Welcome To The Ashen Age

I once had a particularly solemn dream, a dream that seems like it would only appear during a fever or restless nights. There was a towering door before me, then came a voice that blew out all the candles. It was the scream of a beast, screeching about how merciless strength is the most powerful virtue of all. I smashed my pulse against my pillow, but I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the beast's words were heeded.

I'm not above joining the bandwagon of creating homebrew settings. It seems like everybody has one, and I have seen some great things come out of them. So, I'm going to create a setting, one with dragons and gods and heroism in the face of suffering, hopefully one that you all and my players will enjoy.

The Ashen Age
(Markus Neidel)

Once the basilisk ascended to godhood, the people of the world thought that this was the end of everything. It had been a good run. Their lives had been uneventful, simple yet sustainable, free of inconvenience from fabled monsters. Once the basilisk petrified the gods and their gargantuan, half-eaten body parts crashed down from the heavens, many accepted their unfortunate end. Although, among every group there are those who either have a stubborn will to live or the understanding that the end is rarely ever the end.

So, the lucky few built their small strongholds underground and survived as their loved ones were crushed to death by the crushing weight of their gods. The few survivors never dared to peek their heads out of their bunkers out of fear that they may be petrified by the new all-seeing god.

For hundreds of years the surface was ruled by bleak reminders of humanity's failures, ash-ridden corpses, petrified pieces of broken once-gods, and ruins of things long abandoned.

It is unknown who was the first to release themselves from their own confines and step out into the wastes of the world, but soon humans found themselves on the surface once more, not as rulers but as roamers. For the people who are brave enough to settle on the surface, the world is strange. They didn't know what to expect, for all that they had heard previously about the surface were dubious tellings of their ancestors accounts. They only have the destroyed things around them to remind them of their legacy. Ash and dust is everywhere, hills have turned to dunes, forests have been toppled and stubbornly refuse to recover except for a sparse few trees, large lakes have been filled with ash and turned into bogs, and the ash has even buried entire villages. Alien wildlife grows slowly and sparsely on the shattered body parts of the once-gods, who's petrified bodies now act as mountains of sorts in the barren landscape.

People have and always will clutch for whatever power they can find in any given situation. Some people have claimed themselves as lords of particular ruins and most have made caravans that stick closely together to fulfill this wanting for power and protection. Some small communities have begun to spring up on the surface; although most still keep to their dark and damp dungeons out of fear of what lies above. These fear-mongers are somewhat correct in their assumptions, the surface is a lawless place and strange things also roam the lands above, thriving on the lack of humankind in their newfound ecosystem.

That's the Ashen Age in brief. It's awfully dry, life is snuffed out by dust and ash, and a cloud of ash always clouds out the sun. Some say that the goddess of the sun was also petrified and the sun was replaced by the all-seeing eye of the basilisk, basking in the success of its judgement upon humanity.

Addendum
(Anthony Pismarov)

Phew, back to informal voice. At the end of every one of these more world-buildy type of posts, I will have an addendum with tables and whatnot to please my inner rules-lawyer and those that like more mechanical stuff, of course the tables will be related to the subject I talk about. I really like this setting, it's evocative and provides loads of justification for lots of things, such as:
- Dungeons, you got em. People have been living in them for hundreds of years, a few have probably died out and now contain monsters within the roots of their achievements.
- Mysterious ruins, yup. There are odd and ashen ruins above the surface, waiting to be looted, and people have already begun to squat in them.
- Giant Greco-Roman statues, uh-huh. The gods have plummeted from their orbit around the world, if you want some can still be in one piece. Also if you want, you can make the gods completely alien in biology. There will be a post about the gods soon, but just remember, you can take and remove whatever you want if you use this in your home-games.

You can also stick to whatever historical themes you want, since this is so far pretty vague in design, like:

- You want vikings? Sure, just make it so this is some sort of weird ashen tundra with warrior clans.
- You can go colonialist with this, with brave (or foolish) people trying to settle the frontier in these ashen wastes.
- You can also go with a Slumbering Ursine Dunes kind of route with this, making the ash more like sand and having there be tiny points of oasis.

I'm going to define all of this a bit more in later posts. There will be three or four more posts about this, I have the following on my to-write list:
- Gods and their nature.
- Caravans and the new people of the ashen age.
- Monsters and those that now inhabit the world.

So, if you want, tell me what you want to see next. For now, have a method of character creation, a kind of refined version of this previous post, your very own scavenger, just click on the red addendum link. In the meantime, see you all later!