Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Setting: Does this work?

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>>49609050
Cont.
>>Magical fuckery causes all kinds of shit; zombie plagues, animals & plants reshaped into living weapons, places leveled by magic nukes, etc.
>>Dwarves create orks by using alchemy on captured elves to use them as expendable soldier-slaves.
>>Goes horribly wrong as the orks decide to kill their makers out of a sense of "no, fuck you!"
>>Humans create warforged to bulk out their armies and try to slap sense back into both sides.
>>Too late; huge magical "nuking" triggers magical disasters - plane-quakes, hexstorms, all kinds of havoc.
>>Planet somehow survives, but is turned into a twisted, arcane hellhole as a result.
>>Generations later, surviving races both old and new fight to survive and conquer this deadly new world of Malebolge.

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So... yeah, I can give you the rundown on the races I have tentatively planned for the setting, and the setting's cosmology, but that's pretty much everything in a nutshell. I... just don't know where to go next from here in order to build everything up.

Oh! One thing I forgot to mention; Arcane Magic is king in this setting. There's no traditional "gods" and thusly no Clerics; the closest things you get are powerful entities that serve as Warlock patrons and also as "powers to invoke" for Theurges (which, in this setting, are a particularly specialized form of Conjurer).

For those curious, the current established list of races goes like this:

Humans - Because humans survive anything, and weren't directly involved in the fighting.

Calibans - Magical mutants stolen from Ravenloft, these represent the descendants of humans mutated by the "fallout".

Warforged - With their makers gone, they're adrift and determined to find a place for themselves in the world.

Dwarves - "Pure" dwarves are a xenophobic rarity; the most you'll encounter are partially mutated (adapting the Forgeborn dwarf variant from 4e) or have wholely mutated into the Gnomoi (Rock Gnomes).

Orks - Not evil, but have had to rebuild their society since theirs was, y'know, forcibly taken from them. Stealing as much as possible from Wicked Fantasy's depiction, with the reverence for pain and worship of scars as honor-symbols. Possibly include goblins & trolls as mutations due to the unstable alchemy; goblins are more magical (forest gnome stats), trolls are bigger and tougher (goliath stats).

Kobolds - Cursed descendants of the dragons, driven by a racial obsession with finding a way to turn themselves back into dragons. The most successful of their experiments are the dragonborn; the least successful are the various "drakes" (fantasy dinosaurs, wyverns, Athasian Elemental Drakes, etc).

Aranea - Sorcerous spider-shifters evolved from the intelligent giant spiders elves created to serve as their librarians. Magically adept and friendly, but a little naive.

Ratfolk - Evolved from the magical fallout acting on rats. Loose plan is a Burmecian-inspired race of would-be Knight In Shining Armor types.

Shadar-Kai - Elves who were exposed to a massive amount of necrotic energy and survived, but became "half-dead" shadow-beings who seek stimulation to avoid fading away into nothing.

Other races are certainly possible, given the background of this setting, but these are the ones I have a most solid "place" for currently.

I quite like the idea of a post-apocalypse fantasy setting.

If you'll allow me to just ramble off my first thoughts here:

Are warforged immortal and/or capable of creating more warforged? If there are pre-war warforged they could be extremely valuable sources of knowledge from the old world. Settlements could be founded around a handful of them who have the expertise to educate and/or re-establish lost industries.

2 - Is this so far past the apocalypse that language has changed? Your librarian spiders (and again the warforged) are again holding onto a lot of the knowledge of the old world in this case. Because of their naivety (racial naivety? naivety among their leadership due to inexperience?), are they subject to the more predatory elements of a post-apocalyptic society?

I am tempted to wonder how a given settlement comes about. Typically in a post-apocalypse I imagine that society, as a whole, has lost the knowledge and/or capacity to sustain the industries of the old civilization. What are the factions fighting over in that case?

Are settlements built in the ruins of older ones? Are they built in 'logical' areas for starting over, such as near rivers or economic resources (eg quarries)? If they're built in old settlements, I would imagine the people would be trying to repurpose or reactivate old 'technology' - how successful are they? Why that degree of success?

>>49612132
Warforged are functionally immortal, in that they don't die of old age (so far as they know) - they can, however, be killed. Reproduction, however, requires control of the forge-creches where the first generation(s) were constructed before the Black Dawn (the day the world was blown up); they have maybe one or two of these intact and under control, but the race is striving desperately to find/repair more, so they can be assured that they will survive.

Um... well, like I said, I was mostly inspired by Fallout, so I wouldn't say they've gone to that extent. They do have the problem that most of the big centers of learning and magical lore went up in smoke when the cities were nuked, overrun by zombies, consumed by firestorms, sunk below the waves, sent floating into the skies, etc.

I'd definitely say that's one of the problems facing the aranea.

I honestly haven't sat down and thought about the factions, yet, but as a general rule of thumb, you'd see fighting over territory and resources. People scavenging for old world goodies - magical gizmos they don't have the knowhow/power to build anymore, food, secure holdings to live for, etc, are going to naturally be willing to fight each other, even if the other aren't a bunch of bloodthirsty raiders.

Settlements tend to be built where it's practical. Whether that means reclaiming the ruins of an older city or starting from scratch depends on what's available; a city still smouldering under a never-stop-burning arcane fire is less desireable than a nice fertile patch of land near a free-running river, yeah?

People do try to repurpose and reactivate old "tech", yes. Success rate varies. A lot of that stuff was built to last, but then, it's been a long time and through a lot. The biggest worry is making sure you aren't trying to use something that's broken and so ends up backfiring and taking your head off.

Does that answer your questions? I'm grateful for the interest.

>>49612567

Just to be clear about my questions, I don't mean to come off as challenging you at all, just trying to tease out more details about the setting as they come to me.

>>Warforged are functionally immortal, in that they don't die of old age (so far as they know) - they can, however, be killed. Reproduction, however, requires control of the forge-creches where the first generation(s) were constructed before the Black Dawn (the day the world was blown up); they have maybe one or two of these intact and under control, but the race is striving desperately to find/repair more, so they can be assured that they will survive

Cool. How effective are the functional forge-creches in their current state (ie, are they making 1 new WF a month, a week, etc). What special materials are needed to make a new warforged, and how do they acquire them? They might need to have stable trade network to be able to acquire the materials. Do their neighbours know where those resources are going? The WF might want to be secretive about such a precious and important utility. Is a forge-creche necessary to repair an existing WF?

>> I'd definitely say that's one of the problems facing the aranea

Do the aranea have settlements of their own? I typically imagine spiders as being relatively solitary. If yes, how have they responded to trouble? Are there elements of their society that aren't quite so naive, and are they pushing for a different way of life? If no, what might an average NPC aranea's life have looked like before the party meets them?

(more coming, character limit approaching)

>>49612567

>> city still smouldering under a never-stop-burning arcane fire is less desireable than a nice fertile patch of land
>> magical gizmos they don't have the knowhow/power to build anymore
>> making sure you aren't trying to use something that's broken and so ends up backfiring

On that topic - how well-educated is the average person on the history of the world? Would they be able to tell the difference between a natural and unnatural hazard in this kind of climate? Or would they take up a certain degree of mysticism towards old tech, given the danger it can carry? Imaginations tend to run wild when there is both danger and a lack of understanding.

>> as a general rule of thumb, you'd see fighting over territory and resources.

In comparable situations in human history, generally food is the main resource for conflict at the level of society that is implied by a post-apocalypse (at least to me). With the varied species, do they all have the same food needs? Carnivores are going to be much more pressed on this front.

>> People scavenging for old world goodies ... are going to naturally be willing to fight each other, even if the other aren't a bunch of bloodthirsty raiders.

Are they? There's a lot of risk involved in picking a fight for scavengers - in this kind of society, a bad injury could end you, even if you killed the other guy. The same could be true at a tribe level - there's a lot of risk involved in war. Are there leaders who tried to cooperate? Are they respected in their societies? Reviled? How do other societies feel about them?

>>49612943
I'm sorry, I didn't think I sounded hostile. Please accept my apologies; I just thought you were interested and I was trying to reciprocate my interest in answering this.

They only have a few forge-creches and in terms of effectiveness... it depends on how much they feel the need to work it. They require raw metal to build the frame and various alchemical & arcane reagents to kindle it to life, which are hard to come by. They do their best to keep them hidden from their neighbors because, well, it's the only ways of making new warforged they got; they don't want to risk it.

Repairing a warforged is easy and can be done by anyone who knows the right rituals or spells.

Yes, aranea have settlements. Mostly, they organize into clan-based villages; their antisocial nature was bred out of them before they evolved into humanoid spiders.

Naive was probably not the best term to use... "sheltered" is probably more accurate. Aranea clans tend to live a lifestyle that mixes hunting for prey like the giant spiders they descend from with a scholar's fascination with studying magic.

Education... pretty decent, at least in the terms of knowing where and where not to go, how things will fuck you up, don't drink the water with the sickly green glow, etc. It's been about 200 years since the catastrophe, at the least, so folks have adapted to survive.

Directly applicable knowledge about the old world varies. Some groups have fallen into superstitious savagery, others actually still live fairly close to how their ancestors did, taking into account the fall of civilization disrupting trade networks.

No, species need different foodstuffs depending on what they are. Some calibans can eat stuff that would make a human die of poisoning/disease, aranea are pretty much exclusively carnivorous, warforged don't eat, etc.

There is still magical healing in this world, just to be clear.

>>49609050
>Sonnlinor
>Aelfar
>Plant ships

Wow, look at all this Age of Sigmar level copyrightability

>>49613716
Anyway, there's peacemakers and warmongers alike, and social reaction to them... well, it varies, you have to understand. When you're a human tribal surrounded by deformed, bloodthirsty, cannibalistic, superstition caliban raiders who consider it their sacred duty to murder and "breed out" the humans, well, you tend to listen more to the guy preaching you should wipe them out.

>>49613738
Sonnlinor is a D&D dwarf with earth elemental powers from AD&D. Aelfar is a bastardization of the Norse word we derive "elf" from. Plant ships were what the elves used for their space-navy in D&D's Spelljammer setting. Hardly copyrightable.

>>49609050
I got initially excited because I was imagining knights guarding a grown-over Washington Monument

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>>49616505
Tribe 8 you could have knights guarding over whatever landmarks it is that they have in Canada. (Though unlike the picture it's set in Montreal not Toronto).

The system I'm working on is similar to this.
>The campaign is set very far into the future, a bunch of alien races create an artificial planet to house wealthy members of each race in case shit goes wrong.
>The planet is controlled by an advanced AI in its core.
>There are already members of each race setting up places to live.
>It's a peaceful day, when suddenly a false warning makes the AI teleport the planet away.
>All these wealthy people are scared and confused, some of them are able to create working settlements using the prepped supplies they brought.
>Diplomacy between these races goes to shit.
>Shit happens over the course of dozens of generations, each one knowing less and less of the original purpose of their planet.
>The creators of the planet are still trying to find it, but have had no luck.
>Eventually things go really bad between the races, and for the planet.
>AI goes partially insane, unexplainable things happen around the planet.
>after a long time of warfare, things get really quiet since there's barely anyone left.
>Eventually all these freakish halfbreeds of the original races begin to flourish in the ruins of what was.
>trade and civilization bloom.
>Despite being a bit insane, the AI allows the planet to flourish once again.
>Diplomacy is working better than ever.
>Despite the culling of one of the races, and several odd things about each race, things are looking fine.
I'd drop in the players right about here, and see what they'll do.

Rate my campaign? Feel free to give me ideas.

>>49609050
There's a decent anime called Shinsekai Yori that is set in a post-apoc fantasy.

Praedor is finnish RPG that's post-apocalyptic fantasy set after magical apocalypse. There's also comics of it and I have seen some being translated here.