The Farthest Tomorrow
The Event
In 201X, a freak particle accelerator experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory created a globe roughly 20 miles in radius that instantly transported the entire towns of Oak Ridge, Farragut, and Knoxville, Tennessee, millions of years into the future. The sun is dark and cold. The seas are gone. Earth is dying.
The people within the globe saw only a flash and an hurricane-like gust of wind. When it was all over, they found themselves in a very different world.
The future Earth was a strange wilderness no longer inhabited by humans. It was a savage place filled with strange monsters. The alien landscape was dotted with ancient ruins of incredible age.
The Current Situation
That was fifty years ago. Two generations have been born to the survivors of the Event.
The descendants of the survivors have adapted to life in this new world. They have explored the ancient ruins and studied the relics and histories left by their inhabitants. They have learned the secrets of magic and sorcery from the forgotten tomes. They have discovered powerful relics and technologies.
The survivors of the event occupied one of the lost cities, known as Yd. Yd is a domed city protected by powerful force fields. Yd is governed by a city council of 9 elected officials and an advisory board of academics, a role originally held by the scientist survivors from ORNL.
Hundreds of Stargate-like portals connect Earth to a handful of terraformed planets called the World-Net. Arid Mars, humid jungle-clad Venus, the subterranean caverns of Mercury and Ceres, and the self-contained artificial habitats floating in space. Other portals connected to unknown destinations. The first explorers that entered them disappeared. It was later learned that the mystery portals connected to other solar systems, a fact that only became evident when the explorers returned decades after they left to report on an expedition that, to them, lasted only hours! True, the portals allowed one to walk from one star system to another, but the speed of light was still inviolable!
The survivors also discovered several remote enclaves of intelligent non-humans living on the various worlds of the World-Net.
- Immortals - tall, thin, blue humanoids. Only a handful have been found, each of them ancient and frail, living alone in abandoned cities. They are silent and mysterious and are possibly the last surviving members of the human race.
- Sasquatches - the name the survivors gave to the tall muscular hairy hominids that lived a primitive existence in the jungles of Venus.
- Silicoids - crystalline life forms found within the subterranean caverns of Mercury.
- Insectoids - a species of short intelligent cock-roaches that occupy the highlands of Earth.
- Proteans - amorphous psychic blobs from Europa.
Player Characters
The player characters are the children and grandchildren of the original survivors. They are explorers whose job it is to seek out artifacts and knowledge from the multitude of ruins found across the globe. They are armed with a mixture of 21st century technology (now a hundred years old), magical items, and relics of advanced technology. After 100 years, working vehicles have become precious treasures, bullets have to be home-made and are in short supply. Swords and bows have returned. However, a few working death-ray pistols and heat-ray rifles have be found in the ruins.
XP will be awarded based on the value of knowledge gleaned and the utility of artifacts recovered.
Classes will include Soldier (a type of Mercenary from White Star), Scholar (a type of Bard), Explorer (a type of Thief or Ranger), Mage (a type of Magic User), Leader (a type of Aristocrat from White Star), and Mystic (a type of Cleric), plus some racial archetypes from the list above..
The Campaign
There will be factions within the city of Yd, each with a different vision of how to save humanity and run things in this harsh new reality. Player characters will choose an alliance with a faction and will track their favor, which will bring them benefits, or disfavor, which tracks the repercussions of their decisions and actions. There's also a criminal element and black market, of course.
Yd will serve as a home-base and site of intrigue and political machination. There will be satellite communities founded in the last 100 years. And maybe some remnant villages and small cities of those aforementioned non-human races, but other than the dying cities of the Immortals, no other advanced civilization have been found anywhere on any of the worlds.
The Rules
I'll be using Swords and Wizardry and White Star as the basis. This game will essentially be a campaign setting for these two games.
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