(Blast from the past 2008-11-28)
And so we have a name for the new old school campaign.
Tomorrow’s long post [[the planned post for 2008-11-29 was never made]]will go away to explaining why I threw out “Swords of the Red Sun” for this take, but here’s the bullet-point version of the new setting:
- It’s our world several centuries after a mid–21st century biblical apokalupsis eschaton brings our era to an end. It comes about, in conflict with prophecy, due to the willfulness of man.
- The world is mostly blasted waste from man’s war with the minions of Hell. The war was a success in that the demons were limited in their ability to rule but the world was destroyed in the process.
- Most people live in isolated city states separated by the blasted wastes. Some are close enough to war over the fertile land around them.
- Among institutions that survived was the Church.
- Tech levels have fallen and vary from low medieval to late antiquity/late renassance.
- The except on tech is surviving fire arms.
- The wastes still have military caches, demon hordes and nest, mutants (magical, radiation, and chemical), and plenty more to explore. Of course they also have raiding tribes and barbarians.
- Due to man’s disruption of prophecy the world itself may be undermined and denizions of a new underworld are chewing at its foundations, which troubles everyone.
- Characters are generally going to be drawn from the freebooters who seek old tech in the desert, recovery specialists who hire out to rescue kidnapped wealthly citizens of the cities, mercenaries who fight the cities’ wars, and similar.
So, nothing hugely original, but it pushes my buttons. The goal is to create the science-fantasy version of what comes 200 years after the punk rock mutant rebels of the 70s/80s after nuclear war movies. It provides an outlet for my fascination in the kinds of esoterica Ken Hite has made a living writing about while providing an old-school, free-booting D&D kind of setting.
The original version was published on People To Be. It has been edited lightly for grammar and clarity.
This was an early blog entry discussing the ideas that became “The World After” setting. The first iteration used the same name as this post. It had a lighter tone and leaned a lot less on the “the Devil winds Judgement Day” aspect of the setting.
One interesting note is that the inhabitants of Hell are called demons here. The differentiation between demons and devils that became core to the setting had not yet been made.
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