...why did Europe survive, and why is that the setting? (Or rather, given how dense Europe is with countries, why would none of the old country names and cultural representatives - their versions of "Uncle Sam" - not survive to become Gods? Hint.)
How did Hitler come to be the God of Evil, if the grasp of history is so weak in the setting? Nuclear weapons have only been deployed by Truman, more people died under Stalin, more people lived under Mao Tse-tung, and more empire-building happened under Hirohitonote - so what put Hitler at the top of the list in any land outside of (what used to be) Austria? Also keep in mind that, presumably, some statues of historical figures survived The End; Hitler is none of those, quite often by law.
The materials used by Mechyms would probably come from garbage dumps - your version of Mountain Cycles.
Ha ha, no - humans are hard-wired to constantly look for markers in people, that identify them as a not-chosen race and justify their continued status as a slave race. Plus, when it shows up in history, slavery has tended to be protected/backed up by a legal system of reasonable complexity. That's not in evidence here, so your 'ethnicity doesn't matter' explanation will not make as much sense as you think in a world where the concept of ethnicity won't exist without enough people to sustain it - and I'm pretty sure this is because you yourself aren't aware of the history of the word
. This is a comment and a concern.
Are you aware of the Digital Dark Age
? Because that's your ready-made explanation for some aspects of the setting... which you are for some reason limiting to 1940s-era technology at best.
EDIT: Almost forgot! Take a look-see at this
. It might... not be something you'll need Brain Bleach for?
edited 9th May '18 9:58:59 PM by DeusDenuo
You're right. It's a stupid idea.
Here was what I thought.
- The apocalypse happened very close to the end of the war, when a lot of allied soldiers were in the area... and people were discovering the camps. That's why Hitler is thought of as a God of Evil, although most other "gods" are considered Jerkass Gods.
- Yes, probably. Either that or special markets for "magical materials".
- I'm pretty sure you're right about this one, but I wanted to avoid that Unfotunate Implication by having a specific ethnicity of Europeans be slaves *shudders as protesters gather around, screaming about me being racist*. I think that most slaves would either be foreigners or the children of foreigners, if that makes a bit more sense (which I personally doubt).
- That might be a cool idea, but I wanted to keep the reason for the apocalypse deliberately ambiguous.
- Thanks for that last link by the way, it's really interesting.
edited 10th May '18 4:13:59 AM by SomethingRandom113
Umm... so, I was here, I guess. If I wasn't, someone hacked my account. So, yeah.Slavery need not be based primarily on ethnicity per se, esp in an area that is relatively homogenous ethnically. There will be sub-classes of people who are seen as esp. worthy of being enslaved, of course, socio-economic class being the most likely alternative.
More implausible to me is the idea that people will treat twentieth century technology as "magic", at least if that means they are not actively trying to understand the underlying principles of how it works. That's something we are hardwired for, and it wouldn't take all that long for even dark age alchemists to figure out how to manufacture high explosives, while simultaneously re-discovering the principles of chemistry. The WWII tech level is a somewhat unfortunate choice in that regard—most everything they had at that time worked on mechanical principles—the main obstacle to a dark ages scholar recreating, say, the Nordon bombsight wasn't his inability to understand how it worked—it was the primitive manufacturing tools and the poor quality of metalurgy available at the time. As soon as the local alchemists have solved those problem, it wont be long before the local king starts manufacturing his own Sherman Tanks and B-25's.
This sounds like heading into an advanced version of steampunk territory, except with 1940's technology. I'm honestly not sure you wanted to head there, though.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.
Using what as fuel? This seems to take place after Romania's industry got bombed into rubble.
Something, the Unfortunate Implications are more likely to come from going out of your way to claim racism - modern definition - is dead in a world that grew out of WW 2-era thinking, especially when slavery (and/or 'indentured servitude') has historically been driven by this.
And my point on the God of Evil thing is that it seems hard to believe that those legends/myths can arise and more importantly stick when it's based on an era of paper-printed propaganda and antisemitism. And over extant religions at that.
Hmm... You have valid points, but you seem to not quite grasp how badly off this world is.
- Racism as we know it is only dead because these people don't have any clue of the existence of anything outside of Europe (with very few exceptions). Why blame the Africans when you haven't ever seen a black person, and neither has your father? ...Or his father ...Or his father. Oh, and that list could go on for generations. It isn't truly dead, it's just mostly been replaced with good old-fashioned straight-out xenophobia. "Hey, there are some Scandians that have been raiding us for generations, they're no good, so they deserve to be made slaves if we capture them in battle!"
- The Unfortunate Implications I was talking about avoiding aren't about having a specific ethnicity (such as blacks) be slaves. They probably would be if people had access to Africa. The Unfortunate Implications I was talking about avoiding was having white slaves be chosen specifically because of a certain physical attribute such as hair color, as opposed to nationality/region of origin. This is because if I did, someone would inevitably say I was equating actual people with those features in the real world to actual minorities (and probably accuse me of being a member of the alt-right and proponent of the "Irish slaves" historical revisionist theory). Sorry that I didn't clear that up before.
- The legends aren't based on paper-print propaganda. Those propaganda posters were destroyed centuries ago. They're based on oral tradition as badly-remembered stories told by parents to children slowly got less and less accurate as time went on. The majority (i'd say at least 95% of the population) is illiterate anyways, so they probably wouldn't be able to make heads or tails out of any WW2 propaganda that somehow miraculously survived. And that's not even getting into the evolution of language over the centuries.
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As DeusDeno said above, how'd they get the fuel? Also, it's not like very many pieces of actual 20th century technology survived. Mechyms are very good at improvising materials to make their "magical constructs" have a half-and-half chance of working once or twice before breaking and/or dangerously malfunctioning. Science is considered magic, not just technology. Technology is called "magical constructs". Mechyms do have a surprisingly good grasp on how stuff works, why it works like that is where their ideas and ours diverge. As for the thing about the poor metallurgy and primitive tools, that's exactly what I said. Those are the reasons Mechyms' "magical constructs" so often backfire, not lack of understanding of the technology itself.
edited 10th May '18 2:18:21 PM by SomethingRandom113
Umm... so, I was here, I guess. If I wasn't, someone hacked my account. So, yeah.I had a simmilar idea a while back & came up with some ideas.
- I agree with the Pre-Colubian vatiant of slavery (anybody out of luck, like deptors, criminals, prisoners-of-war and such ends up a slave, not a specific ethniticity.) Each nation might have a favourite ethnic or social group to enslave, but that means that you also are the favourite pick of some other nation(s)...
- I agree on having deities being based on a lot of recognisable persons & characters from trough culture & history. Each area should have its own panthenon though. The British might have the Trinity, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Britannia, Boudacia, R Ichard the Lion, Queen Victoria & Churchill in their pantheon among others & Hitler & the Devil being the gods of evil...
- How to fuel these jury-rigged scrap-builds = Wood gas. (It was in wide usage during WWII as fuel were rationed.) Primitive steam-engines works as well. (You can drive both on wood so easy access to fuel.)
- I guess gun-powder is invented as well?
I agree that it sounds a bit Shitzo Tech or Steampunk mixed with Diesel Punk
I reject your reality and substitute my own!!!
Oh, you did? Cool!
- Exactly what I was trying to say.
- Yes, the deities vary a lot from region to region. However, the more recently they played in history/the more widespread the legends of them were (so Hitler is a God of Evil almost everywhere, but Uncle Sam is only worshiped by a few Cargo Cults).
- Fuel is hard to come by, and what fuels these constructs varies from mechym to mechym. Also, "invented" isn't really the right word, but yeah, most mechyms know how to make gunpowder.
- Schizo Tech isn't really the right way to look at it, and it most definitely is not Steampunk or Diesel Punk. You aren't really looking at it with the right mindset.
- The world is roughly equivalent to the Dark Ages in technology level and (to a lesser extent) culture.
- The average person, be he slave, peasant, or noble, is woefully ignorant even if he is literate.
- Mechyms have knowledge nobody else does, but said knowledge is fragmented and mystified, and even they think that what they do is magic, not science.
- Even if they didn't, they aren't interested in mass-producing magical constructs, and don't have the means to anyways. They are also very secretive, and only share their knowledge with a few select individuals they have chosen as apprentices. Oh, and that's assuming that "spells" (chemical reactions) and "magical constructs" (technology) were reliable and not prone to backfiring, malfunctioning, breaking, and otherwise failing disastrously, which they most certainly are.
- All and all, the world is a hellhole.
edited 19th May '18 9:21:47 PM by SomethingRandom113
Umm... so, I was here, I guess. If I wasn't, someone hacked my account. So, yeah.OK, it's a second Dark ages, and a much worse one than the last one at that as the technological & scientifical "fall" is so much larger... The first dark age were basically the the knoowledge not being usefull for your very survival being lost (to the masses) and there were as far as I know not much knowledge or tech really being lost, it was just not really cared about. The second dark age however has seen the world regress from WWII to Dark age level technology and allmost all tech & knowledge in between being lost...
- This second dark age might be seen to be just a weak echo of an almost forgotten Golden age by the unfornate souls living in it. (This age they look up to ironicaly considered itself to be the fallen remnants of an former utopian age...)
- It makes sense in a primitive society like this to only have a few litterate/educated. However, in the first dark ages could not much bad really happen from these educated people messing about. At most can a monk or scribe find some dusty old heretical and/or heaten papyrus or pergament scroll hidden away somwhere in the archive and read it and cause some local rucus when the knowedge is spread. In the second dark ages are there however the Mechyms who could atempt to put a dissasembeled nuke together and see how it works... It is obvious that bad stuff will happen when the local Dark-age Mad Scientist try to recreate the wonders of the Golden age.
- Maybe Mechyms view advanced technology as "sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguiched from technology. In other words or as something comparative to an magitech variant of alchemy.
- So Mechyms view themself as artizans/ historians then? Their works are one-off pieces of art and they are in their mind re-creating the lost marvels of the Golden age in one (somewat functioning) object at a time.
- If it is the second dark ages, how common are Mechyms and how common are their inventions. (They might be a one use-only weapon, but that one use migh be enough to win wars. Imagine how terrified the pesant levies must be against a gattling-gun armed "steampunk tank", especially if it explodes in the middle of their lines... Easy pickings for your peasant levy)
- On a related note, I guess some inventions are used for peaceful purposes?
- And finaly is this world strictly "realistic" or is there hints of the supernatural there?

So, I have a vaguely Alternate History story set After the End. The basic premise is this: An unspecified apocalyptic event occurred near the end of World War Two, an unspecified number of years ago. Although little is known about it, it killed a rather large amount of people and desolated the landscape, though there is no radiation. At the time of the setting, the actual history of the world before, especially the war that was occurring when it ended has faded into (wildly inaccurate) myths and legends. The world is roughly technologically and culturally equivalent to the dark ages, though it's hard to tell. Here are some of the finer points:
I still need a little bit of help with the worldbuilding, so that's where you guys come in. I would like a few pointers on who should be considered gods and other such wonderful worldbuilding stuff, and I'd also love questions, comments, and concerns. Thanks for reading.
Umm... so, I was here, I guess. If I wasn't, someone hacked my account. So, yeah.