Tales of the Red Age

Touchstones: Dark Sun, Mad Max, Gamma World, Conan, Book of the New Sun, Numenera, Dying Earth, Thundarr the Barbarian

History

Knowledge is fragmented and sparse. History, as most people know of it, has four ages...

• The Blue Age: a dim, mythic time when the gods ordered the world; a time of culture-heroes founding tribes and just-so stories.
• The Green Age: a time of unbounded prosperity, when great cities and empires rose. Humanity mastered the arts of sorcery, plumbed the unseen dimensions, and built grand arcane workings. Offerings flowed and divine blessings were abundant.
• The Yellow Age: ambition, hubris, and old feuds brought war among the empires. Terrible sorcery was unleashed, and cities laid to ruin. Gods went to war along with their peoples and slew one another, fell to human arts, or withered as sorcery-born wastelands began to spread. Empires fell, replaced over centuries of conflict and collapse by dwindling successor kingdoms.
• The Red Age: the present day, age of fire and blood. Warlords, would-be sorcerer-kings, abhuman hordes, and dark cults vie to rule the ruins. What civilization remains is often cruel and decadent; tyranny and barbarism clad in the remnants of better times. Modern sorcerers piece together fragments of barely-understood lore, seeking to reclaim the secrets of the high arts. The gods are dead but dreaming--many embittered, maddened, or hungry--but some can still speak to them and call forth miracles. Monstrosities spawn from the ichor of fallen gods, war-golems prosecute forgotten conflicts, and demons of the void creep down past the spiritual walls that once held them at bay. The decay of the natural order spawns hungry dead and mutated aberrations. In the ruins, the wealth and lost lore of the ancients await anyone crazy enough to seek them.

• the chronicle

Atlas

• Cistern and the Oasis of Grass
• The Scorch
• The Inundation
• The Mountains
• Distant Lands
  • three cities, the machine theocracy, the lake country, the great forest, the sea of pyres, the nabakteen plateau

Peoples

• armiger houses of cistern
• njerezim
• nomads
• nabakteen
• salters
• yawari
• chuxah
• brekosa
• cannibal saints
• the carvers
• stone-eaters

nefrit adamant

Cosmology

• the degraded world (undead, demons, aberrations, etc)
• magic (mana, spell constructs, vessels, panoply)
• the astral, half worlds
• spirits, demons
• gods, the world-spirit, the afterlife
• sorcerers, theurges, malisons

Rules

• characters
• equipment
• Magic
  • Spells (work in progress)
  • Spells (old textdump link) (work in progress)
• taking action
• expeditions
• rewards