Steven Blake Harrison

Every month, Many Worlds Tavern releases a new “realm.”

That realm is the creative centerpiece of the month’s products: a monthly coffee and tea series and a trove of D&D 5E content, limited to 1000 boxes each. They sell out almost every month.

I conceptualize those realms as art briefs for the dozens of independent artists we work with. Those art briefs turn into beautiful pieces like these:

When a commission is completed, I develop its art brief into 100-word “lore” brief, creating a name for the world in the process.

The Melorealm

The upper plane from whence the first song was sung, the Melorealm’s harmonious music is heard wherever a tune strikes a willing listener’s ear well.

Oft do bards see visions of its cool woodlands and warm hillsides when a clever melody comes to mind, but when the Muses will those musicians to sing songs of sorrow, they see that same realm as bleak ruins and lonesome forests. Not even the darkness here is discordant.

That lore is then designed onto collectible cards, which are purchased with coffee, tea, dice, and D&D content.

Leading with a visual vignette of the realm’s landscape, these cards are part of the immersive experience of the Treasured Realm monthly coffee series, which is Many Worlds Tavern’s flagship product. The small emblems and blurb below the realm’s lore add some function to the card’s fashion, tracking each premium coffee’s details.

Treasured Realm also has a complementary product: Fabled Foliage, the monthly tea series.

In the tasting room, we always curate tea blends that would balance the coffee in exciting ways. Narratively, the Fabled Foliage is a mystical plant from the same month’s Treasured Realm. Below is the Fabled Foliage that complemented the Melorealm, as seen above.

This has been, by far, one of the most unique writing projects I’ve ever had the privilege to do. It’s also been my personal favorite.

Below are more of my favorite pieces so far (written as plain text for readability).

Latehaven

One might be surprised to awaken in front of a sign that reads, “Latehaven: Life doesn’t start ’til it ends!” One might be even more surprised to realize they’re dead.

Luckily, the afterlife paradise city of Latehaven has created a tremendously smooth onboarding process for newly dead, undead, and re-dead peoples who manage not to succumb to madness. It’s the rest of the realm of death that’s a bit less…desirable.

Loomside

As tales of the infinitely complex cave system beneath the Loomside Mountains grew, so too did a small settlement atop one of the peaks.

Frequent discoveries in the underground—treasure-filled ruins, valuable mineral veins, mythical creatures—developed that settlement into a series of townships and trade hubs sprawling across the mountaintops. Every day, cavers contracted by the dozens of guilds and factions above dive ever deeper under the mountains, with competing adventurers sometimes posing as great a danger as anything else they might find below.

Magus Flats

The Sorcerers’ War rages on. 

Lord Dominik has outlawed magic, sending magisters to enforce his Decree of Mundanity and contracting bounty hunters to seek out rebel leaders. With his discovery of the anti-magical metal known as magebane, his asserted power over mages is ever increasing.

Matriarch Tyestra has rallied magic users to respond to their persecution in kind, training arcane amateurs into rebel sorcerers and renegade wizards. The once noble fight for arcane freedom has gradually turned peaceful towns like Magus Flats into hotbeds of hostility and unrest.

Some remember the lush beauty of the region before it was warped by conflict, but nowadays, most just grab their swords or staves without a second thought, and pick a side.

Riftwild

The badlands called the Riftwild earned the name from the spontaneously opening portals throughout the region, giving way to hundreds of unforeseen extraplanar entities. Land that was already sparse and inhospitable become even more so, as the rifts continue opening and closing of their own accord.

But for those with a career in hunting monsters, business booms like the traps they set under these ever-yellow skies.

Ethersea

Enchanted with fallen stardust and astral magicks since a meteor shower rained into its waters centuries ago, the Ethersea’s flora and fauna have since evolved to match the mystery of the stars. Beauty is abundant on the water’s surface, with clouds and water sparkling alike as if the endless night sky never truly leaves.

Fathoms below the surface, however, something stirs.

Magni’s Isle

Formerly known as Minutia, Magni’s Isle is a small, uncharted civilization of humble people ruled by King Magni the Massive: a collosus of a man with the valiance of a knight and the benevolence of a martyr.

It was years ago that Magni washed ashore the Minutian coast to the awe of the island’s tiny denizens. After he warded off the blight of gigantic, draconic, flying creatures that had harassed Minutians with their rainbow-feathered assaults for decades, he was crowned their ruler.

Magni enjoyed the honor, but more notably, he enjoyed his newfound sense of scale. It was quite the elevation of stature from that of a struggling halfling merchant in a city of giants.