Do you have any tips for describing to your players a fantasy setting that was built on the ruins of a modern world without just saying it? Think Adventure Time, Nausicaa, Shannara, Wizards, etc.
Ideally I'd like this to be a slow revelation over the course of the campaign culminating with a big blatant reveal in the last session or two.
How long has society been gone? How much shit is left?
"You trip over strange black rocks, they are a ribbon, straight to the valley where you seek parley, the general isn't there"
>>48253895
Thanks.
I'm thinking society has been gone 300-400 years. So, I guess just shells of big buildings, subway tunnels, beached aircraft carriers, and other big stuff is left.
Check out The Book of Swords and At Winters End.
There are also a couple documentaries about what would happen if humans disappeared. Given the timescale, nothing currently modern would last given a huge apocalypse of some sort.
I suggest that their be a few clues that can be explained as magical anachronisms and making the end of the campaign take place in a ruined (or relatively maintained) modern enclave.
I would say a more advanced civilization would last better than a modern one, and you can get away with passing sci-fi tech as magic items more easily than a piece of modern technology.
>>48253739
Simply don't let your players in on the joke. That wizard tower is a wizard tower, not a centuries old space ship, and the wizard is incredibly due to magic, not because of the technology and medicine he has access to in the not-at-all-spacecraft, and the trolls that guard his tower are big creatures made out of stone with glowing eyes, not robots.
>>48253739
Depending on how the world ended, you could fluff irradiated areas as "cursed". After all, radiation causes all sorts of bad effects. Illness, headaches, vomitting, hair falling out, heatless burns...people who don't have access to science may be quick to blame such things on the angry spirits of whatever race of giants used to live in those ruins taller than the tallest castles.
I did it once in a campaign, but the players already knew it was post-post-apocalypse before the game even started, it wasn't really supposed to be a secret.
If you can, find the text from the part of Nier where the game turns into a text adventure. Specifically the part that describes the "City of Art". It describes sky scrapers from the point of view of two characters that have never seen one and don't know what they are. They think they're some kind of sculpture, and when one character asks why they seem to be the only kind of art present, the other theorizes that maybe abstract art is really popular in the city.
>>48253739
I would think the best way is to have everything in the first area be so overgrown it looks like dense odd fantasy Forrest . Like a perfect circle bush tunnel that is actually a subway. Or massive think trees that are grown in and around skyscrapers.
Maby a nasty cave with the walls covered in a think layer of moss and stink but really it's a sewer.
Make to to point out the squareness of your environment without being to obvious about it. And slowly add things like small broken artifacts from the old modern time.
>>48253739
Oh my god are you me? I've been struggling to tape together a Hyper Light Drifter setting for a while now.
My current idea is to make it clear that there are ancient ruins from a past civilisation who possessed a great deal of power, but to have it explained away as 'magic' by the locals.
I always wanted to gm a campain inspired from Etrian Odyssey I and II.
I'm still stuck about how to make pleasant the exploration and the map of a giant tree. (And how to explain wall and door.)
>>48253739
Most ancient temples and dungeons in fantasy settings are made out of stone and rock. How about explicitly stating that many of the ancient structures are made of steel or some kind of air stone (very durable but light material that the ancients used, actually just plastic).
bomp
>>48253954
Probably focus on the shape and unnatural coloration of some of the constructs.
If there are huge ships beaching themselves on the shore, there are also likely people looting them for whatever high-quality steel they can get from it.
>>48253997
Post moar Habitat, I loved Simon Roy's take on Prophet.
>>48254838
Man, that story was so well done. Took me an embarrassingly long time to realize what they were actually talking about.
>>48253895
>"You trip over strange black rocks, they are a ribbon, straight to the valley where you seek parley, the general isn't there"
>>48256483
air stone (very durable but light material that the ancients used, actually just plastic)
Be very careful with these sort of descriptions. They can become really goddamn annoying if they players have to actually think through what the thing actually is. Asphalt (if that's what even what the first one is supposed to be) should be a "smooth, black stone road," not a ribbon of strange black rocks. Any synthetic material should be explicitly stated to be unnatural. When in doubt, err on the obvious side.
