How it all started
by Martina
This is a story about why was Kalusa created, and how was it created. In the beginning, there was Dragon Age: Origins, a videogame some of you hopefully still remember – it dates me a bit, right? For our younger readers, it was an influential predecessor to Baldur's Gate 3.
It wasn't my first RPG; I had already played a lot of other titles before, both on PC (Baldur's Gate 2 and the like) and tabletop. But when I started playing Dragon Age, I was completely blown away, because, while it was still a fantasy, my favorite genre, at the same time it was very adult, very deep, and dealt with a lot of social issues. And what I thought was absolutely amazing was the ability to have really deep relationships with the side characters – they had their own personal stories, which I could influence, and there was even a possibility of romance. You had, for example, a side-quest where one of your companions went to visit his sister and got into a fight with her, and depending on how you advised him on how to deal with it, the companion then follows down a different path and finally gets even a different ending!
I loved it – and at the same time, I was upset that I didn't experience things like this in a tabletop RPG. Our games back then were mostly very black and white, simple fantasy, something like Dragonlance. You can probably imagine there wasn't really much space for dealing with any social issues, personal problems or even any queerness – things that interested me, things I wanted to explore in roleplaying. Well, I said to myself: if I want to see this in tabletop RPGs – and I really do – I guess I have to do it myself.
As a GM, even before I knew Dragon Age, I was already naturally inclined towards this type of campaigns, and my players had already commented on how the games I ran were different from what they were used to and that they enjoyed it. So the stage was set, and Dragon Age was the impulse that made me start writing the game I wanted to play, with a goal of not only keeping it in my drawer, but to help get my favorite gaming style out there a little more, at least in the tabletop RPG community that existed in Czechia.
At first, I started writing a campaign set directly in the world of Dragon Age – I was always more into creating NPCs, plots, and stuff like that than into geology or long histories. However, there was the licensing issue. I was writing it in Czech, and aiming it only at the Czech market, but that market is ridiculously small, so it was unrealistic to reach an agreement with the license holder for the Dragon Age RPG for any official publication.
Well, in for a penny, in for a dime: I decided to create my own world so I wouldn't have any copyright issues. As I said, I'm not much of a world-maker, I tend to build the smaller things – but I tried to turn it into an advantage. Rather than writing up a macro world, I focused on getting individual regions ready to play, keeping the wider world only vaguely defined. That way, GMs could put those regions to their own running campaigns, or they could play a game without having to read up on the history of three separate continents. That's my preference as a player anyway, so that's how I am approaching design, too.
Eventually, that work produced a book containing three such regions – it came out in 2017. There was the Kingdom of Thuren, inspired by medieval British Isles, playing a bit like my take on Game of Thrones, with hateful noble houses maintaining an uneasy peace after a civil war. Then there was Agol-Zar, an exotic landscape of steppes and wild nature, with a population of dragons living in peculiar cohabitation with local people. And finally, there was Kalusa, a city of mages, which was at once a cosmopolitan metropolis and a ghost town, as a terrible plague had turned huge swaths of the city into what was basically a dungeon full of magic. During the course of this work, I brought on collaborators who contributed to the book, a team of consultants and playtesters, and, most importantly, I received a lot of advice. It was great to see my work on shelves of gaming shops, and although the Czech market isn't really a place where you can make a profit with a hobby as niche as ours, I was proud of our achievement and didn't want to stop.
I knew I wanted to continue writing, but for a while after publication I took time to just play what I already had. Some time before covid, I started a new campaign in Kalusa, because I already playtested the other two regions to my heart's content before. But the new Kalusa campaign was going so well I started to think about writing it up and publishing it. Then came covid and threw a wrench into it. We had to switch to playing online, which I generally don't like, but even so, because the campaign was just so much fun, we managed to slowly carry on and finally, in 2025, the second book came out. The format has changed a bit – this time, there weren't three modular regions full of plot hooks, but one deep campaign crafted to tell a story I really wanted to tell.
What do I mean by that? An important motif is definitely strong, interesting NPCs – I always enjoyed creating those. Characters who can be really interacted with, with whom you can build a relationship – even a romance. And I love to give them some internal dilemmas, to place them at a crossroads in their lives, so players can influence how things turn out. That's what I really liked about Dragon Age and what I really want in my game, because tabletop RPGs are a great platform for this. You have agency and real freedom to interact with them – I love that as a player, I love giving my players such an opportunity as a GM, and I am happy for being able to share it with other groups – and now, with your help, I can share it even abroad!