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Old 11-10-2014, 12:56 PM   #9
Sindri
 
Join Date: Nov 2011
Default Re: Obscuring a Setting's Descent from Earth

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nymdok View Post
Disguising the earth:

Mess with the Geography. There have been enough Apocalypses done in movies and TV to make this trivially easy depending on your particular flavor of apocalypse. In a short lived Thundar campaign, I flooded the great plains and let California fall in the ocean all the way to Sierra Nevada which made the US look very different.
Another important trick if you are dealing with a post apocalyptic Earth (or a martian colony for that matter) is to just give the players few and bad maps which is a pretty realistic situation for many tech levels.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Very well. Assuming you want to retain real-world religions without alerting your players (note just getting rid of real-world religions and replacing them with Fantasy pantheons would be much easier), you'll need to come up with plausible reasons for the changing of names. This is going to depend heavily on your setting, of course, but for descendents of today's humans to not know they are on Earth is probably going to require some sort of large-scale cataclysm. We'll assume a great deal of knowledge was lost during this, and sufficient time passed before old documents were rediscovered that language had changed, such that something written in English would be unreadable, so when a King James Version of the Bible (for example) is discovered, the scholars have to go through and retranslate it. Alternatively, the only versions of the religious texts that survived the cataclysm are written in languages that mostly didn't survive. Enough other documents survived that the texts can be translated, but it's imprecise work and sometimes the translators had to insert educated guesses. This was particularly the case with names, as nobody is certain how the words of the dead language were actually pronounced, so you end up with similar-but-divergent versions of present-day religions, with the saints/gods/prophets having names more befitting the setting.
This is a useful tool but it's somewhat challenged by the presence of significant devotion to maintaining religious information through oral history if nothing else.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Naturally, you don't have to explain any of this to your players. You just make the modified religions and say "Hey, here's the religions of the setting." Throw in some standard - and not-so-standard - fantasy religions while you're at it and the players will probably just think "Oh, the GM must have based the Knights of Trinity on Christianity, and the Holy Struggle on Islam," not "ZOMG we must be on Earth 'cause those are obviously Christians and Muslims!"
Oh definitely. Between a few new developments and some theological differences in old religions as long as the names are disguised it shouldn't arouse suspicion.
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