World of Ruin

I've been toying around with an RPG setting for a while now. It is meant for use with the GURPS rules, my favorite RPG system, and is a sort of post-post-apocalyptic cross-genre world. It's meant to be a setting for somewhat traditional "adventuring" with lots of weird powers and toys and plenty of fights with strange creatures, and a healthy amount of exploring and discovery. I've been writing up individual elements--character templates, martial arts, and such, but nothing on the setting as a whole. I decided to use this blog to jot down some ideas on larger-scale elements.

• The setting is tentatively called "World of Ruin." It is set on Earth in the medium future, maybe 100 or so years from now, though I've not settled on a specific time frame.
• Most of the world is uninhabited, or sparsely inhabited. There are "barbarian" tribes with primitive technology and primitive magic but lots of survival skills, and plenty of howling, monster-filled wilderness. All of this is dotted with the ruins of past settlements and installations, both modern and futuristic, though all in a state of serious decay.
• Civilization has never truly fallen, but it has receded. Most of the population lives in large, fortified arcologies, or in nearly-as-fortified outlying communities. These outliers would be things like farming towns for crops that can't be grown well in the arcologies, or mining towns, or the like.
• Similarly, technology has continued to advance, in small spurts and leaps at least. Overall Tech Level is mature TL9 with superscience. The smaller and more remote settlements may have only TL7 or TL8, or even lower, and a lot of older tech is still in use, especially by the poorer folk. There are lots of toys, but in most of the world those toys are unavailable or expensive, and difficult to repair, so the PCs will still have situations where they have to rely on their own talents.
• The disaster which brought the world to this state wasn't anything traditional like nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. Rather, the laws of nature changed subtly, and the boundaries between worlds broke out. Magic returned to the world with a bang (actually, quite a lot of bangs) and with it creatures of legend--and nightmares.
• Magic and Psionics both exist in this setting. There are several different types of magic, ranging from standard RPG-style fireballs-and-lightning spell magic, through more subtle (and far-ranging) ritual magic, to primal control over reality itself.
• The civilized world consists of, to borrow a term from 4th Edition D&D, "Points of Light." These are mostly independant, high-tech and/or high-magic city states, separated by wilderness and possibly connected by tenuous lines of communication or transportation.
• Each of these city states is different from the rest. One might have the latest TL9 (or even early TL10) tech, but ban all forms of magic, while the next has only moderate tech but full use of spell-magic, and so on.
• There should be many, many options for player creation. Standbys like Elves and Dwarves are available to play, as well as exotics like cat-people, and high tech cyborgs and bioroids.
• The city states are (mostly) lawful places, with functioning societies and public services like police and firefighting--they are safe for law-abiding folk, and (usually) not oppressive police states. However, weapons ownership is common elsewhere, and the world beyond the immediate control of the city states is lawless and dangerous--great places for adventure are commonplace, and not too far from civilization should things get too bad.
• There is plenty of intrigue both within and between the city states, so there are opportunities for adventure even within civilization.
• Other worlds exist, and characters may be from them, or descended from beings from them, but Earth itself is the usual location for adventuring.

In short, the "World of Ruin" is meant to be a perfect place to play capable but not omni-powerful heroes who get into a wide range of adventures, and where almost anything is possible. One adventure might be a standard dungeon crawl, only with guns and robots as well as fireballs and elves, while the next might be a cyberpunk style mission to infiltrate a research facility in a city state.

I hope to add more ideas in future posts, but I think this is enough for now.