thirteen gods got jelly, Telumea defeated Krueg in battle etc etc. Then Telumea contacted the Void. This allowed in the Xxyth who are reality-warping abominations. The worst of these incursions have mostly been dealt with. Mostly. The Sulwynarii race has founded a Dominicon redoubt for when Telumea's voidspawn should return in force.

Now Avadnu is rife with Voidspawn of various stripe. Additionally people can be Tainted by the Void - including if they've dispatched one so corrupted. Something-something-gaze-Abyss-Nietzsche.

Races

Besides Humans, Violet Dawn allows other player-character races.

Mistji are the elf-expies here, firstborn of Telumea. They were made mortal - corporeal anyway - through a dump of lore in DoA p. 97. Other gods captured a mistji and enslaved it. Telumea was understandably pissed and lashed out; the gods then dumped this mistji's prison onto Avadnu, which bound all mistjis' souls to flesh here. Although most are still near-immortal (if they stay safe) and magic-infused, 17% of them are mi'thu who can't magic. Mi'thu go more for the Rogue class.

Ngakoi are also short magical feylikes, here with a more arboreal theme. "They get along best with humans" we suppose because the humans they meet aren't cityfolk.

Skarren descend from the blood shed of defeated and dying Krueg. They are the Klingons here; not orks, because they're pro-nature, but they love them a good fight... and they're in the two-meter-on-up range. They're social and nomadic, living in kulvrak-tribes. They're not illiterate but they're like premodern Tuareg here, using their glyphs mostly just to mark territory.

Sulwynarii are the nephilim, created by the thirteen gods after Temulea created the mistji. They are tall and strong as skarren, but (much) less numerous and (much) longer lived - if they're not killed. Most of them were killed in the struggle against the Xxyth.

Zeidian are two-meters tall so manlets by Skarren and Sulwynarii standards. Some of the thirteen gods (Morindalien and Cylethil are named) created them to watch over humans. Zeidians are nomads who don't do magic. The niche of the not-quite-human Dunedain rangers, then.

There's some hybridism here, because coomers gonna coom: the Skareth, for instance, result from skarren-slash-zeidian. Instead of Zeidian +2 DEX they take -2. And their parents like to dump their clumsy bastards onto human communities. Better lock down the fine china.