Expand on a world idea

[richardbob123]

I have a idea for a world i want to create , that is around 2 thousands years ago there was a war that resulted in most of the land being destroyed, leaving most the of the population that was left living in plateau city, and now leaving the lowland covered in a deadly fog.
and i wanted people to help with expanding on it , to be more flesh out

[Segev]

I have a idea for a world i want to create , that is around 2 thousands years ago there was a war that resulted in most of the land being destroyed, leaving most the of the population that was left living in plateau city, and now leaving the lowland covered in a deadly fog.
and i wanted people to help with expanding on it , to be more flesh out

I had a setting a long time ago that had a similar aesthetic. Though the fog there was less "deadly" and more just "obscuring the enormous drop." Creatures could fly in the fog that would breach its surface and then fall back into it, as if it were water, while the creatures that lived up on the plateau would find the fog to be...well, thin air. Descending below into it was easy enough if you could find handholds on the cliff faces, or a cave or something. And go far enough down, and it thins out enough to be a massive cloud-cover.

The plateaus were barren places, hard to keep watered, but had ample sunlight and generally were monster-free. Monsters dwelt within the fog. Wood from a particular kind of tree - fairly common around the edges of the plateaus - would cause hte fog to thicken into water, but the water would stay around the wood and rest on other fog as if the fog were, itself, water. Boats and ships made of this wood would thus be used to sail over the fog, and for fishing within it. Though dangerous monsters dwell below, so, too, do creatures that are good to eat.

Lush lands lie far, far below, though they're in near-constant dimness from the clouds overhead, only rarely thinning out to let the sky and the sun straight through. Humidity is high and rain is rare, but moisture beads up on every surface if you're not careful. Fantastical races live down there, and fire is almost impossible to start or maintain (making it almost magical, and making the forge-metals of the plateaus valuable). Contact is rare, due to distance, to the point that many plateau-cities believe there is no civilization beneath the fog, and many of the peoples below don't know there's civilization above the clouds.

Oceanic and avian creatures both fly about beneath and within the clouds, and some dwellers below have the ability to "swim" in the air. Or use cetaceans as beasts of burden.

[strangebloke]

I have a idea for a world i want to create , that is around 2 thousands years ago there was a war that resulted in most of the land being destroyed, leaving most the of the population that was left living in plateau city, and now leaving the lowland covered in a deadly fog.
and i wanted people to help with expanding on it , to be more flesh out

I'm a big fan of settings like this. In fact this is more or less how I tried to run my first big 5e campaign. It makes the friendly world nice and small and neat, while also supplying you with a near-infinite supply of monsters and baddies to fight against. Works great for a grid based exploration game, where you're trying to explore the misty regions and establish forts that allow you to expand ever further from the original plateau. Perhaps even provide a special mission they can do that allows them to raise up one of the "wild" hexs to the level of the plateau in some huge feat of magical geo-engineering.

You can work in a really fun mystery element here too, where the origins of the war that broke the world are unclear but as the party explores more ruins it becomes clear what happened. IMO the best way to do this is to have a friendly NPC questgiver who's been funding them the whole time, and they slowly piece together that he's actually some ancient demon or dragon or something, and might be partially responsible for the mist.

Then the final part of the campaign is them hiding in the wilds and trying to run missions into the settled areas to strike out at the BBEG. :smallcool:

[Corran]

Not really an idea for expanding the world, more like a quest or a rumor that may turn into a quest at some point. There is a (rumor of a) map (not geographical, more like X miles in this direction, then Y miles in this direction, etc) that leads you through the fog to other unaffected parts of the world.

[Greywander]

First, I'd repost this in the Worldbuilding forum (or have a mod move it there), which is a subforum to the Homebrew forum. Second, I'd give it a more eye-catching title like "Island plateaus above monster-infested foggy wilderness" or something. (If this thread gets moved to Worldbuilding, you can change the thread title by editing the OP.)

Your OP is a bit short on details, so it's difficult to expand on what you have without just inventing something whole-cloth. So I guess I'll do what others are doing and share some details for a setting I came up with, but never used.

Oddly enough, this was from way back when I was deep into the MLP fandom. It was intended to be the "evil twin" version of the setting in the show (so expect some "edge"), and as such had three "evil" races that were the counterparts to those in the show, though you could just as easily replace them with some kind of humanoid race.

But first, the environment. The land was a twisted hellscape of rock and lava and dangerous beasts (no plants, though there was fungus which filled a similar niche). What's worse is that a poisonous fog filled the land, sinking down to the lowest points, leaving only the peaks of mountains free from the deadly gas. There was one thing which could drive back the fog, though, and that's fire stones. The bigger the stone, the farther it would push the fog back, allowing the lower places to be safely settled. But they would lose their power after a while and needed to be immersed in lava for a time to recharge. The world as a whole was also dominated by one enormous maelstrom, which I didn't ever quite find a purpose for, only that the capital was at the eye of the storm (and thus free from its ill effects) and that it was alternatively held at bay by the king who ruled the land, or created by said king as a means to control his subjects, depending on who you asked.

Now, the inhabitants. At the top of the social hierarchy were the shadhavar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadhavar), evil unicorn-like creatures with one or more horns. When they used their magic, it would create music that was unique to each individual. They formed the aristocracy and nobility, often taking the roles of philosophers, artists, and other occupations of leisure. Since this is the evil twin universe to MLP, naturally the society as a whole was both racist and sexist, so even among the shadhavar the females would be considered inferior to the males, and the other two races were even below them. The shadhavar had their cities atop the mountains where they were safe from the deadly fog, though they could be found in the lower cities as well, often in positions of government or other social functions. The most common way to earn a promotion is for your immediate supervisor to suffer a tragic accident, and if you could get away with it, it meant that you were probably better suited for the job.

At the bottom, both of the social hierarchy and with regard to elevation, where the helhest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helhest), who looked like mostly normal horses, aside from the slitted eyes and the sharp fangs that were clearly designed for eating meat. Then again, they all had those. Did I mention there was no vegetation in this world? Also that all three races, in addition to the other stuff I said, also used to be cannibals? It's illegal now on account of not being conducive toward the advancement of the kingdom, but that doesn't mean they don't try to sneak a bite when no one is looking. (I did warn you about potential "edge".) Anyway, the helhest are also resistant, but not necessarily immune to the deadly fog. In fact, fog-huffing is a bit of a pastime among the less intelligent, where they see how much they can huff before they pass out. Helhest often work in manual labor jobs (with mining being a common one; the helhest of folklore are said to only have three legs, these ones often have a mining pick or other tool attached to one leg, leaving them only three to walk on), and often in the fog unprotected, until they eventually expire. They're basically serfs, and boy do they loathe the other two races. They've been known to occasionally lead groups to the middle of nowhere, "lose" the fire stone that was holding the fog back (or wait for it to run out of power), then just walk back to town through the fog while their comrades perish.

In the middle are the pyrippi (singular pyrippus; no Wikipedia link, but supposedly these pull the chariot of Hades or something), basically a dragon-horse. They can fly and are immune to fire. They make up the bulk of the military and police, which includes monster-hunting (because the shadhavar would never lower themselves to doing that themselves), but they also serve another important function. They're generally responsible for keeping the fire stones charged up, swapping them out when needed and putting the spent ones in lava to recharge (oh, yeah, and they can swim in lava). They'll also often explore to look for new fire stones to use.

So I actually did have an idea for a story set in this world, featuring two characters from each race, one for each sex, all working together. The pyrippi are just as hateful as the rest of them, but for some reason the two specific characters I had in mind consisted of one who was super chill and didn't really care about that stuff, and the other who was the chief of police and fanatically loyal (though she could and would drop a shadhavar if he or she were breaking the law). So, all that to say that there would have been quite a variety of people in this culture, and not all of them were representative of the average. Even so, there would have been a tense moment where all the characters met up in one place and very nearly kill each other before deciding to work together to solve the crisis that had just sprung up.

So pretty much it's a world where everyone hates everyone else and also the world sucks. So basically the 40k version of MLP. Some may say it's too edgy, but I see it as a place ripe for adventure and storytelling due to all the potential conflict boiling just below the surface. The trope of an elf and a dwarf working together and overcoming their cultural animosity is a bit played out and just doesn't hit as hard anymore. But here we can have several characters of all races and sexes with a seething hatred of one another that are forced to work together because reasons, and to eventually see past their own biases and maybe, just maybe, find true friendship.

Anyway, I hope there's something in there that inspires your own setting.