What is this setting?

There are many ways to answer this question. How about a lightning round?

• A setting for tabletop roleplaying games, not least of which is 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, although many will work just fine.
• A single planet, with some planes and magical realms thrown in, dotted with cities and settlements, and absolutely littered with dangerous, exciting places to explore.
• A world where magic and science have long since met, dated, sired a few weird offspring, and have gone their separate ways.
• A setting where a train-robbing outlaw, a gangland mobster, an eccentric wizard, and a sword-wielding holy knight might find themselves working for common cause.
• A post-racial world, where creativity is king, and accidents of birth are unimportant.
• A world where dragons, liches, and demons exist, but the greatest evil is committed by people seeking profit at the expense of their fellows.
• A foundation for your characters, who are bold, adventurous, and willing to risk a great deal, whether for profit, or discovery, or just a sense of freedom.

The setting as an RPG world

This setting has everything one would expect, with one important exception. To wit:

• Places to live (cities, towns, etc)
• Monsters to fight
• Organizations to join or oppose
• Gods
• Planes
• Magic!
• Wild lands
• Adventure sites galore!

The one thing it doesn't have is a map. Why? Well, there's a whole diatribe about that, but in short: maps only constrain creativity, they never add to it. Every place imagined by the setting's creators will be listed, and is reachable, but there's infinite space for players and GMs to add their own content, without worrying about "where it fits". It fits here. Always.

A single planet

It will become apparent that this setting draws a lot of inspiration from sci-fi and space fantasy. However, it is important that this remain a single world...the lure of converting it wholesale to some sort of planet-hopping sci-fi setting is ever-present, but should be avoided. Space provides a wonderful way to play mapless games (which is a good thing; see elsewhere in this document), but is downright terrible at providing a required staple of this kind of game: vast, wild, dangerous lands between cities and adventure sites that can spawn challenge and opportunity. Space is empty--that's kind of the definition of space--but the land between cities and adventure sites in this world is anything but.

We'll get into this more, but for various reasons, the conceit of this setting is such:

• The vast majority of land is wild and dangerous. There is very little farmland, pasture, open space, national parks, etc. Land outside of cities tends to be governed by monsters and magic, not by civilized folk.
• Cities are defined by their ability to hold back the danger. They are not all necessarily city-like; some settlements pride themselves on their green spaces, fresh air, etc. But there is a clear boundary between "civilized" and otherwise. Magic and artifice are used to protect the edges of cityscapes, and beyond them, the only law is chaos.
• The current population of all civilized areas is a fraction of what once was. Thus, for every populated safe space in the world, there are plenty of ruins of a bygone civilization, replete with monsters and mystery. By definition, these ruins are too dangerous to reconquer, so don't expect a handful of goblins and a troll or two.

Magic, Science, and Progress

Magic was discovered in time immemorial. Science came more recently, and was largely an idle curiosity until the Unified Theorem was developed, which found the links between the two. Soon, Artifice exploded across the land. Magic was tamed and industrialized. The reach of The Civilization expanded until it began to overstress the world that contained it. Perhaps the stars themselves would yield to the call of Progress.

Then, it all collapsed. Was it war? A magical catastrophe? Gradual decline? Nobody knows, exactly. When was it? Before the birth of the oldest living folk in the world who could credibly claim to have witnessed it firsthand, that's for sure. Not so long that nature has entirely reclaimed what was lost.

What was the Civilization called? How big was it? What were their cultural values? Is this all some object lesson about the overuse of natural resources?

It isn't as if nobody is asking these questions, nor that there are no clues to their answer. The problem is that there are an overwhelming number of answers, all supported by some degree of evidence. Every scholar has a pet theory, and even the oldest and most stable are inevitably disrupted by some new finding. It certainly doesn't help that for every archaeologist trying to unearth the past, there's a religious zealot or corporate goon trying to bury it, or plant false evidence to misdirect.

And if that isn't bad enough, some theories hold that magicks powerful enough to alter the past itself not only used to exist, but fragments of them may still exist, and perhaps have been used to alter the truth itself. It may be impossible ever to learn the truth of the old Civilization.

Nor is it particularly clear what moral lesson should be gleaned from the broken past. Was the overuse of Magic and Artifice the downfall of old, and therefore we should discard it? Yeah, good luck with that. Copious amounts of both are required to hold back the tide of the wild lands beyond every city. There is no option to fall back into a pastoral existence. There is no Shire, no calm land to raise crops and feed sheep. This world is no longer naturally hospitable to civilized life. Artifice is an absolute requirement, and it is ever hungry.

Magic and Artifice do not exist along a spectrum, although some would hold it so. Magic is part of nature, as much as the Binding Force that holds chemicals together, or the Nuclear Force that makes the sun burn. The interactions between "magical" and "mundane" forces are well-documented--that much survived the Fall--and there is no clear dividing line. Artificers would hold that "Magic" is simply an outdated view of reality, that their art represents the successful mastery and industrialization of fundamental natural forces, and Magic is a deliberate anachronism, as obsolete and needlessly inefficient as a horse-drawn carriage versus a modern Steam Coach.

But practitioners of Magic might disagree. While the fundamental forces are indeed natural, the traditional practice of Magic--most of the time--relied only upon energies that could be sustainably used. Nature, in her wisdom, seemed to prefer an equilibrium in which relatively few could manipulate those forces, and even fewer to a degree that could possibly upset the balance, if only temporarily. Even taking the most outlandish claims about the magical power of the Old Civilization as fact, all of those practitioners working together could scarcely have as great an impact upon the environment as any given modern Terraforming Plant, sucking energy from deep within the dying world. Artifice, in their opinion, represents the final overreach of the Old Civilization, and has doomed civilization in turn. Nature may recover, but not before cleansing the world of those who have abused it.

Then again, they may just be bloviating. Nature has had plenty of chances to eliminate sentient life, and they seem to be holding on. And the monsters that proliferate in the wild were not invented by Artifice--in fact, they tend to have much more innate Magic than even the stories of old suggest they ought to. Hmm. Hmmmmm.

It Takes all Kinds

This setting is, quite deliberately, a pastiche of tropes from medieval fantasy all the way through to early 20th century pulp adventure. Due to the fractured history of the world, various levels of cultural progress exist simultaneously, and thanks to magic, plenty of "obsolete" technologies remain quite relevant, especially for adventurers. Mass-produced weapons meant for ill-trained draftees fighting wars with other humanoids are not necessarily as good for fighting a nine-headed burrowing dragon as, say, a flaming vorpal sword. Artifice may be convenient, but older technology--with a bit of magical flair--tends to be a little more reliable and commonplace outside the big cities.

The circumstances of the setting support the notion that each City has its own distinct character. One might be almost uniformly comprised of tall, concrete buildings, joined by streets covered in Studebakers, with art deco and pinstripe suits everywhere. Another might look like a greco-roman paradise, with toga-draped folk enjoying grapes from a bronze divan atop a marble floor under a blue sky...tinged with purple lightning from the protective dome covering the entire thing. If it helps, think of them more like planets than cities--entirely self-contained, and enabled by the setting's constraints to be culturally and technologically distinct from all others.

And yet, the space between cities is not impossible to traverse. In fact, plenty of the great works of Artifice that united the Old Civilization work just fine to this day: great networks of electrified rail, proud airships disdaining the scorched earth below, even behemoth Crawlers, great land-bound vehicles containing entire roving tribes, who might be persuaded to take on passengers, for a price. And so, despite the dominant culture, style, and norms of a given city, you'll still find all sorts anywhere you go, especially in the parts of those cities frequented by travelers.

Furthermore, all of this uniqueness tends to focus on cultural, stylistic, and technological elements--not race. That's an entirely separate point that will be dived into a bit later. In fact...

What happened to races?

TL;DR: traditional races are boring. Let's do something different.

In the Old Civilization, there were many races. Perhaps they all had names and unique identities. Perhaps it was more complex than that. In any case, we can't know what was (see Magic, Science, and Progress above), only what is, and that is this:

There are virtually no races of note among civilized, sentient people in this world.

That is not to say everyone is human. That couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, this guide studiously avoids the use of the term "human" to describe sentient people, because it would be both misleading and entirely inaccurate. While many people are humanoid (though that is not a prerequisite for being a "person"), hardly anybody is what we would call homo sapiens in our world.

The reality is that there are innumerable physical characteristics that seem to exist independently of the capacity for sentience, self-identification, and the ability to hold purpose within a society. Those physical characterists can and do have advantages and disadvantages, but those tend not to matter much in everyday life--technology generally overshadows these minor physical differences--although they do sometimes make a difference for those leading extraordinary lives, i.e. adventurers.

But these characteristics cannot be called "racial", because for a "race" to exist requires a broad clade of individuals with common traits, and apart from some very basic ones (such as a humanoid form), these large groups just don't exist. Far from achieving a majority, there isn't a single "race" that even comprises a noticeable plurality in any known City. The Old Civilization was simply too diverse for that. Sure, some large extended families show a lot of similarity to one another, but that is hardly surprising. And even then, Spellscars and Mutations occur too frequently for even a family to remain all that consistent for more than a few generations.

When you create a character in this world, you decide their physical characteristics. There are some major deviations you can choose--some have wings, some can function underwater, some resist elemental energy, etc--and this is all factored into the system. But for everything that has no real bearing on gameplay, such as external colorations, textures, number of fingers, small amounts of tentacles, etc...go nuts! The only limit is your imagination. While it's hardly true that this world is populated entirely with bizarre mutants, the preponderance of unusual physical characteristics makes things like skin color and pointy ears frankly beneath the notice of just about everyone you might come across.