Fantasy and Exploration

[Arith Winterfell]

So currently I've been working on a fantasy setting, which at first I was working on under the basis of building post-apocalyptic elements into core, since then I've found myself drifting away from the post-apocalyptic elements somewhat. So currently I'm at a point where I'm looking for ideas to spark my inspiration and interest in order to help drive me forward in setting design.

Generally I realized with the post-apocalyptic stuff my interest wasn't so much about the pure survival aspect (starvation, finding food, etc) nor about the mechanical aspect (the scavenging for parts, building gear and machines, etc), but rather my interest was more in the sociological aspects. Specifically societies and how they might change due to isolation or the break down of earlier societal structures. This led me into a new premise for a setting which I'm looking to fill out more (hence suggestions and ideas seeking).

The general premise of the fantasy setting is centered on a fantasy setting that once had a large magical civilization made up of many fragments of small dimensions or "Realms" which originally were linked into the inter-dimensional hub of a single large Nexus Realm. However, due to an unknown disaster the Nexus Realm failed and the all of the Realms were severed from each other leading to total isolation from each other. No magic spells known at the time could allow travel between Realms or allow the reactivation of gates to allow access to the Nexus Realm.

Move forward from this event several hundred years and a number of generations.

Now in a Realm ruled by a powerful government of wizards recently researched new advances in dimensional magic allowing them to reactivate their Nexus Realm gate. After successfully doing so they found the Nexus Realm untouched for hundreds of years, but also essentially dead and non functional. The problem was that all the gates had been severed, and the Nexus couldn't connect outward to other Realms, only receiving gates activated from outside Realms.

This led to a new period of research, combined with study into the magic of the Nexus Realm, that eventually yielded fruit. A complex ritual that would allow a small expedition of people to jump to another Realm. From there they would need to find and repair the gate on that Realms side in order to return home by reconnecting with the Nexus Realm. Thus begins a new age of exploration and discovery.

However, the governing wizard society that has succeeded at this is divided as many individuals are driven by many different hopes and dreams. Some see opportunities for conquest, empire building, or expansion and colonization, others see monetary gain by trade, still others seek knowledge and discovery of the societies that have changed over the past hundreds of years, some all of these things in combination.

I currently only have one player (I will run my own personal PC as well, and possibly additional party NPCs if we need more people to make things work). My player is fairly neutral toward the game, and has a strong interest in anthropology. She has trouble coming up with character ideas, so I've suggested essentially playing an "anthropologist" mage focusing on communication, empathy, and divination magic hence giving her the opportunity to act as a "face" character when meeting with new cultures or discovering stuff in the ruins. I imagine she will largely be driven as a character by motives of knowledge gain and good intentions.

My own character, a Necromancer, serves the function of also understanding what happened in these societies/ruins via things like questioning spirits of the dead. He has quiet motivations toward power and learning anything he can about his field of studies. Potentially dreaming of forging an kingdom of his own in time.

I currently imagine also at least one other NPC character whose sole function is "gate repair" as a gate specialist who will spend their time fixing or setting up the gate so that the characters can get home.

Beyond this I'm looking for interesting ideas for character conflict (adding new NPCs with different motivations) and interesting ruins/societies to explore and encounter.

Ideas I have so far:
1. Arrival on a realm that failed resulting in ruins and dead remains, possibly the threat of mad spirits for the party to deal with.

2. Perhaps a Eloi/Morlock situation as from The Time Machine.

[whswhs]

A worthwhile literary source for this sort of thing is S.M. Stirling's Emberverse. It starts out with the sudden failure of steam and internal combustion engines, explosives, nuclear reactions, and electricity all over the world; in the chaos that follows, in which more than 90% of humanity dies, a lot of new cultures are founded, often by random and eccentric people. Over the later novels, the series mutates from moderately hard sf to something approximating high fantasy, with apparently supernatural powers playing an increasingly active role in the world, rather as if the fall of Numenor had been reversed. The second series, novels four through seven, has the heroes going on a quest from the Portland, Oregon region to Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, encountering a variety of new cultures.

My own current fantasy campaign, Tapestry, is largely about world exploration. The PCs started out doing a short range voyage up and down the coast from their home city, and now are on the coast of the western continent, on a long-term voyage that's passed beyond the range of civilized cultures to lands with lower tech and smaller populations. They've traded with trolls, nixies, elves (two groups), and most recently dwarves. Now, they include a troll and a nixie, but the ones they've encountered are from distinctive cultures and beliefs. . . .

[Boomerang]

You could have a realm where the inhabitants developed steam punk type technology mixed with magic and then mysteriously vanished leaving behind a vast city filled with golems, steam powered vehicles and other weird contraptions.

Perhaps you could also have a realm stuck in eternal winter.

Or maybe a cursed realm where nobody can remember further back than the recent past.

[Refplace]

CJ Cherya and Andre Norton might have some inspiration.
Gate of Iveryl and the Witch World series in particular.

[Celjabba]

You may also get some ideas from the death gate cycle of Weis and Hickman.

[VariousRen]

If the gates failed for some unknown reason, how can society trust them now? Imagine if all the planes in the sky suddenly stopped working, and dropped to their doom. Even if we got the ones on the ground working again, it's going to be a long time before anyone trusts them, especially if we don't find out what happened in the first place.

So for an interesting idea: A realm that believes the nexus is going to bring the "corruption" that collapsed the network in the first place. I imagine a draconian state keeping strict control over all magic to ensure no one is trying to open the realms up again. The gate sight itself is a huge exclusion zone in the heart of an otherwise crowded empire, with abandoned towns left exactly the way they were when the gates collapsed. Think Chernobyl exclusion zone.

[johndallman]

Dan Simmons' Hyperion series of novels deals with a technological society that had an extensive system of interstellar gates - sufficiently commonplace that rich people had different rooms of their house in different star systems - and the effects of its collapse.