RPG Setting: The Long Twlight

I'm working on a new RPG supplement, systemless because I can't balance my own checkbook, let alone do game mechanics, but it's based on some of the "gentler" after the end style stories, where there's less violence and more making your way in a new world. Here's the first part!

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Twilight can come both in the dawn and in the dusk, that period where the sun isn’t visible, but it’s light still illuminates the sky. For some, it is a harbinger of the end. For others, a promise of a new day. And when we are talking about civilizations, it may be impossible to tell if the sun is setting or rising, at least until everyone asking the question is long dead.

Two hundred years ago, something happened on Earth. Out of every thousand humans, only a few remained after the Last Sunset.

None of them knew what had happened, or at least none of them told their descendants. Some cities had been burned, and some places looked like wars had been fought, but others… save for the ravages of time, nothing, with some speaking of neatly made up beds and cleaned houses, as if the owners knew they were leaving and would not return. Some of the survivors were human, some were different, robots made before the Last Sunset. None of them knew what had happened either.

But over the last two centuries, rising water levels have seen the great cities flooded. Magic, or at least something very much like it, has returned, and spirits dance in the dense woods. Farms, villages,  small towns in lonely valleys, these are the things that mark the world today. The age of great empires vanished with the old world, if there are problems, they are local. A great hero, or villain, is unlikely to be known even a few hundred miles away.

In some places it appears that the population is at least increasing.

Or maybe it’s just  a blip or wishful thinking.

But children are still born, and farmers still till their crops. Heroes and villains still exist, and if they no longer determine the course of entire nations, does it matter to the people who are protected or victimized?  Is the Twilight Age set before the new dawn, or the final night?

Who knows. But there’s a spirit bothering Farmer Will, and everyone’s getting ready for the harvest festival, so it’s time to head out and save… well. Maybe not the day, but save the farm, save the village. Maybe see what is over the next hill, or visit some of the fabled Lost Cities. Because whatever is going to happen, the twilight is going to end sooner or later, so why waste time?

Twilight Age is an RPG set in a quiet era. It may be the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, but it’s not a tale of mighty kings and wars that change the world. It’s quieter, set on a smaller scale, where the characters may spend their entire lives in a single village, or set out on the empty roads that once knitted the globe together. Maybe they will fight in a war between two lands where the total armies are under a thousand warriors.

Or maybe they will make peace between the two  lands. It’s up to them, because there are no longer any great powers to define the world. Just the people living in it, as the twilight rolls on to its final conclusion.

Theme:

The theme of Twilight Age is finding one’s place in a world that is… empty compared to the bustling world of today. And yet it did not lose the people through some great cataclysm, and the world is not a post-apocalyptic hellhole. The ending of our world wasn’t like that.

In a real way, Twilight Age owes its look and feel to Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō  and similar shows, ones that look at the world and focus on both the natural beauty, and the melancholy of a slowly vanishing mankind. Twilight Age doesn’t have to have that ending, but the era where mankind ruled the earth, casually moving mountains when he desired is over. The world is smaller, fewer people and many of them are satisfied to live their lives and accept what ever will happen.

And yet there are those who want to see what is over the other hill. Those who rise up and deal with the corrupt local lord, or convince two feuding families to make peace. Those who deal with unruly spirits or something left behind by the old world. They are not conquerors of nations—the world seems to have moved beyond that. But they are heroes.