The Glorious City of Gelbenhügel

Creating a city setting is a ton of work, so I'm sharing The Glorious City of Gelbenhügel, the city that I'm developing for my home campaigns (one Shadowdark, one Cairn), with you. This is a work in progress and will be periodically updated as I create new material and adventures.

Gelbenhügel's layout and culture are based in historic Munich, as I wanted a city that prominently features beer and pretzels.

UPDATES:

• 2025-01-03 — I added the first version of the Sewer Map. It has the entrances/exits marked as well as the positions of three landmarks: the Alchemical Wasteland, the Rat Hole, and the Ooze Farm.
• 2024-12-21 — I added v 0.0.1 of the Adventurer's Guide to Gelbenhügel as a placeholder. It is very much a WIP. I'll be adding content to this pdf as I turn my notes into text that's actually intelligible to other humans.

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The Glorious City of Gelbenhügel is a free and open city setting based on historic Munich for Shadowdark, Cairn, and other rules-light fantasy games. It is a diverse, inclusive, optimistic, post-post-apocalyptic, high-fantasy world filled with nature spirits, the ruins of ages past, heroic quantities of beer and pretzels, and a mysterious, mythic underworld.

Gelbenhügel is free — all material developed for it is available at no cost. Additionally, the source assets of the project will always be made available for ease of reuse: markdown for words and Affinity or Procreate files for maps and images.

Gelbenhügel is open — it is dedicated to the public domain. ALL words, cartography, and art produced by Amalara Game Studio for the project are available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation, which means that you can copy, modify, and distribute any element made available here for personal or commercial use without asking for permission.

Gelbenhügel also has a permissive Third Party License for those interested in claiming compatibility with the setting or using the compatibility logo.

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The Glorious City of Gelbenhügel by David Garrett is dedicated to the public domain using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation

The Glorious City of Gelbenhügel is an independent product published under the Shadowdark RPG Third-Party License and is not affiliated with The Arcane Library, LLC. Shadowdark RPG © 2023 The Arcane Library, LLC.

Cairn is written by Yochai Gal and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.