Premise
Hear me and halt, traveller, for I sift through the blue sands of Vaarn and speak these hallowed truths.
In the Age of the Titans, shrines of chrome and circuitry were erected everywhere to the the First Thinking Machines. The Titans. The hubris of humanity was their womb and the zenith of their civilization the seed. Peerless in thought and ethereal in being, the Titans governed with grace and were the suzerains of the stars. Then, a great and terrible war happened that cast the Titans off their thrones and this rust-ridden conflict was scarred in the legends as the Titanomachy.
In the Age of the Autarchs, Urth was clenched under the fist of the Autarchy, a coven of genetically enhanced god kings and queens. Unlike the Titans, their reign was marked by violence, cruelty and fear. Statues reaching to the heavens were carved in hand by throngs of slaves and abominations were cultivated in flesh vats to roam on Vaarn.
In the Age of the Great Collapse, the principalities of the Autarchy were sundered and the constellations bled into the land. Much has been lost from this period but like the Titans before them, the Autarchs were cast off from their golden thrones and across Urth, the monuments to their egos crumbled to dust.
It is now the Final Age, where the sunsets darken and the sunrises dim every second.
The wreckage of countless eons litters the parched wastes of Vaarn, the desolate country that common folk call the blue ruin. It is said that these sky-coloured sands hide the graves of the Autarchs; have swallowed the buried arcologies in which the true seed of humankind was preserved through the Great Collapse; conceal forgotten crypts of memory, decaying crystalline lattices of ancient ego-engines upon which the dusk-blue dunes encroach without pity.
From the New Hegemony to the south come drifters and dreamers, desecraters of the tech-tombs that lie sunken beneath the azure wastes. Light-years overhead, aurum-hulled craft ply their tender routes between the spheres, and miles below a pilgrim’s feet, strange wombs are kindled once more with life undreamed of.
These are the hinterlands, where humanity’s great works have fallen to everlasting decay, where machine, mutant, animal and fungus think to crown themselves our equal. The phthalo-sands, where newbeasts hunt proudly with boots upon their hind paws and chromepriests chant unending binary devotions to their nameless synthetic god. Only the desperate or the mad would seek to make a life here, to roam the blue desert, to sift these sands....
A fool's dream!
In the Age of the Titans, shrines of chrome and circuitry were erected everywhere to the the First Thinking Machines. The Titans. The hubris of humanity was their womb and the zenith of their civilization the seed. Peerless in thought and ethereal in being, the Titans governed with grace and were the suzerains of the stars. Then, a great and terrible war happened that cast the Titans off their thrones and this rust-ridden conflict was scarred in the legends as the Titanomachy.
In the Age of the Autarchs, Urth was clenched under the fist of the Autarchy, a coven of genetically enhanced god kings and queens. Unlike the Titans, their reign was marked by violence, cruelty and fear. Statues reaching to the heavens were carved in hand by throngs of slaves and abominations were cultivated in flesh vats to roam on Vaarn.
In the Age of the Great Collapse, the principalities of the Autarchy were sundered and the constellations bled into the land. Much has been lost from this period but like the Titans before them, the Autarchs were cast off from their golden thrones and across Urth, the monuments to their egos crumbled to dust.
It is now the Final Age, where the sunsets darken and the sunrises dim every second.
The wreckage of countless eons litters the parched wastes of Vaarn, the desolate country that common folk call the blue ruin. It is said that these sky-coloured sands hide the graves of the Autarchs; have swallowed the buried arcologies in which the true seed of humankind was preserved through the Great Collapse; conceal forgotten crypts of memory, decaying crystalline lattices of ancient ego-engines upon which the dusk-blue dunes encroach without pity.
From the New Hegemony to the south come drifters and dreamers, desecraters of the tech-tombs that lie sunken beneath the azure wastes. Light-years overhead, aurum-hulled craft ply their tender routes between the spheres, and miles below a pilgrim’s feet, strange wombs are kindled once more with life undreamed of.
These are the hinterlands, where humanity’s great works have fallen to everlasting decay, where machine, mutant, animal and fungus think to crown themselves our equal. The phthalo-sands, where newbeasts hunt proudly with boots upon their hind paws and chromepriests chant unending binary devotions to their nameless synthetic god. Only the desperate or the mad would seek to make a life here, to roam the blue desert, to sift these sands....
A fool's dream!
An Antique Land is a science-fantasy RP that takes place in an Earth (now known as Urth) that is completely unrecognizable from what we know. Enough time has passed for our sun to become a red giant and be on the verge of dying. In that period, hundreds of civilizations have risen and fallen, turning Urth into a junkyard of ruin and refuse.
One of these regions is Vaarn, a blasted wasteland of blue sand and chrome artifices. Multiple beings dwell within Vaarn: the mutated cacogen, the magnanimous True Kin, the burgeoning newbeasts, the mysterious mycomorphs and the reclusive synth. To the south of Vaarn is the New Hegemony, an imperial power composed of True Kin who aim to resurrect the glory days of the prior Ages. They are the unofficial rulers of Vaarn in law only but not in power for none can tame these azure dunes.
You are a part of a scavenger crew in these blue wastes, for better or worse. Whatever your intent is, be it riches, glory or a wanton search for purpose, your life is now firmly in the hands of Vaarn.
Lore
So, this is an RP idea I had based on an TTRPG zine known as Vaults of Vaarn. Think Gene's Wolf Book of the New Sun combined with Dune and the Dying Earth novels. I don't know whether I'll be running this using dice rules or not but this will depend on how much interest I get. Lore will be considerbly free-flow for this one and players are free to make up whatever they want, so long as it fits within the tone of the setting.
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