An Alternative Setting for TNU: Some Preliminary Ideas

This is a collection of the first big batch of ideas that I hope will congeal into a setting guide for a future campaign I plan to run, which also might be worth collecting the ideas in and turning into a published object.

The Kingdom of Law, as detailed in The Nightmares Underneath, exists. It’s expansive and powerful and has all the qualities mentioned in the text. However, it is not where the players are, though it isn’t that far away and it’s presence can be felt.

There is a nation which, within approximately the last 50 years, has undergone both an industrial and social revolution. A class of merchant industrialists came into power and staged an uprising against the former nobility, backed by military support from the Kingdom of Law. This new power is still struggling to fully establish itself. The various sub-factions are conspiratorial, humanist with all the pitfalls that implies, and dedicated to proving themselves better than their precursors. Under their oversight, in their attempt to avoid the Royalist-associated signifiers of mass execution of dissidents, they have rapidly expanded the carceral systems of their state. Other philosophies struggle for the chance to establish themselves here, anarchist conspirators who fought against the royalists but were cast aside post-revolution, radical transcendentalists trying to imagine a world more to their tastes than the march of impending industry, communists fleeing from the Kingdom of Law in hope that their ideas can take root here, occult futurists from other industrial nations looking to make allies for their schemes.

These occult futurists mostly hail from a nearby land of elegant arched terraces and smokestacks, the most heavily industrialized city-state of the known world. Built on, off of, and above a hot sunbathed peninsula and archipelago, the result is a sort of aerial Venice, Balloon-Gondolas tracing paths between the Factory-Palaces. An internal cold war brews here, as various families and factions squabble in hopes they can control the city as a whole. Their balloons drift ever further across the sea, seeking… something. From the bottom of the factories crawl Devils, odd little creatures out of a Bosch or Bruegel painting, who mostly just seek to get out of this wretched place.

There is a section of the world that became unsettled in the wake of a plague. It has been, for several centuries, a place you do not go. It sits to the north of the merchant industrialist nation and to the west by sea of the city state detailed above, a presumed endless wilderness that inspired fear in the old royalists and is treated as a superstitious anathema by the kingdoms of Law and those who follow their philosophies. Faerie tales abound about what might have taken up residence there in the absence of mankind, and the few brave fools who venture off are assumed lost forever, never let back into the border wall. Strange ruins dot the hills and thickets, and if you were to venture in you might find that the rulers of this place have vehemently refused to pass on, buried courts continuing an accursed performance of nobility, while above ground you might find manifestations of nature, disgusted, working to keep this nobility deep underground.

This presumed abandoned land becomes the solution to the strain on the merchant-industrialists struggle to detain everyone they consider seditious. Rather than inhumane executions, prisoners can be given the opportunity to prove themselves in a new life on the other side of the wall. Provided with a selection of their belongings (or whatever happens to be in the pile of confiscated goods at the time) they are let free in the wilderness, perhaps with a promise that in some number of years they might be allowed to return, should they be able to prove they are worthy of doing so. These exiles have begun to create new societies, either in mimicry of their own or in attempts at new forms, while trying to survive the wilderness and its dangers, navigating the buried horrors and their guardians. This is the fate of player-characters, banished together for crimes real or imagined, to wander forth from the walls of the merchant-industrialist nation and make whatever new life they find out here.

Structurally, this will be a big sweeping hexcrawl populated with locations, some rules for random encounters and the statblocks thereof, various premade TNU-rules settlements and their appropriate sheets with NPCs, social institution templates. I imagine it might make particularly good fodder for a West Marches campaign.

My immediate tasks to get the ball rolling on this are to:
create the actual large-scale hexmap

talk with my playgroup to hash out their interests in the setting (so far they seem to really like the Devils)

re-read The Years of Rice and Salt

Some influences at play here are:
The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Dark Souls 2

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Dark Is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper

The Thawing Kingdom by Rowan Algoet

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

Spy in the House of Eth by Zedeck Siew