Dungeon Blueprint: Wasteland Towers

It's a hot day in the rocky wastelands of a charred little planet. Dotting the surface and all over the horizon stand massive, rotting structures -- the towers of the ancients. The sites your ancestors built to reach the heavens and escape the hell below them. You often wonder about them. The ancients. How they managed to create so many wonderful things and how they threw it all away.


I have a special love of post-apocalyptic settings. Always have. I wouldn't want such a thing to occur in real life, of course, but in the imagination it's quite nice to explore the wastelands, the potential freedom of them and the potential horrors they might contain. The setting I'm cooking up to go with the 2D20 mechanic revolves around the use of massive, ruined towers in a wasteland. The idea came from the Solve for X talk with Neal Stephenson which I saw in my Google+ stream some time ago. His idea is for a more optimistic setting similar to the older space adventure stories, but I'm not one for optimism.

The time period is somewhere after 19,440 AD. Humanity had built the massive towers, launched space colonizing efforts and had a massive intergalactic war that set them back thousands of years. Over the next 10,000 years humanity managed to rebuild, recolonize and have a second intergalactic war -- even more destructive than the first -- that led to nearly exterminating them. Their worlds are in complete ruins and their descendants are barely managing to survive. Rebuilding and recolonizing are all but impossible at this point.

It's in this bleak setting that characters -- game or story related -- will find their individual struggles for life, for power or for dreams.

The world is based on Earth with some general changes due to the massive amount of damage the planet would take during two massive wars. Ruins of towers would dot the planet -- many completely destroyed, others partially, and a few intact. The towers have a range of heights, most rising up thousands of stories and into the atmosphere to act as space ports. Some towers will stretch far and wide beneath the surface of the Earth, like a maze of tunnels in an ant hill. The rest of the world is largely desert wasteland and craters -- the aftermath of bombardments from the upper atmosphere. The oceans are still present, though highly reduced they are overgrown with hardy plant-life.

In case it isn't obvious, the setting isn't going for realism or scientific plausibility (that makes sense, right? heh).

Technology-wise the ancients were highly advanced, space faring and colonizing. There is still tech in existence, but it has been a couple thousand years since the war and most things have already been collected, ruined or completely forgotten.

Humanity has survived in various forms. There are pockets that still use a lot of technology from the ancients -- they maintain at least some knowledge of it and occasionally build new things. Bandits and slavers roam the wastelands and towers. Primitives -- either through imposed restrictions or 'devolution' -- live in various caves and towers. Hunter/gatherer tribes exist. Farmers/ranchers exist. Just a wide variety overall. The one thing they do have in common is the use of small groups or tribes -- there really aren't many large populations or cities. Some of the tribes -- especially farmers/ranchers -- will keep in touch with other local tribes like them and do some trading or helping. They still keep their distance, though.

And that's the overview of the setting. Next week I'll see about posting a bit on some possible ideas I have with dungeons, poetry and riddles.