The theme for this month’s RPG Bog Carnival is Doomsdays and Dystopias hosted over on Daemons & Deathrays.
There are two major doomsday points in the Sea of Stars:
The Fall of the Gods and the Sundering, the war between the gods and the dragons had considerable, to use the current term, collateral damage. While the dragons did not seek to destroy any more than necessary, looting rubble is less productive, there were situations that required significant devastation especially in the cases of the gods who choose to live among their worshipers. The combats in those cities were massively destructive to life and property.
But the damage caused by the Gods War pales by comparison to that of the Sundering which followed immediately afterward, as the world itself shattered and pulled apart. The loss of life was immense and some area were rendered uninhabitable as rivers were diverted, lakes and oceans drained away, mountain ranges crumbled or emerged. In less than a day, the world was irrevocably changed.
However, with the help of their new rulers, the dragons, the world was slowly rebuilt. Some areas took longer to recover than others . . . and a few never did leaving ruins in formerly fertile areas that were now deserts or marshes or worse.
If massive environmentally disruption is your idea of a good campaign, the Sundering has everything you could imagine.
A much more focused doomsday is the Sen’Tek Revolt, the attempt by a conspiracy within the Visse servant class and Imperial bureaucracy to overthrow (and replace) the draconic overlords. The deep conspiracy planned across decades was forced to act prematurely when it was revealed to the Empress. While many dragons and dragonkine were killed, the plot as a whole was foiled, and many, many Visse were slain. Though the core of the conspiracy escaped deep into the far mountains. Even this failure caused deep disruption to draconic rule as the dragons turned upon the weakened houses and sought to benefit until the Empress stepped in and reorganized the survivors.
If you want a survival horror type scenario it could be run on either side of this: either dragonkine nobles trying to survive against servants who know their every foible and weakness or a group of Visse, possible mixed conspirators and innocents, avoiding dragons and trying to escape.
For dystopia, well, it is a world ruled by dragons after killing the gods, for many, they could not imagine a worse world. For the dragon rulers who had to “reeducate” formerly pious societies, it was not a pretty task. While, in general, the dragons take a claws off approach as long as they get their taxes, there are always exceptions.
So if you are looking for unhappy places, there are no shortage such as the Kingdom of Laccini and its militant knights backed by necrourgists or the Dark Star Dominion and its ruler, Ba’a’ai, the Dark Star himself.
Other dystopias must exist as well but I cannot immediately think of any more.
Notes: Photo “Ruined Castle” by Grant is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Sea of Stars RPG Design Journal 