Welcome to the Fifth World

After five years in various stages of development, I'd like to welcome you to the Fifth World website!

The Fifth World presents an open source vision of a truly sustainable future. Four hundred years after the fall of civilization, humanity thrives in feral tribes and bands. They inhabit an abundant and vibrant world, one that they have cultivated over generations of dwelling in the land. If you'd like to find out more about the setting, please visit the introduction.

Right now, The Fifth World exists in a beta state. The website, the roleplaying game, and even the GitHub repository just provides enough to get us started. Over the next several months, we'll begin doing public playtests of the roleplaying game, we'll develop new features and hone the interface on this website, and hopefully, you'll join us to start some discussions about what the Fifth World could become.

As Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, put it: "Usage is like oxygen for ideas. ... That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world." As an open source project, I hope you'll join us. Yes, I feel a little ashamed seeing the Fifth World going public in its current state, but I take some comfort from what Matt said: "if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long."