Post Apocalyptic D&D Setting?

[Jimp]

How would you go about making a post apocalyptic setting for the D&D rules?
I'm interested in making and running one, but I'm not entirely sure how it would work out with D&D's high fantasy style. Either 3.5e or 2e, either works. Let's try and keep the discussion general.
Overarching house rule that I always enforce: Spells can't create food/water.
So, how would one work out? Have people run one before? Things to look out for? etc etc.

[FlyMolo]

How would you go about making a post apocalyptic setting for the D&D rules?
I'm interested in making and running one, but I'm not entirely sure how it would work out with D&D's high fantasy style. Either 3.5e or 2e, either works. Let's try and keep the discussion general.
Overarching house rule that I always enforce: Spells can't create food/water.
So, how would one work out? Have people run one before? Things to look out for? etc etc.

I'd leave that houserule out, actually. It makes clerics the most important member of the party, and nobody likes starving players.

Check out the Dustlands campaign setting by SilverClawShift and her group/DM. They've done a really excellent job with that. It's almost exactly what you're looking for, I think.

And if you don't feel like co-opting those races and weapons, just make the world darker. Perhaps the world is mostly empty, with roving gangs of phantom-horse riding bad people, killing and looting for a living. Make the world emptier, instead of teeming with monsters, and add one to the CR of every monster.(I mean, throw monsters 1 CR higher at the players.)

[hylian chozo]

I second the Dustlands but it isn't quite finished. The setting is, just not the classes and races. It is awesome, though.

[Prometheus]

I've never seen Dusklands, but the general premise of filling a world up with monsters would be my approach to the situation. Think zombies, although it doesn't have to be zombies. When the world is filled with powerful monsters, it is a harsh world indeed, and all society collapses. People are forced to return (establish?) to feudalistic systems, where security grants loyalty and power is measured by how much land you an safely protect.

[SilverClawShift]

ICheck out the Dustlands campaign setting by SilverClawShift and her group/DM. They've done a really excellent job with that. It's almost exactly what you're looking for, I think.

I second the Dustlands but it isn't quite finished. The setting is, just not the classes and races. It is awesome, though.

Thanks for the praise. Yeah, the Dustlands is very, very unfinished (and we have a habit of going back and refining things we considered 'done' at one point). Even the Spellshot Pistol needs a little work (just really more rules concerning how it functions with feats and such).

We'd be a lot further along if we didn't actually play the game.

[Tsotha-lanti]

How would you go about making a post apocalyptic setting for the D&D rules?

http://www.athas.org/

Also, get Sandstorm to go with that.

[Cainen]

Seriously, why does almost noone know about Dark Sun nowadays? That was one of the best settings ever.

[Tsotha-lanti]

Seriously, why does almost noone know about Dark Sun nowadays? That was one of the best settings ever.

Guard thine tongue, heathen! It still is.

[Cainen]

Guard thine tongue, heathen! It still is.

Well, it doesn't help that Dark Sun, Planescape, and Spelljammer died off with 2E and they haven't been officially published in any meaningful way for 3E, no? I'm still not pleased that Forgotten Realms is still massively popular.

[Tsotha-lanti]

Well, it doesn't help that Dark Sun, Planescape, and Spelljammer died off with 2E and they haven't been officially published in any meaningful way for 3E, no? I'm still not pleased that Forgotten Realms is still massively popular.

The athas.org project has kept the setting very much alive and up-to-date. "Official" is kind of irrelevant, if you ask me (especially when you consider that all the best things done with d20 were not done by WotC anyway). Getting world material is hard if you're not willing to pirate it, admittedly. (Lucky me, I have the last Dark Sun campaign boxed set put out.)

[mostlyharmful]

Hey, I like Dark Sun. I don't get to play there often it's true but that's mostly because I have to DM most of the time and my group isn't keen on harsh + gritty worlds for some reason. Ho hum.

But I love the desertification through magic thing. and the Dragon Kings.

Edit: Oh yeah. and I third the Dustlands in SiverClawShifts sig, I've shamelessly poached off it for a few things. in particular the negative energy bleedthrough and the wastelings. very Dark Tower-esque.

[SurlySeraph]

Dustlands are win.

Well, it doesn't help that Dark Sun, Planescape, and Spelljammer died off with 2E and they haven't been officially published in any meaningful way for 3E, no? I'm still not pleased that Forgotten Realms is still massively popular.

Good news for you! Planescape is in the same continuity as Forgotten Realms.

Really. I don't know about published campaigns, but Sigil comes up in most of the FR-based PC games, and it's the same Sigil you knew. The planar cosmology is the same. 3E still has Planescape, it's just not it's own setting.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

The Cataclysm project in my sig is also post-Apocalyptic.

Shameless Plug.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well, I had an apocalyptic setting which I can share with you...

In short, the Emperor of an empire in which most of the nobility were magic users, who tended to see non-magic users as serfs, was murdered. This caused a free-for-all where everything was up for grabs. Neighbor warred against neighbor in an attempt to grab all they can for themselves. The ensuing time period was known as the Mage Wars. It all ended after the major players started consolidating their own holdings, and fighting each other, devistating the countryside in the process, and both end up dying (one kills the other, but was so weakened, he was killed by one of his own minions, who couldn't hold what he had).

In this post-apocalyptic setting, mages are feared and hated. Magic itself is seen as, effectively, heresy, and will get you lynched if you admit you practice it or even know a lot about it. One of the more common 'witch hunt' practices is to plant a spell component pouch on someone and accuse them of wizardry.

Magic is rare enough that there aren't a lot of people teaching it. Everyone who does teach magic are specialists, which means all PC Wizards are specialists, only they have to exclude one additional college at no additional benefit. They have to hide their book, and their spell components, because either can get you lynched.

There are no spellcasting progression PrC's. They simply don't exist. No one is left to teach them. However, each specialty has attributes which they get as they progress, depending on the specialty. For example, Necromancers become more and more undead as they progress in levels, eventually gaining the Undead subtype (very similar to the Dread Necromancer, only without the spontanous casting). Also, as a wizard progresses in levels, as he gains more benefits, he also becomes easier to distinguish as an arcane caster. Evokers, for example, have various elemental effects about them that they cannot repress, necromancers look more undead, etc... some of the colleges are less dramatic about it, but they all have things which a commoner might be able to identify a magic user by. Of course, by the time a commoner could make a default check to distinguish it, you're pretty much not worried about them.

Sorcerers HAVE to come from a bloodline, and gain powers based on that bloodline, and become more like that bloodline as they progress, making it difficult, if not impossible, to hide their magical nature after a while.

There are areas warped by magic from the wars. In these areas, if you cast a spell, different things can happen, depending on the area. For example, an area with a particularly cold aspect to it can auto-max any spell with the cold descriptor, but any fire spell has to make a sufficently high spellcaster level check or be auto-countered. Other areas warp the native flora and fauna, so you might encounter a plant that shoots thorns coated in poison that does 1d10 Con damage, or a fire-breathing displacer beast. Entering such an area is obvious to a magic user, making an easy Spellcraft check to notice. Detect Magic can also alert you to the presence of warped magic.

Clerics are also restricted, because the dieties themselves fear the continuation of sentient life as a whole, so they grant different powers to clerics rather than the normal spell list. Druids are almost non-existant anymore, and are very rarely seen, because they are too busy trying to fix the warped magic areas to bother with anything where people still reside.

Yes, it was a low-magic campaign. It was done this way on purpose, as a 'Merc' game. It was a very lethal game, as one might imagine, but the players just loved the additional challenge.

[LibraryOgre]

Good news for you! Planescape is in the same continuity as Forgotten Realms.

Really. I don't know about published campaigns, but Sigil comes up in most of the FR-based PC games, and it's the same Sigil you knew. The planar cosmology is the same. 3E still has Planescape, it's just not it's own setting.

Actually, 3e FR's cosmology got rid of the Great Ring.

[Corsec1337]

Ever heard of the Scarred Lands? While it's not apocalyptic, it came very close. It's based on greek mythology and it was approx 50-90 years ago in the storyline that the titans were taken down by the gods. It had alot of well written fluff and was a pretty good setting in general. It a city of Paladins that was one of the most corrupt places in the world, a city of Necromancers that were one of the most lawful places, and many other intersting places. The books can be found generally pretty cheap on amazon and ebay. It was done by Sword and Sorcery and is a pretty brutal place since the Titans corrupted the land so much. The sea between the two main continents is red from the still beating heart of one of the titans at the bottom of it. It actully makes people go crazy if they touch it.

[Ascension]

I can see now it's not a particularly novel concept, but I plan to run a post-apocalyptic low (arcane) magic setting in which a war between magic users devastated everything a few centuries back. Most of the universities were destroyed and the draconic bloodlines all but died out, so wizards and sorcerers are incredibly rare, and are not exactly well liked by the general populous. The magical relics of the bygone era are still highly prized, though, leading to an environment actually highly conducive to the production of adventurers... a fairly large portion of the surviving population makes a living by delving into the various ruins that still dot the landscape, trying to recover various mystical artifacts. This leads to an interesting variant of the oft-maligned "Magic Mart"... magic items are widely available on the market, but since they're being randomly excavated, not crafted, the selection would be fairly limited. "You don't want a +3 flaming quarterstaff? Sorry, but it's the only magic weapon we were able to find on our last run. Take it or leave it."

I like great and enigmatic global traumas lurking in the past. Leads to great quest hooks, and rewards people who take Knowledge (History).

[Randel]

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with Dustlands or some of the other settings like that, but I have been thinking about a game in which the surface if filled with bands of goblins/orcs/zombies/shadows/plant monsters/druids or whatever and humans are basically forced to live in underground bunkers and defend themselves against the stuff on the surface.

Basically, a reversal of the thought of people living on the surface and hunting monsters in dungeons.

There might be plenty of vegetation/food around, but there are also plenty of monsters that would be attracted to those life-rich areas. People are either hiding in fortresses and defending against the hoards outside, keeping on the run from said monsters, or moving to areas where the monsters don't normally go and trying to eke out a living there.

So you could have the choice of gathering up refugees to go to the nearest Evil Overlord for protection in his Dungeon of Doom, Be a group of gorrila warriors hunting the monsters for food and fleeing when things get too dangerous, or try your luck in a desert.

Of course, one assumes that Evil Overlords have a source of food to feed their minions... at the very least a source thats made of magically created gruel or even monsters that were lured into the dungeon, killed and then cooked into "mystery stew".

This idea was kind of inspired by zombie apocolypse threads and reading one strip of Zogonia where the group camped out in front of a dungeon entrace where they planned to wait till morning to go in... until one said "Are you kidding? I can't wait to get in there. Out here we could get eaten by dinosaurs, giant spiders, dragons... In a dungeon, we can't run into anything so big that it can't fit through the door."

Then they all went into the dungeon, peering fearfully outside to make sure nothing was trying to follow them in.

[TheThan]

If your looking for a sci-fi take on it you can look into D20 modern apocalypse. Barring that, I had an idea the required two campaigns to use. The first one was a basic dnd campaign setting. The story involved the destruction of the world. And the second deals with the aftermath of the destruction.
I was going to take a page from The legend of Zelda, and have the new campaign setting would be the same setting as the first one, only twisted and different. Where once a tall forest of evergreens stood, a forest of petrified trees now stands. Those fertile fields that provided food for a town is now a desert. That sort of stuff.
But its just one of the many ideas I have had for campaigns.