Railway Ties

A millennia ago, Atlantis was united under one crown.

Centuries ago, Old Atlantis was the economic heart of an empire, slowly rustbelting under rulers that were increasingly looking to strange and distant realms.

Today, Old Atlantis is a ruin, slowly returning to nature.

It is Tiamat Year 3539 and the Jupiter Wall that has protected the islands of the Kanarsea has dissipated. The only remnants of civilization on an entire world, the people and states of the Kanarsea are once again returning to the mainland. You are one of them.

Setting Information

Gazetteer

The Kanarsea and the Islands

The Kanarsea is a vast expanse of calm and shallow water lying off the western margin of Atlantis' supercontinent. Rarely more than 100m deep, over half of the Kanarsea is even shallower and ranges from 50m to a mere 10m. Highly photic, the Kanarsea has exceptional biological productivity and has been fished for thousands of years. Much of the shallower regions are covered in enormous kelp forests, millions of square kilometers of ancient gene-edited aquacrops producing an endless bounty of oilpods.

The islands of the Kanarsea both ring it and penetrate it, rising out of the warm waters in several defined chains and clusters. The climate in the southernmost isles is subtropical wet, with a band of dry semiarid and even outright desert conditions in the outer southern isles. Much of the rest is varying types of raincoast, typically featuring wet winters and drier summers. The vast waters mediate temperatures and summers are rarely devastating while winters are mild. Snow is not pervasive save in the mountains, but general humidity means that when snow does come, it tends to come in large amounts.

When the End came, the Everqueen summoned her divine power and wrapped the Kanarsea and the islands within inside what became known as the Jupiter Wall. Effectively cut off from the outside world and bereft of many sources of advanced learnings while others were discarded or failing, much of the last three centuries has been a history of recovery and reconstruction. This was hampered by the simple fact that the Islands were never places of high education or of extensive industry. The economy of the before times was based around tourism, leisure and oilpod harvesting. The latter proved to be a boon in more recent years as once again the industrial-scale harvesting of marine oilpods and the subsequent processing into neutocarbon fuels has led the Islands back into the age of internal combustion engines.

The Seaboard

While most of Atlantis's supercontinent was ravaged by the events of the End, a strip along the Kanarsea coast was saved by the curtain of the Jupiter Wall. Rarely more than a few dozen kilometers wide but several thousand kilometers long, the Seaboard was politically split between over a hundred statelets and city-states until the unification of the 35th century - this has dwindled to only a couple dozen.

The dissipation of the Jupiter Wall has led to a crisis in the Seaboard; the long border that was once the Jupiter Wall was undefended and it did not take long for the strange Endercreatures to migrate across. This was, to put it mildly, a crisis, and the Seaboard is now well-armed with citizen-militias ready to respond to the unexpected.

Mainland

Before the End, Old Atlantis had a population of circa six billion souls. Many enormous cities dotted the continent and innumerable smaller - but still significant - cities filled in between them. That all is dust, and the cities are slowly crumbling. The masonry and mundane metals in them are slowly succumbing to neglect and the environment but there are still many valuable resources in them; even a small storehouse of mithril ingots is worth millions of aurics.

The mainland is not some easy frontier though. The full details of the End may never be known but the aftereffects are understood well enough by now. Strange menageries of creatures that escaped their confinement, mutated fauna and flora, the cursed einherjar and draugr.

The Railways

Old Atlantis is webbed by railway tracks. It is unknown exactly how much trackage the mainland once had, but most estimates place it at somewhere between four and five million kilometers of rail. And most notably, the vast majority still exist. Old Atlantis held such riches that instead of mundane steel, it could use feshir arcano-alloys for its railway track. Distantly related to adamant, feshir is heavy and ridiculously hard-wearing and has been prized for tools ever since the renaissance of modern industry a century ago. The difference, however, is stark; the islands can forge feshir in small quantities for machine tools and sometimes for coatings in cannon barrels while Old Atlantis had over a billion tons of the stuff just for transport rails.

And as the ancient rail network is still mostly passable and can be brought back into service, it has rapidly become the transport method of choice for the islanders exploring into the vast continent of Old Atlantis.

Miscellaneous setting notes

Ley Line Walkers - The Jupiter Wall was never absolute. The ancient ley lines webbed the world of Atlantis since forever and those with talent could open themselves to it, 'drifting' along them. While not fast it was the only known way to breach the Jupiter Wall and for centuries they were the intrepid scouts and tomb raiders of the islands. The trinkets they brought back - for a ley line walker could only carry a backpack or so with them - were of immense value, the information they brought back even more so. The fall of the Wall has greatly reduced their import but even so, they remain scouts and experts in the wilds of what lies outside.

• 6.66mm HEXE - The standard rifle cartridge of many of the Islander states, 6.66mm Hexe is, depending on who you ask, either a sublime balance of weight and power or a milquetoast median that mostly continues thanks to elven tastes.

• 7.77mm Kriegfluch - A larger and punchier rifle-caliber round, the 'Holy 7' is even more ubiquitous as a machinegun round than as a rifle round. The Holy Seven nickname is seen as rather ironic given that the cartridge's name translates to 'Warcurse'.

• 9.11mm Martel & 11.43mm Liberator - The two common pistol cartridges found across the islands, the Martel is lighter but with less recoil; the Liberator has greater stopping power but commensurately higher recoil.

• 13.2mm GRADER - Used almost exclusively for heavy machineguns, the 13.2mm GRADER is the smallest of the Grader series of automatic weapon cartridges. As the size and aggression of some mainland wildlife has filtered back to the islands, a variety of oversized bolt action rifles have been built chambering this heavy round.

• 0.900 Ren - A typical heavy blaster, packing a punch but slow-firing. Exceptionally effective against ectoplasmic entities.

Game Stuff

Archetypes

Warrior - Keeps a trench gun handy.

Wizard - Carries the radio.

Valkyrie - It's just a flesh wound.

Archer - The best riflist within a hundred-meter radius.

Necromancer - Has the most knowledge of the outside world.

Simple system thoughts

D20 base, loosely inspired by Bolt Action

Everyone has 3 Ether which can be used for body strengthening (eg, 1 hit point) or other effects.

Generic rifle shot from generic soldier taking aim hits on 11+

Penalty for 'moving'.

Skill costs square?