Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass — A Southeast Asian-Inspired 5e World
There is a particular kind of magic that happens when a tabletop RPG setting knows exactly what mood it wants to evoke. Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass, published by 1985 Games, knows its mood down to the last grain of rice. This is a 5e campaign setting that smells like rain on warm stone, sounds like wind chimes on a village porch, and feels like the quiet beat between one Studio Ghibli scene and the next. It raised over $2.6 million from more than 23,000 backers on Kickstarter in 2023 — numbers that tell you the appetite for this kind of experience has been hiding in plain sight within the D&D community for years.
Written by Adam Lee, Ari Levitch, and Jeremiah Crofton, Obojima takes the 5th Edition rules engine and drops it onto an island where humans and spirits coexist, where ancient corruption creeps through the tall grass, and where the greatest adventure might be sitting down for a perfect bowl of ramen. The designers describe it as "leisure fantasy," a phrase that sounds almost radical in a hobby built on dungeon raids and dragon slaying.
The Island of Obojima
Obojima is, at its heart, a place. The island setting draws heavily from Japanese culture, Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, and the pastoral exploration of classic Nintendo titles — The Legend of Zelda chief among them. But Obojima is not a pastiche. The setting builds its own mythology from these inspirations, creating a world where spirits inhabit the forests, mountains, and rivers, and where the boundary between the mundane and the magical is less a wall than a screen door.
The island is divided into distinct regions, each with its own ecology, culture, and population of spirits. There is an ever-present tension between the natural harmony of the island and the Corruption — an ominous, spreading blight that twists the land and its inhabitants. This central conflict gives DMs a throughline for long campaigns without forcing a conventional "evil army marches on the kingdom" structure. The Corruption is environmental, insidious, and personal. It is less about armies clashing and more about a forest that has forgotten what sunlight feels like.
Four detailed spirit factions add political and narrative texture to the setting. These are not the warring kingdoms of a typical fantasy campaign but rather communities with distinct philosophies about how the spirit world and the mortal world should interact. Navigating their relationships — and the expectations they place on adventurers — drives much of the social gameplay.
New Ancestries and Character Options
Obojima introduces two and a half new ancestries to 5e. The Nakudama are small, frog-like adventurers with expressive tongues and boundless curiosity. They collect stories the way dragons collect gold, soaking in every experience the island offers. The Dara are born from the roots of glyph-bearing trees, inheriting the memories and skills of past lives through symbols left by their elder kin. They can create paper talismans that bestow abilities on those who wield them — a mechanic that is both flavorful and tactically interesting. The half-ancestry, a variant of Obojima's native elves, rounds out the options.
The real depth of character creation, though, lies in the 11 new subclasses that span every class in 5e. An origami-wielding wizard who folds paper into magical constructs. A mask-wearing bard who swaps enchanted masks to adopt new personas and powers, gaining flight and defensive bonuses. A barbarian who brews magical concoctions in their own belly, eating strange objects to fuel unique effects in combat. These are not minor mechanical tweaks — they are full reimaginings of what a class fantasy can feel like when stripped of Western European assumptions.
Add to this 50 new spells and a generous selection of magic items, and you have a setting that provides players with a genuinely different toolkit while remaining fully compatible with the core 5e rules.
The Potion-Crafting System
If Obojima has a signature mechanic, it is potion crafting. The island is scattered with over 100 ingredients — herbs, minerals, spirit essences, and stranger things — that players can gather, combine, and brew into potions. With more than 180 potions in the system, this is not a token crafting sidebar. It is a full subsystem that rewards exploration, experimentation, and the kind of lateral thinking that makes tabletop RPGs sing.
The potion system also reinforces the setting's tone. Rather than looting corpses for magic swords, adventurers on Obojima are foraging in meadows, trading with spirit merchants, and perfecting recipes. It is a gameplay loop that naturally encourages the kind of slow, attentive play that the "leisure fantasy" label promises. For DMs looking to build sessions around exploration and discovery rather than combat encounters, the potion system provides a mechanical backbone that goes well beyond "you find some healing potions."
Spirits, Monsters, and the Tone of Encounter Design
The book includes 60 new monsters and NPCs, and the creature design reflects the setting's animistic worldview. Many of Obojima's creatures are spirits — beings tied to natural phenomena, places, or abstract concepts. Fighting them is always an option, but it is rarely the only option, and it is often not the best one. The encounter design philosophy here echoes the Ghibli films that inspired it: the spirit blocking the mountain pass might be a threat, but it might also be grieving, or lost, or simply misunderstood.
This approach to encounters makes Obojima a compelling option for groups that enjoy social and investigative gameplay alongside their combat. Every creature in the book carries narrative hooks, and the best of them function as adventure seeds in their own right. You can track these creatures alongside the rest of your 5e bestiary using tools like Lorekeeper's monster compendium, which makes managing a mixed library of standard and third-party creatures painless.
Who This Is For
Obojima is for the table that watches Princess Mononoke and thinks, "I want to play that." It is for the DM who wants to run a campaign where the party spends a whole session helping a river spirit remember its name. It is for the group that wants their 5e experience to feel different — not harder, not more tactical, just different — without learning a new system.
The 2025 follow-up Kickstarter, Obojima: Tales from Yatamon, raised another $859,572, demonstrating that the appetite for this setting is not a passing fad. As the 5e ecosystem continues to expand beyond its sword-and-sorcery roots, Obojima stands as proof that the engine is flexible enough to carry any mood a creative team is willing to build. It also makes a strong case that the most radical thing a D&D supplement can do in 2026 is tell you to slow down.