A Fist full of Post Apocolypse

 I freaking love post-apocalyptic settings.  A good high concept setting for a campaign is like good science fiction, it will ask questions about how humans will change when faced with a fundamentally different experience of life.

Also if you have a post-apocalyptic setting you no longer need to come up with any justifications for why there are so many dungeons populating the world.  They exist because they are as much a part of the environment as mountains and forests.

Below I present to you a number of post-apocalyptic settings that have been bouncing around my brain for a while.  Some are readily inspired by other works others just came to me while swiping right while on the loo!

The Godfall

• Countless generations ago God fell to earth.  At least it was assumed to be God (or at least a god).  It hurtled through space and smashed into the planet creating an unbridled extinction event.
• The impact created earthquakes and tsunamis on an unprecedented scale.  The dust from the impact shot into the stratosphere darkening the skies.  Civilization was snuffed out.
• The corpse of God now rests in a vast crater/fault in the planet that runs almost completely from pole to pole.
• The body of God is rotting, the juices of its decay are seeping through the rocks and soil alike.  All things touched by the rot mutate into new forms.  Occasionally these are benign or even beneficial but all too often they are dangerous and horrific.
• Around the crater (the so-called Godfall) are the Faultlands.  An area that saw the worst of the tectonic upheaval.  It is full of faultlines, mountains chains, deep jungles, and volcanoes.
• The Faultlands are heavily under the influence of God's rot, the creatures here are changed and dangerous.
• A stoic few decide to make a pilgrimage to the Godfall so that they may mourn the death of God and view its corpse.

The Overgrown City

• The lost generations of the past had such ambition.  They built THE CITY, the only city, a city that covered every last square meter of the world.  The generations past lived in peace and richness until the Great Dying happened.  This is a mysterious event that is only remembered through oral histories.  The stories speak of a terrible plague from the sky, people dying in the billions and some speak of creatures crawling out of the corpses of the dead and dying.
• The city has lain abandoned for uncountable generations, and like all abandoned cities nature reclaims it.  Atop the ruins of the old world is The Green an endless rainforest that carpets the world.  The world is verdant with life, even the dark streets below the trees.  The life that has evolved in The Green is caught in a hyper-aggressive evolutionally arms race (almost by design it seems).  These creatures are dangerous and often immiscible with human existence.
• Humanity was a micron away from extinction and yet against the odds through the years the survivors clung on.  They have reclaimed a corner of the city, and their numbers grow but The Green around them threatens to always swallow them whole.
• Archonaughts, hunters, and explorers step into The Green to plunder it for past riches or the bounties of the things that dwell in canopy, root, and branch.

The Unobserved World

• This one makes sense if we assumed the world is flat.
• The apocalypse has been a slow burn, but it has also been utterly devastating to the civilizations of the world.  It all began when a mountain in the wilderness just disappeared.  In its place was a vast hole in the world that cut all the way down to the endless void of space.
• This pattern repeated with increasing frequency.  Entire chunks of land would vanish leaving only a hole in reality.  However, there was always one curious common factor.  No one saw what happened.  The land that disappeared was always unseen and uninhabited.
• The results were devastating entire oceans drained away, forests and farmland lost their topsoil and slowly much of the world was eroded down to the bedrock.  As a result, civilization collapsed.
• A few bastions of once-mighty empires hold on.  In this strange pockmarked landscape.  Each guards their agriculture fiercely and bizarre ritual magic seeks to give mages omniscient sight so that no more of the world can vanish unseen.