Ancient Web: David Roomes Built Khoras Into a 1997 Fantasy World
David M. Roomes turned a 1990 college-era fantasy setting into Khoras, an extensive free and system-neutral online campaign world launched in May 1997.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
Some game masters buy a fantasy world in a boxed set. David M. Roomes spent years building one and then put the whole place on the Web for anyone to explore.
The front page still warns that its navigation uses frames, which is a useful clue to the site's origins. More conclusive evidence comes from Roomes's own FAQ: Khoras went online in May 1997, then moved to its independent domain on April 16, 1998. The author dates the earliest pieces of lore to December 1990 and describes building the setting in earnest for a 1992 college role-playing campaign.
Khoras is not a multiplayer computer game. It is a place for tabletop characters to live, travel, fight, and make decisions, with detailed people, cultures, kingdoms, religions, geography, and history available through hyperlinks.
Build the world, leave the dice to somebody else
Roomes made a deliberate design choice: Khoras is system-neutral. The FAQ explains that a strong character should be described in ordinary prose rather than locked to a specific numerical strength score. A group could use Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, RuneQuest, or another game and translate the setting as needed.
That makes the site's huge body of information useful even when a particular rules edition becomes obsolete.
The cultured-races overview illustrates the density. Alongside humans and familiar fantasy peoples are invented lineages such as Guldra, Saurians, Skrell, Vothen, Aswani, and Karthasians. The page distinguishes natural evolution, magical creation, and visitors from other dimensions or star systems within the world's fictional history.
The game-master tools offer short adventure hooks, full campaigns, player information packets, and optional rules. Its entries link back into the fictional encyclopedia so a prospective adventure has actual places and people behind it.
The archive remains maintained: one tools page carries a March 2026 update notice. That is not a reason to call it a new site. The same long-term personal publishing project has survived changes in browsers, rules systems, and web design.
Khoras shows how a home campaign can become a freely shared reference world without needing a commercial game release.
Read how Khoras began and explore its game-master resources.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #ancientweb, #webhistory, #roleplaying, #worldbuilding, #fantasy