I like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. (Look at that ox!) It’s got this cozy apocalypse thing I’m kind of wild for: Ganon came back and you can still see the remains of burned-out villages and battlefields full of robots, but for the most part the world moved on. Everything’s smaller: towns are now villages, villages are now families living in the wild, a wanderer on the road is a unique experience. Like all those people were asking, “What, were we gonna live a hundred years in the past forever?” Kind of like medieval Rome: a great city that once housed the heart of the greatest empire on the planet, brought down to irrelevance with about 20,000 people living in its streets. The great coliseums and monuments are there, but the reason is lost to time. People are living here now. Your grandad was a Guelph who would get into fistfights with Ghibellines, but that’s the last time there was anything exciting going on.
I bought a book of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, though I suspect that the world represented there will be more Moorcock, more woe, less cozy, less hope. Also, I thought of a great article: there is no magic in Dungeons & Dragons. All of Vance’s magic follows one of Clarke’s three laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The memorizing and forgetting of spells are people literally memorizing mathematical formulas so powerful that even thinking of them creates phenomena that can only be recognized as magic. And since this was the system Gygax used for OD&D, it might be safe to say that’s how it works there, too. All those dungeons dotted throughout the Long Rim, all those secret R&D laboratories, who knows what’s inside? It’s also why I’m kind of leaning towards psionics for the magic system, or something similar.
Every tiny town on the Long Rim has three people in it: a blacksmith, a tech analyst, and a witch.
The blacksmith works hard, but she doesn’t innovate: she’s been pounding iron for the same way her family’s pounded iron for a thousand years. She’s still not completely sold on the idea of these “submachine guns” over a solid steel blade, just like her grandmother, but the bullets she casts are leagues beyond the bandit bullet-forges in the Blue Mountains. Shoeing horses, sharpening plows… she’s the reason what technology does exist works at all. I guess there reaches a point where the technical progression plateaus, though I don’t know what that is. Some piece of technology that sits between medieval plowshares and electric batteries is out of reach for the Long Rim, even with all those high tech dungeons all around. It’s not gunpowder since people can still make bullets, but it’s something. Nothing past the 17th century, that’s for sure.
The tech analyst probably lives in one of the nicer houses in town. She graduated from a university in the City, not at the top of her class but up there, and she’s still paying off her Debt. (I love this idea of every NPC having Debt like a player. I wouldn’t go so far as to randomly roll all those stats for NPCs, but it helps feed into player/character interaction.) She moved out here to make money, more than she would competing against fellow graduates in the City. She dresses nice but is a little eccentric. Something happened to her: maybe she turned down the advances of someone with power, maybe she has a narcissistic streak without the skill to back it up, maybe she secretly resents authority. (Not openly. Open revolt against society is punished. Not violently. They don’t hang you if you rebel, they just make sure you can’t find a job and you don’t have enough food so you starve.) Regardless, she doesn’t live in the City. She’s the kind of person who would be consumed by it, like a lot of others. She’s not as set in her ways as the blacksmith, but she’s not as wild and free spirited as the witch. Something about her would not be accepted in the City.
The witch lives in the woods. She’s half-naked and covered in cuts and eats bugs and she can hear the Dark Goddess talk to her in her head cause she ate a bunch of crystals one night after she fell into a cave. If the tech analyst isn’t allowed in the City because of some respectable disagreement with society, the witch would be burned at the stake. She also has a complete understanding of magic, and is willing to teach you for a couple of bottles of strong red wine, the memories of your childhood, and watching you burn down something the City has built.
The mundane, the technological, the magical. These aren’t specific people, but archetypes. I’ve got to remember to figure out a way to populate the Long Rim, but this is something to keep in mind. There’s always someone you can bug in the little lights of civilization in the darkness to find out information. Just don’t stay too long or you’ll be seen.
One last thing. You might be asking: “If all the NPCs have Debt, why don’t they rise up and change the system?” My answer is “I don’t know, why don’t they?”