In honor of our post-apocalyptic week, I went ahead and put together a campaign setting for your D&D game. The idea here is to give you an overview and description of the state of the world, and to allow you and your adventurers to seek out and uncover the true nature of the white cataclysm that overtook the realm.
The idea, if I am being honest, formed from the snatches of legends mentioned in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire series about the winters of Westeros. I love the idea of the winter that comes and never leaves.
Overview: The White Realm
There was a name for the world. Some called it Faerûn, others Ebberon, or Greyhawk, but none remember now what was, before the world was snowed in and its vibrant greens and blues became a deadly white. How it truly came about was uncertain, but the oldest among us say it started with a war in heaven.
Continent-spanning storms lit the sky as celestial axes and war hammers fell. The shouts of deities as they thundered war and died turned the sky a deep hue matching the color of blood. Sailors say the sea boiled over, drowning coastal cities in fire-hot waves the size of mountains. Dwarvish runes describe their earthen caverns violently opening up and swallowing whole fortresses. Temples shut their doors as clerics, following the lead of their various gods, made war on each other on earth. Cities burned in the chaos.
It was at the climax of this chaos, when the world could no longer bear the rending of itself, that the sky went silent.
And that was when the cold came.
The sky took on an ashen palette and the temperature dropped. The races of the plane, busy trying to rebuild after the cataclysm, barely noticed the first snowflakes beginning to fall in places they had never fallen before. In the north, tales of white dragons venturing farther south, more cunning and intelligent and larger than ever before, began to trickle in. White walls of snow formed in the north, fanning out over the land, and where the snow fell, terrible things came.
It seems, in a world with no gods, and therefore, no afterlife, the dead did not want to stay dead.
Villages went dark and the riders sent to them did not return. The mountain dwarves, who fared better then most during the cataclysm, slowly became silent and no travelers told of being quartered in their great, warm halls. As the temperature dropped and dark things became more common, the elves, against their love of nature, began to leave the forests of the world and moved into large fortified communities with the other surviving races.
There is now no name for the world, and no kings or lords to rule over it. It is a land of fell things where undead things roam free in the ruins of great cities and survival for the living grows tougher each day.
The small folk call the world the White Realm, or the Whitelands. Many others just call it death.
Life in the White Realm
Adventurers seeking to play in the White Realm must face some hard truths. Most races have been constricted to secured cities led by mixed-race councils of elves, humans, and halflings. Dragonborn do exist in the world, but have grown increasingly uncommon and dangerous. It is common for an adventurer to have lived most of their lives in their city, which is often cordoned off by some natural element, or a manmade wall.
Traveling between secure locations is even more uncommon, although most areas do have rangers that scout out and forage in the local area. Most of these cities have little to no contact with each other.
Outside the Cities: The Deadlands
The world is filled with fell things that came with the snow. There are reports of wild bands of humans scratching out a living roaming the areas between cities, and along with them, undead armies wander as well as hags and spirits. It is a place inhabited by ethereal things that have no place on this plane any longer.
Unknown to most cities, the mountain dwarves’ fortresses still exist, but are cut off from the outside world. They are constantly at war with the Drow, dark elves who inhabit the Underdark, with battles that take place below the feet of the world. It is more common now to see these dark elves on the surface now than it was before. But without their spider goddess to worship, many have turned their alignment and seek to help the races of the Whitelands.
White dragons are now the most dominant form of dragon, although red dragons have been spotted from time to time.
DM’ing the White Realm
Inside or outside the cities, the emphasis for your characters will be on survival. Good lives can be made within the cities, but that probably won’t be enough for your adventurers. Within the setting it’s good to ask them what they would like to do. Do they want to secure supplies for the city? Is their own city running out of supplies and do they need to traverse the horror of the Deadlands to find help at another city? Do they want to investigate why the world is like this and figure out a way to reverse it?
As the DM, I think the best way to handle this would be a nice combo of survival horror and epic fantasy. Lead your characters on a quest to change the world for the better and put an end to the Whitelands, while hacking and slashing their way through undead hordes and minions of the Underdark.
Personally, the idea of adventurers uniting disparate cities in order to fight an undead army sounds pretty great. I’d love to hear if any of you get up to anything in the White Realms, so let me know in the comments below.
Have a great post-apocalypse.
I immediately start asking where the food comes from — there must be some kind of cold-resistant crop that makes up the bulk of everyone’s diet in a world without a growing season. And what does a vast dragon eat when the food chain has shattered at its very roots? There must be large animals that eat the cold-resistant plants and are able to live in the freezing cold — animals normally found in the high mountains of our world, like llamas and yaks; megafauna from the last ice age who now roam the world again, like mammoths and giant sloths; stranger things that are not known to our world, like spiders with chitin made of ice that feed on the heat of their prey and heat-producing fungi that consume the frostbitten forests.