Fallen Sons

Time to sport a bit with another homebrew: this time, it's one I'll call FALLEN SONS.  I got the idea from my recent re-read of Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and wondered to myself what a setting would look like that takes place in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting where evil has won? What if, in fact, it was a fantasy Purgatory? Imagine the Worldwound from Pathfinder expanded to cover the entire world?  Thinking a bit more about books like Cthulhu's Reign (which I own, but haven't read yet) and this post on Goblin Punch, I decided that there was a real need for me to explore this theme, so I've created another tag—and I may yet create a Google Sites for the idea too, if I end up generating enough content, or feel like it would be worthwhile.  If the end result ends up feeling just a little bit like Dark Sun except with demons instead of dragons, that's more or less OK (to be fair; I don't know for sure what it will end up feeling like, because it's very early in the design process yet.)  Too bad I never got around to picking up Dark Legacies, because it looks like pretty much exactly what I'm heading towards... at least at a high concept level.  I don't have any details on it, of course, since I never bought either of the Dark Legacies books.

Let's establish a handful of baselines.  I'll be doing this as an m20 game, of course, with levels 1-10 only.  This releases me from needing to worry too much about rules, but also about crazy, high level threats.  Not that they won't exist, but merely that they aren't meant to be actively confronted, most likely.  m20 doesn't use CRs, but since I'll most likely adapt a lot of d20 creatures into my specific monster list for this setting, let's focus on about CR 15 as the highest level I'd worry about.

To make it just a bit different, this isn't a normal fantasy setting; I'm positing a world much like our own, with more or less the same technology and whatnot, which is suddenly invaded by demons.  The setting now is set many, many generations after the invasion, and the world (and the people left on it) have changed significantly from where they used to be.  I'll have a handful of fantasy races, but I doubt it will be elves and dwarves and hobbits and stuff like that; I think it'll be more like analogs of tieflings, dhampirs and people more like that.

I imagine a highly balkanized world, with lots of kingdoms ruled by demon lords.  I like the idea from the Demonimicon of Iggwilv series of articles that put demon lords at 30+ CR range, but realistically, I don't need anything that powerful.  Besides, I don't mind the concept of a Cthulhu-like paradigm where there are certain threats that you simply cannot, under no circumstance, expect to defeat in combat.  I expect some handful of refugee states, but mostly, people in the setting are on the run; not terribly unlike the humans in The Terminator except without the high tech.

Anyway, over the next little while, I'll start exploring more of this concept over time.