With roughly a month before I expect I will be running a game and diverting my GM energies elsewhere, I’ve been taking the opportunity to continue to write the fantasy world I expect to use for a long game and some indeterminate point in the future. I’ve mentioned this setting before, as early as January of this year, and I am still plugging away. I’d venture I’ve actually gotten to a point where I could hypothetically run a game in what I’ve written, which of course brings me to yet another set of interesting questions.

The setting is still at its core an expansion of the ideas set forth in Electric Bastionland, with one giant central city serving as the setting’s ‘gravitational pull’ in terms of politics, culture, and economics. That said, I’m trying to make my own riff on these ideas, and there are a couple major ways that my setting differs. For one, the game is going to start in what’s defined in Electric Bastionland as ‘Deep Country’. For another, the history of the city and the surrounding area is going to play an important role that will make things look a lot different.

I’ve mentioned in a few places that this game is also inspired by Mutant Crawl Classics and Caves of Qud, among a few other ‘Dying Earth’ settings and stories. It’s likely not going to have the same sort of timeline you’d see in something by Jack Vance or Gene Wolfe, but timeline is one place where in my head some degree of realism takes over. The setting still won’t quite hew realistic, but we’re looking at multiple histories overlapping around 500 years ago, not thousands or tens of thousands. The core event that defines the era that the setting is in currently, as I vaguely alluded to in my last worldbuilding exploration, is an asteroid that hit the planet and plunged it into a new ice age. What really makes this interesting, though, is that the asteroid almost directly resulted in the founding of the city at the core of the setting.

My core ‘creation myth’ for the city is that a pair of survivalist/opportunists rode out the initial apocalypse in a bunker before hauling all manner of equipment to a rocky crag on the side of the very new crater that had been created by the asteroid impact. Thanks to the impact, the crust was very thin and so the pair began setting up their survival settlement with a ground-source well and a geothermal power station. That geothermal power was what enabled them to grow food, distill water, and generally stay alive long enough for their survival base to turn into a settlement. Over literal centuries that settlement becomes a city, and it’s through the mission-driven thinking of the two founders and their inner circle that eventually the whole area around the city becomes re-settled and starts growing food, mining ore, and doing a whole host of other economically productive activities.

This timeline raises some interesting questions about the society that exists at game start and how it relates both to the society the founders created and the society that existed before that. The founders attempted to save as much knowledge as they could from their home civilization, which I’m envisioning as somewhat more advanced than current 21st century Earth. Of course, knowledge preservation is institutional, not merely having the information written down, so the apocalypse of the asteroid would necessarily limit what the founders were able to do even if they had nuWikipedia or the like saved among their possessions. That being said, I’m not exactly imagining that the most dramatic reversion happened in those first few years. Whatever equivalent that this world had of, say, the internet was likely destroyed, but the founders could use some degree of engineering knowledge to maintain a lot of twentieth century niceties, not to mention some magical ones (the sunstones I mentioned in an earlier article are envisioned to be purely arcane devices, not technology masquerading as magic). A lot of the reversion happens later. The starting village of Old Cross is a planned town with a large train station in it, but by the time the game starts only some know what trains are, let alone how they work. A lot of what I’m thinking drives the reversion down the tech tree is more the institutional collapse of the government that initially settled and policed the areas outside the city, and there would be both economic and cultural reasons for this. The literal dust settling from the asteroid is a big part; even with the Macguffin-esque sunstones, one can imagine there’s only so much crop yield that can be produced. From this, we can further imagine that a large radius outside the city needed to be cleared and used for farmland in order to support the economic activity within the city. Over 500 years of literal dust settling, of both increase in insolation and resultant climate change, have dramatically changed the productivity of farmland (and almost certainly for the better). Between better farmland, re-emerging fisheries, and just a general ease in being able to produce food, one can imagine that the costs of maintaining rail lines, power grids, and social welfare to such a large radius of settled land begins to look much smaller than the (increasingly unnecessary) benefits. The rail network gets contracted, benefits are cut off, and suddenly a hundred miles away may as well be another country. The theme of urban-rural divide, already present in Electric Bastionland, is given center stage here, really made even more stark if anything. And, just in case it wasn’t blatant enough, those changes also bring with them monsters, making the contraction feel even more like abandonment.

I’m of course left with plenty of questions. Is the city a neglectful parent from generations ago, or is it a mythic architect from centuries? How does religion play into this? First, is this a world where gods are real (many fantasy worlds are), or is it a world where religion is based on the either ineffable or fictional, like the real world? And second, what does faith look like for denizens of these villages? In a way, having actual gods is almost a cop-out, it makes religion much less like an act of faith and more like yet another element of the world’s physics. My preference, given that this is fantasy, is to have real elements of the supernatural agglomerate with myths of history in a way that makes religion…complicated. I think designing religious cosmology in a way that forces players to reckon with the idea that some of it (but not all) may be true introduces an element of mystery that, let’s be real, most modern thinkers don’t really face themselves with at any significant frequency.

Religion is likely to be but one element that produces the tension that will be ever-present between the village and everything outside of it. Hell, the fact that I designed a map where the tech level increases the closer you get to the city means that there must be a continuing reason for the divide to be maintained. Yes, resources play into it, but so does culture. As it says in Electric Bastionland, when you’re in the Deep Country travelling away from the city means travelling deeper in both distance and time. Beyond being distant from modernity, though, Deep Country opposes it.

I know it’s a lofty goal, but I want to design a game where the players feel the world expanding as their characters do. I want them to enter knowing little but the village they came from, and slowly but surely begin to understand how much larger the world around them truly is. This does mean limiting character concepts at the start; I am receptive to characters which come from even further away but none who are from the city or closer to the city. It also means that even the area immediately surrounding the village has to be fraught with mystery and danger. I’ve drafted the first segment of Deep Country, the one immediately surrounding the starting village. It’s a pretty solid starting game map, with a number of adventure sites that can make for some introductory arcs. There has to be more, though. There has to be something which will pull characters towards the city, even slowly. Given the size of the wilderness there’s a complete other map between the starting village and the point where the trains still run, let alone anywhere near the city.

And that is the other side of the coin when it comes to my prep. So much of the city gets filtered, distorted, and outright denied by the time it makes it out to the villages. When the starting map is only really going to ‘the next village’ in most directions, there does need to be an overarching conflict that will draw players’ interest towards the city, even if that draw takes some time. It’s the inherent conflict between pushing the players towards that nexus while also having characters who were taught to resist, resent, and avoid said nexus their whole lives. My hope, then, is to exploit (weaponize, even) players’ natural desire for power and capability. The city is the nexus of magic in their known world as well as a font of incredible technology. Just as it says in Electric Bastionland, you can find everything you could possibly want in the city. You just need to figure out where it is, who has it, and how much they want for it.