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My PA Fantasy.....; makes you wonder...
Topic Started: May 21 2009, 10:51 AM (407 Views)
Ross
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Wasteland Warlord
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It came to my attention a while ago why I fell in love with the fantasy setting of Dragonlance by Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

Why? What's it all about?

The setting itself for the majority of novels and adventure settings is during a war. The Queen of darkness has given priests and black wizards the power to corrupt good dragon eggs and turn them into evil bipedal dragonmen. Thus she has a solid backbone to her ground forces, as well as the addition of dragons, hobgoblins, goblins, evil men, minotaurs, and in the arctic areas, Thaoni.
A group of friends, at first fleeing the oncoming dragon army, then through discoveries turn and fight back to finally defeat the grand evil forces.
Now of course there's plenty more to it than that, but that's the basics.

What I think sets this setting aside from others, is that the main stories occur 300 years or so after a god made apocalypse.

The lands rose shook and settled, famines and plague spread across the land, decimating the nations. The once great knights, now partly blamed for the Cataclysm are shunned and even attacked by the populace.
Wizards are feared, and without access to their great magical towers of learning are but beginners compared to wizards of the past.
With the gods wrath, priests believe the gods have abandoned them.

So things during this war take on some very interesting twists. For example, some of the heroes, looking for transport for fleeing refugees, head of to a long remembered coastal city. Upon reaching the town they discover that during the upheaval of the world that the oceans had receded and lay some 50kms from the town.

So, while adventures mostly revolve around the war, you can of course explore adventures before the Cataclysm, and the rebuilding after the war or even straight after the Cataclysm during an era of severe paranoia fear and struggling.

I guess the moral of the story is, an apocalypse can fit into any genre, fantasy, modern, or sci-fi.
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v_lazy_dragon
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Enforcer
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The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is also a good way of setting a 'fantasy' setting after an apocalyspe (It all seems fairly normal vaguely 1700's america type setting with witch hunts and pioneers, etc and then eventually its revealed that its PA) and Phillip Reeve does a great Steam/dieselpunk PA setting in his Mortal Engines series
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mattblackgod
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Big boss warlord dude!
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It sounds a cool setting, and your point is one I have been telling folks for a while. You can have apocalyptic settings anywhere, any time or any background.

The Jon Shannow novels are set after our times, but they have a western feel to them. The first books have black powder precussion weapons, horses, magic, tribals and even mutants.
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Benny
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I've always really liked the Dragonlance setting. Shame my players played it to death back in the day when it was all the rage. Sad that I came to the party so late...

I've been reading the Obernewtyn series by Isobelle Carmody which is PA but without all the funky magic like in D&D. It's really interesting to read through a series where the apocalypse knocked everyone back to the middle ages. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan also has a very similar story of an ancient apocalypse and a recovering world...
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Chrome_Cat
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Merc
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I hear what Blackgod is saying. In that Post Apocolypse seems to be one of the deeply set archetypes in the western culture. Even the new D&D's world is set after the crumbling of an Empire. Lord of the Rings is set in the after math of the origional war of the gods. It's in our history to, the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages.

Dragonlance was a favorite of mine also. Played quite a bit in that world with D&D, after reading the trilogy of course. So many good charcters in there. Lord Soth, Sturm, Raistilan, the Kender, Kitiara.
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Ross
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Wasteland Warlord
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Mmmmm Lord Soth :(|:$:

I guess it's almost a prerequisite for things like that to hit fantasy settings. After all, your stereo typical dungeon crawl is usually a long abandoned city or dungeon complex, filled with treasure left there long ago by dead inhabitants.

I got a parcel from eVilbay yesterday, I'd forgotten to mention this setting, but Darksun falls into the once great lush green planet, now dusty wasteland thanks to defiler magic sucking the life out of things.
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Benny
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Ooh, gotta love evil defilers :) They've always got hot babes working for them... :P
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