The motivation to create the Northwind fantasy setting evolved over a decade ago, after a long two year stint of running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign in one of the “official” settings provided by Wizards of the Coast. The campaign proved to be of epic proportions, perhaps even worthy of a book or three, but for the fact that it was at once so intertwined with that setting that it could not be easily divorced from it, and so customized to my own specs (and of such “settings altering” proportions) that the stories would never have been picked up by the company. It was then that I began kicking around the idea of authoring my own setting; be it for any future D&D games I might run or for the sake of simple story telling.

The setting is strongly rooted in our own real world history, folklore and belief up to about the 5th century B.C. when the first significant historical deviation occurred…

Source: What is Northwind?