Just for fun, wanna spin a setting idea a bit, ...

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by samd6

I find really hard to crash a TL3 society down to TL1 in such a way that they couldn't recover within a generation or two.

I'd personally go for at least TL3+3^ before the disaster.

A large chunk of population (at least 30%, possibly up to 90%) needs to die off fast, leaving fewer survivors.

Or a magically enhanced civilization that depends on powerful magic to maintain what is effectively TL1+2.

[Archangel Beth]

Read Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife quadrilogy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sharing_Knife

Short form: the world was once ruled by potent mage-kings who apparently warred upon each other, creating bio-magical creatures to be their troops. Or, in some cases, Ogre-tank-equivalents in magical power, if not size and shape.

Then something blew up like WOAH, scattering the "seeds" of these bio-magical Ogres, er, Malices throughout the land.

Now humanity is divided into Farmers and Lakewalkers. Farmers don't have magic. Lakewalkers do. Kinda. They also have an obligation to kill malices (since a malice, when it "sprouts," immediately starts to eat people's life-forces and turn the local wildlife into an army...), and a bunch of self-imposed traditions to keep themselves from becoming mage-kings again and wrecking the world even worse.

(No actual ruins were left, though, which is kind of a bummer for the "Magical Precursor" trope. I think The Lies of Locke Lamora is better for Mysterious Dwellings Of The Past, but it just, well, dwells in them without much focus on the mysterious magical Precursors who built the city.)

The Sharing Knife series starts as a romance in the first two books, but unless you really cant stand that, keep going for the worldbuilding...

[Anders]

Dragonlance right after the Cataclysm?

[Pstrych9]

An idea for the former-utopia-now-gone would be to have it have been a 0+3 tech level of botanical magi-tech. You can really go wild with the wondrous terraformed landscapes and alien plants that are artifacts of that age. Herbalism would be a high-risk high-reward venture when you come across wild patches of the old life-artists' work.


Plant magic was obviously the great magic of this setting, and maybe the overuse of interconnected biomes all cross-pollinating allowed the spontaneous awakening of the planet, or just the biosphere, in a massive hive-mind. Hmm, maybe biodisk rather than biosphere in a fantasy world hehe.

That's for if you want to make the precursor magic disappear or diminish.

Maybe the weather became the Overmind instead, and is still capable of lashing out if you draw its attention too much while it slides towards dormancy. That would give you a free hand to have interesting weather challenges that are actively hostile and trying to make things difficult, and with the occasional directly-dangerous whirlwind or whatever for egregious angering of Overwind.

Everyone is afraid of lightning here, and takes cover during storms. You could use it to keep things acceptably post-apocalyptic the same way that the robots in Reign of Steel prevent anyone from ruining that setting!

Maybe you can't even survive long in this version without that powerful plant magic to help, though it does make the setting the most prominent part of the game.

I'd prefer the tired-Overwind-drifting-towards-sleep option. Though if anyone tries to make use of weather magic and/or "summon" Overwind....

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

The OP reminds me of the Alara setting in Magic: the Gathering. Grixis was originally a pretty decent place to live, until it got totally cut off from all lifeforce magic and civilization ended up taken over by liches who systematically turned nearly everybody into zombies. The few living humans are just ekeing out a living in tiny enclaves.

Then Grixis and four other worlds collide and merge with each other. One of them was Bant, which was depicted as close to utopian (though it did have a caste system). Basically, every place except Grixis got smacked down with the Zombie Apocalypse. But I have no idea of the eventual outcome.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

But I have no idea of the eventual outcome.

One player is reduced to 0 Life. :)

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

|D Actually, I think canonically, it was revealed that Nicol Bolas is in fact an objectively ****ty character.

[martin_rook]

I'd written up notes long ago for a D&D campaign I never got around to that would have begun with a good-sized asteroid chunk hitting the Forgotten Realms (in the Sea of Falling Stars, of course) and tearing open a rift to a plane full of demons. The PCs would have found a prophecy describing all this that also suggests that the land across the sea (the Americas stand-in) would be spared most of the destruction. The PCs would have to journey across the torn, dying kingdoms and find a way to cross the ocean.

I had also toyed with having a campaign where the dragons -- good, evil, whatever -- decide to get up off their piles of gold and take over and carve up the world into territories they control. Sort of a fantasy version of Reign of Steel

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by martin_rook

I had also toyed with having a campaign where the dragons -- good, evil, whatever -- decide to get up off their piles of gold and take over and carve up the world into territories they control. Sort of a fantasy version of Reign of Steel

That's basically one of the campaigns in GURPS Dragons.