Ok, so I'm going to let y'all decide something. I'm having a hard time setting the time period. To be entirely honest, I feel like this is supposed to be set in the Industrial Age. I don't know why, but I do. Like, science and technology are just beginning to boom. Steam engines are a thing, railroads are new and cool, and best of all, there are guns. Revolvers and rifles mostly.
This could just be because I'm currently DM'ing a game on another site that has both fantasy and sci fi stuff going on, and it seems to be working really well.
In this case, the reason swords and melee weapons are still a thing is because of magic. it's a simple thing to enchant a suit or armor to be bulletproof. In fact, we can assume any magical armor of any kind is bulletproof. Not blade proof. It means against firearms, your AC gets a boost. Makes firearms cool, and useful, but not more so than a good mace.
Or we can go with a normal fantasy setting. Medieval, feudal, that type of thing. I just feel like that's been so...done.
The story basically would be that since the War of Magic, the number of wizards and magic users are fairly low, which caused people to look for other means to accomplish their goals. Thus, science became a thing.
I would very much like to see what would have happened to the world had the Industrial Age happened while magic still abounded. What do y'all think? I realize this might affect your characters a bit, but there it is.
