Dark Fantasy in a Dying World
The Setting:
They've said it all happened in a flash. A cataclysm. A war without end, where brother murdered brother. Where the gods were cast down from the heavens, sundered on the stygian and jagged rocks of Nagathrond. No-one now knows how it happened. The bones of the last men to remember are dust now. The gleaming cities dark, swallowed up by leaf and wave til not even ghosts remained to howl over their forgotten graves..
The Atlantes and their world-unifying empire are long gone. In their place, a hundred upon a hundred warring kingdoms have risen and fallen. Their great works scavenged like a leviathan's bones, their archives razed, and all trace of their existence nearly gone from memory. Only learned men remember their name, and many of these begin to doubt: were the precursors ever anything but myth?
War has come home to the Kingdoms of Prydain, favored sons of Atlant. A people from the West bare down on their realms, bound in crude leathers with archaic weapons of bone and rusted iron. They bring violence and hate in equal measure: starving and murderously desperate, seeking bread and blood both, to stave off the inevitable...
... And all the while the sky seems to grow increasingly dim, as Sol waxes away with slow and inevitable entropy born of time. Something unnoticed by the teeming masses, though careful and studious eyes have taken note: Second Earth is dying. Mankind's end seems imminent. Not through fire or war, but choking darkness and starvation.
It is into this world that you were born. A dying son of a decaying race. A world of warring clans and kingdoms, a realm where techno-priests contend with sorcerers of fire and ice, and where the only certainty is that an end must surely come yet... And that it will come soon.
Of Days Gone Before takes place in a dark age of sorts following the collapse of an empire roughly analogous to the contemporary myth of Atlantis. The players will discover through the course of gameplay that their world is dying. Not through the nefarious schemes of some sorcerer, or the machinations of an alien force, but as part of the natural course of things. Hard choices will present themselves, and the characters will need to decide what's more important to them: righting the wrongs of Second Earth or finding a way to escape the inevitable fate of their world?
For inspiration, consider Conan the Barbarian's Hyborian Age, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, "traditional fantasy", and of course classical and dark age history in our own world.
Magic does exist as do near-human races; the player characters will come from relatively mundane beginnings and later uncover the curiosities of their world.
I've allowed for plenty of opportunity to participate in world-building, if any players decide they would like to. There are a few nooks and crannies of Second Earth that could use describing by someone imaginative.
This game emphasizes writing over gameplay and is not first come first served.
