A while back I posted my dying Earth one page setting, The Mad City. I thought I was finished with it but it's been on my mind lately, because I'm not sure there isn't more to be done with it. A single page doesn't have room for more than a sketch of the setting and in writing it I found myself putting aside ideas that interested me but needed more detail than I could go into without overflowing the page. Some of them seemed like they were worth getting down in text.
This post is to serve as a kind of setting bible, so I can get my thoughts on tone, theme, etc. down in one spot.
The premise
Earth is old. Unimaginably old. Epochs have come and gone. The sun has shrunk to a glowing coal. The planet's core has cooled, mountains have worn down to hills. There isn't a square inch of land that hasn't seen epic adventures of greed, altruism, lust, courage, tyranny, nobility, betrayal, redemption, rebellion and rebuilding play out a hundred times over. The Lighthouse has revived the human race from extinction at least three times. There's no history any more because it's all history. Where would you even begin?
Earth is tired. All the ores and useful minerals have been dug up and used. The ground is nothing but stone and dirt now. The magnetic field flickered and died. The oceans shrank. The environment is maintained by ancient machinery, but most of the land is sterile desert. The other planets are gone, mined away to nothing. Siphoned away into hydrogen fuel to feed the sun for another eon. Now there's nothing left.
Earth is dying. Everyone agrees that the sun is in its last decade of life. It might explode and destroy the world in fire, it might gutter out like a cooling ember and freeze the world in darkness. There are different schools of thought, but there doesn't seem much point in arguing about it. Whoever's right won't have much time to gloat. The skills to operate the machines that might have saved us vanished megayears ago.
People are handling this knowledge in different ways. The majority carry on the way they have their whole lives. If crops don't get harvested and replanted, they'll starve before the sun has a chance to kill them. Perhaps they make more time for family and friends than previous generations have. Others are giving in to despair and letting it degrade them. Abandoning responsibilities, chasing grudges, surrendering to hedonistic urges they might have kept buried if there was going to be time to have regrets. A few (and hopefully this is where the player characters would come in) aren't ready to give up easily and spend their remaining time doing what good they can and chasing rumours and folklore about forgotten technology that could save even just a few.
The style
People live fairly primitive lives for the most part. The majority are subsistence farmers. They might enjoy a few conveniences that need advanced science to develop but function just fine at a subsistence level - farmhouses are very commonly heated and lit by burning methane gas fermented in simple biogas plants under the building. A village might be built around a single surviving machine from an earlier age that provides an important resource.
Cities tend to be where the most ancient technology can be found. It's no longer under human control but it carries on working by itself, providing heat, light, food, etc. Sometimes it's a threat as well -- robot cops run amok and killing indiscriminately, industrial processes poisoning the streets -- but people still hold on in the cities because the deterioration has been gradual and their cultures have developed rituals and taboos that keep them safe for the most part.
Technology is, and isn't, a mystery. In most cases how it works is unknown, but what it's meant to do is obvious. The methods of the people who built it half a million years may have been swallowed up by the dust of history, but in any age people are people, with reliably human motives. Magic is technology. Monsters are machines following orders from long-dead masters to walk a perimeter and kill intruders. Building a golem is done by assembling parts stripped from defunct mechanical arbeiters. A healing 'spell' might be a device produced to keep meat edible by reversing entropy. (Knave seems like a good system for this, since it already treats spells as inventory items.)
The situation
As the end comes, forgotten devices all over the continent are starting to reactivate on their own. Transport networks are coming back to life and automated vehicles have started moving - often with no regard for any structures that might have been built in the way since they last rolled or flew. (One of my influences is pulp novels from the 1970s in which artificial intelligence could be maddeningly simple-minded.) Many of them are in an indifferent state of repair and adventurers using them to access the isolated areas of the continent need to be both agile and prepared.
The reactivation has encouraged some people to hope for the world's survival, but for the most part they're working at cross purposes. Lighthouse cults practice human sacrifice to give the giant orbital installation the power it needs to save us. Scholarly cabals sabotage each other out of fear that if there are still-working spaceships, there will only be enough to carry a few. Powerful nihilists want to ensure the world dies because their twisted philosophy tells them that to be the final generation is to be the most important of all generations.
The tone
What I'm going for here is bleak-but-with-hope. Even with the player character efforts, things are probably going to end badly. They're surrounded by examples of people who've lost hope and decided to forget about it and carouse their remaining time away. But if there is salvation, even if only for a few, it'll be because PC action made it happen.
This post is to serve as a kind of setting bible, so I can get my thoughts on tone, theme, etc. down in one spot.
The premise
Earth is old. Unimaginably old. Epochs have come and gone. The sun has shrunk to a glowing coal. The planet's core has cooled, mountains have worn down to hills. There isn't a square inch of land that hasn't seen epic adventures of greed, altruism, lust, courage, tyranny, nobility, betrayal, redemption, rebellion and rebuilding play out a hundred times over. The Lighthouse has revived the human race from extinction at least three times. There's no history any more because it's all history. Where would you even begin?
Earth is tired. All the ores and useful minerals have been dug up and used. The ground is nothing but stone and dirt now. The magnetic field flickered and died. The oceans shrank. The environment is maintained by ancient machinery, but most of the land is sterile desert. The other planets are gone, mined away to nothing. Siphoned away into hydrogen fuel to feed the sun for another eon. Now there's nothing left.
Earth is dying. Everyone agrees that the sun is in its last decade of life. It might explode and destroy the world in fire, it might gutter out like a cooling ember and freeze the world in darkness. There are different schools of thought, but there doesn't seem much point in arguing about it. Whoever's right won't have much time to gloat. The skills to operate the machines that might have saved us vanished megayears ago.
People are handling this knowledge in different ways. The majority carry on the way they have their whole lives. If crops don't get harvested and replanted, they'll starve before the sun has a chance to kill them. Perhaps they make more time for family and friends than previous generations have. Others are giving in to despair and letting it degrade them. Abandoning responsibilities, chasing grudges, surrendering to hedonistic urges they might have kept buried if there was going to be time to have regrets. A few (and hopefully this is where the player characters would come in) aren't ready to give up easily and spend their remaining time doing what good they can and chasing rumours and folklore about forgotten technology that could save even just a few.
The style
People live fairly primitive lives for the most part. The majority are subsistence farmers. They might enjoy a few conveniences that need advanced science to develop but function just fine at a subsistence level - farmhouses are very commonly heated and lit by burning methane gas fermented in simple biogas plants under the building. A village might be built around a single surviving machine from an earlier age that provides an important resource.
Cities tend to be where the most ancient technology can be found. It's no longer under human control but it carries on working by itself, providing heat, light, food, etc. Sometimes it's a threat as well -- robot cops run amok and killing indiscriminately, industrial processes poisoning the streets -- but people still hold on in the cities because the deterioration has been gradual and their cultures have developed rituals and taboos that keep them safe for the most part.
Technology is, and isn't, a mystery. In most cases how it works is unknown, but what it's meant to do is obvious. The methods of the people who built it half a million years may have been swallowed up by the dust of history, but in any age people are people, with reliably human motives. Magic is technology. Monsters are machines following orders from long-dead masters to walk a perimeter and kill intruders. Building a golem is done by assembling parts stripped from defunct mechanical arbeiters. A healing 'spell' might be a device produced to keep meat edible by reversing entropy. (Knave seems like a good system for this, since it already treats spells as inventory items.)
The situation
As the end comes, forgotten devices all over the continent are starting to reactivate on their own. Transport networks are coming back to life and automated vehicles have started moving - often with no regard for any structures that might have been built in the way since they last rolled or flew. (One of my influences is pulp novels from the 1970s in which artificial intelligence could be maddeningly simple-minded.) Many of them are in an indifferent state of repair and adventurers using them to access the isolated areas of the continent need to be both agile and prepared.
The reactivation has encouraged some people to hope for the world's survival, but for the most part they're working at cross purposes. Lighthouse cults practice human sacrifice to give the giant orbital installation the power it needs to save us. Scholarly cabals sabotage each other out of fear that if there are still-working spaceships, there will only be enough to carry a few. Powerful nihilists want to ensure the world dies because their twisted philosophy tells them that to be the final generation is to be the most important of all generations.
The tone
What I'm going for here is bleak-but-with-hope. Even with the player character efforts, things are probably going to end badly. They're surrounded by examples of people who've lost hope and decided to forget about it and carouse their remaining time away. But if there is salvation, even if only for a few, it'll be because PC action made it happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment