roseembolism | [rpg] Below the Green Moon: Background theory

I'm currently working on a setting, one that's a long term world-building project. I'm Calling it "Under the Green Moon". And I blame the elves for it.

It started with the dissatisfaction I've had about the reactionary nature of high fantasy, and the pseudo-medieval settings that are generally used. It just has always seemed bizarre that we can have completely different worlds, with different geography, ecology, and sometimes even physics, and still end up with the Holy Roman Empire in drag. I wanted to get away from the feeling of "Europe with Magic", and the Tolkeinish elements such game worlds use. Thinking about it, I decided I wanted something a bit more inspired by Burroughs and Howard, and Vance, with the impression of long-lived civilizations living on the ruins of even older long-vanished precursors. A world that was visceral and romantic in the classic sense of the term..

At the same time, I was mulling over how I disliked one on of the classic cliches of High Fantasy: the idea of elves as the elder, wiser, better race. Along with the related idea of elves as an alien nonhuman race that somehow could still breed with humans. Something clicked, and I said, "I I do a game, I want to have HUMANS be the elder race that is fading, with the other races being...(another *click*) descendents of the humans. Children races.

And as I considered how this could work, abruptly everything came together in a synthesis. "Well, how about instead of making it another world, we make it Earth! But (to continue being different) not Earth a long time ago, but Earth in the far future. Twenty, Thirty thousand years or more in the future. An era when our time is all but forgotten; multiple civilizations risen after ours, and gone to their various collapses, ascensions or singularities, A world where humans are slowly fading, being replaced by new races created by those fallen civilizations. And because it IS a fantasy, it has to have magic in it...unless of course it's really some strange future technology.

I call it a post-technological fantasy. And I'm going to be tossing details and ideas about it for while, until I do something with it.