#bordersfallearth

Who lives in your world.

Humanity still exists in the borders fall world and it eventually regrows into what it once was and surpasses it. But it’s still the same general people, and the same problems and solutions with perhaps a few words swapped to better fit the changed world. Culture has taken a huge hit, but does start to recover, and new cultures are born and grow out of the ashes of the old.

There is one kind of interesting current, one of the eras where they’ve started to explore deep space. One colony is founded by and for people who wish to live life free of the wild magic that had flooded Earth. They maintain decent relations with the main faction of humanity and most don’t outright hate the Twisted by the magic but they are fairly limited in where and how far away from the space centers they are allowed to go without escort or giving up their powers. For their long term stay.

The Twisted is usually used to refer to human’s who have been touched/twisted by the wild magic. But it could be used to refer to anything. Sentient, animal, plant or inanimate touched by the magic. But usually it will refer to anything sentient(even if only just barely anymore) that has mutations provided by the magic. Beyond the trait of being twisted by the magic it is basically a grab bag with little unifying traits. But there are a few common trends which I’ll discuss.

The most common is that the twisted tend to be fairly adventurous and this is either driven by just a strong interest in the unknown. Or a drive to try and find or develop new mutations that either work with the ones they have or maybe they are a mutation trader and they trade mutations by the way of using purge to pull some or all of the mutations out of other twisted and then can sell or trade them with others. I will cover purge probably when we get to magic in further detail.

Some of the twisted seek to explore the new world they’ve woken up to. By which I mean before the fall they might have been some kind of animal, maybe a plant in a garden or even possibly a rock and now suddenly their small or even non existent world has suddenly expanded into full on sentience and they are trying to discover everything.

And of course you have some seeking to go the other way, to give up their sentience and to live as the new kind of animal they exist as.

There are some who seek to master the wild magic and become mages, and others who seek to banish the magic from Earth and try to return to the world they once knew.

Some don’t even care too much about their magically altered selves and just live in the new normal being traders, travelers or maybe even farmers. Each twisted is after all their own person with their own goals. As diverse as humanity was before the borders fell, just with more arms and much longer lives.

Geography

Theres some rocks here... under the dirt and stuff.

Geography wise, this’ll be kinda on the shorter end, mostly because this is still Earth, just not Earth as we know it any more. The flood of wild magic didn’t really cause entire mountains to shift or completely disappear. It has caused some things to shift. The coast lines look kind of different and somethings have changed. The really big changes is not in the geography but in the biomes, there isn’t a single biome that hasn’t undergone some change.

Where once was vast desert now after the cataclysm there might be a swamp land. Or some kind of new swamp desert known as a Steam Desert. Mushrooms forests grow in place of a regular forest. Alien plants created either by the magic or maybe brought to Earth from distant worlds by it grow everywhere.

Of course several of the old towns and cities are still there, left to decay and become ruins, some have been replaced or in a few situations relocated. Stranger still are new ruins, almost uniform in their rubble as if the magic wanted to create a ruined city but could only copy and past.

As the years roll onwards these new biomes shift and change constantly altered by what lives in it, passes through it or the unpredictable whims of the wild magic. It’s rare for an entire biome to be replaced over night, but it can happen usually though minor Cataclysms( also know as Magic Storms or Cattys) will occur and introduce a pocket of some new biome.

This feels like a good place to start talking a little about the Eras because what era your looking at could change how Earth looks dramatically.

As was mentioned the Eras go from the days before the Fall of the Boarders. To humanity being an established presence in the space fairing community.

The specific eras and the names I gave them I’ll talk about them deeper in the history section.

Tell us about your world

Kay.

The big under pinning of bordersfall is a literal interpretation of the phrase, “You are what you eat.” By which I mean the more you of a monster the more you become that monster. Eating it’s skin will give you it’s scales, eating it’s legs will reshape yours, eating it’s brain will change yours too. Eat enough and you could become the monster in mind and body. This mutation can be controlled by force of will or by mastery of the wild magic that fuels it. But more on that probably when we talk about magic.

Genre wise I’d say this is sort of magic fallout with impossible creatures or something else with a theme of mutation and change.

Theme wise change would probably be a big one, I also started developing this world as a setting for a table top RPG, and one of the big things I wanted mechanics wise would have been this interplay between instinct and thought, this kinda bridge between gut feelings and knowledge to predict possibilities. A sort of Instinct vs Intelligence thing. Maybe I was never really able to make it work because I never had a good way to explain it. If I’d gotten the mechanic any further it might have been a bigger theme for the short exploration stories I’ve written set in this world.

Another big theme would probably be rebuilding or recovery considering I was gonna have sorts of Eras going from three days before everything explodes, to long after humanity has rebuilt and now explores the stars.

For this World Building June I’ll be focusing on what I was thinking would have been the “main” era, a kind of half way point between the disaster and the full recovery. Humanity has addapted enough to start managing to rebuild rather than just survive. Technology is coming back people are really starting to figure out how to wield the new magic with levels of mastery not seen before and some are getting really good at working with their mutations. Settlements are growing into towns or even a couple of big cities, and travel is starting to happen on a much larger scale and for more than just because they have to.