I need an apocalypse

[Derren]

I have an idea for a new homebrew world but I need advise on the history.

The world would be psionic only (the MM monsters would have their SP abilities simply changed to psionics)
The basic idea is that on a world similar to earth a genetically engineered virus used for "human perfection" (inspired by resident evil) escaped and started to spread around the world, unlocking the higher brain functions (psionic) and mutating uncontrolled which resulted in many different types of virus which created the different races changing humans and animals alike.
The actual campaign world should take place some hundered years later in an late medieval/early renaissance style world where no one knows what happened in the past or that there even was a technological society.

My problem is finding an event which explains how a whole world forgets their advanced society and removes all evidence of it. I don't think that the virus alone is enough to do that.
Maybe a desperate try to stop the virus with nuclear weapons what some nations used as excuse to launch a nuclear first strike on old enemies would work, but I would prefer less permanent things (radiation etc.).

Has anyone as idea what could have happened?

 

[Goblyns Hoard]

Interesting idea - particularly to me (I'm a geneticist)

Let me make sure I'm getting this straight - someone created a virus to improve human mental capability. It somehow escaped, and started infecting and transforming humans and animals alike. Thus the virus itself created the various races and monsters that you'll be using. And all technology has disappeared.

Questions:
Are you using all races and mosnters or just certain ones
Are you completely destroying all technology or just in the 'main area of play'

The idea I have is that the virus itself was so badly designed in the first place that it started killing on a vast scale. All air travel with the infected zone was immediately cut-off, and a nuclear strike used in an attempt to eradicate the virus - scorched earth policy. But the combination of the mutagenic nature of the virus and the radiation created various monsters.

But the reactions were too slow the virus did get out, and the process was repeated a number of times - this means all your highest tech places (The US, EU, Japan, India, Australia, etc. anywhere with large use of air transport) gets devastated by a bunch of politicians hiding away in bunkers somewhere.

During this time the virus is mutating. And some of those mutations are less virulent than the oiriginal. These result in some significant changes in the populations that each of them arise in - hence your races. Generally speaking these will be in those more remote areas which don't use air travel as much. The elves could have come from somewhere like the Amazon, Dwarves from the Himalayas, Orcs from the Mongolian steppes, etc. Gives you a range of cultures to go with. One of these is still for all intents and purposes 'human'.

This gives you your mutated monsters, and a reason for the lack of prevalent high tech. And you could also have a population of high-tech old humans living in bunkers deep under the US, which were sheltered from the strikes and aren't coming out yet because of radiation problems. They could even still have satellite access and be watching the world develop.

So the new civilisation - which had grown out of the surviving remote populations may still remember the 'Golden Age', but most of it will be legends. Any trech that did survive will have fallen apart by now - though the odd artifact may have survived.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Maybe a nuclear apocalypse isn`t that bad, in fact - Maybe the survivors of the virus and the apocalyspse are simply immune to the effects of the radiation (at least at the remaining level).

Since probably nobody will create a nuclear weapon or reactor in your setting, this immunity should pose no trouble.

An alternative would be that the most powerful creature that was created by the virus decided that the technology would endanger it, and used his mind to alter the world (think of a psionic wish). Maybe it did it for all psionic races, because the uninfected world wanted to destroy them all (possibly with a massive nuclear strike)
This raises the question what happened to this creature, but there are some options:
It overestimated it capabilities and died through the process, or simply sacrified itself.
It evolved even further and left the world.
It lost all of its power.
It is still there, and people pray to it as its god. (This doesn`t require it to give divine spells or something like that, but it could be an option)
It is still there, lurking in the dark, secretely manipulating the world.

Not all of the possibilites are mutually exclusive.

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[Derren]

Interesting idea - particularly to me (I'm a geneticist)

Let me make sure I'm getting this straight - someone created a virus to improve human mental capability. It somehow escaped, and started infecting and transforming humans and animals alike. Thus the virus itself created the various races and monsters that you'll be using. And all technology has disappeared.

Yes. The virus was created to increase mental capacity and "general human perfection" by a coorporation similar to Umbrella in resident evil (without the bio weapons) so it wasn't the first virus used this way, but the one who changed the base creature most (The early viruses were mostly used for eye and nose correction etc.)
The virus escaped while still in testing, but no one thought that it would be thi devesatating so the corp tried to hide it which should give the virus a headstart and the corp want to slow down investigations of the virus.

Questions:
Are you using all races and mosnters or just certain ones
Are you completely destroying all technology or just in the 'main area of play'

All PHB races and MM/XPH monster. Golems will be a bit hard to explain though.

Technology shoulb be unknown. In remote areas there is still technology, but not the type you can discover easily mostly underground shelters/labs.

In short no one on the world should know that there once was technology, so all things on the surface has to be gone and that is my problem.

I also had the idea of the nuclear containment together with a nuclear war (some nations used all the nukes flying around to shoot some at their enemies. (I'm not using real earth as world). The problem is that the radiation would persist, but maybe the virus changed some plants to clear radiation.
The nuclear radiation could also be the reason the virus mutated in the first place and started to affect animals and created other races.

I also had the idea that the virus changed some common bacteria (if that is possible) to eat important meterial for technology like oil and silicon. That would explain why mankind didn't try to preserve technology.

As a sidenote, while I say humans and mankind, humans won't be the original race and I think I will leave it open which race is the original one (or if it even still exist)

 

[Whimsical]

The temperature of the planet went up, so any survivors had to move closer toward the poles which were uninhabited while the middle part of the planet became an unhabitable desert or was immersed underwater.

Plus during the post apocolypse, almost everything tech was found and used up.

 

[Derren]

The temperature of the planet went up, so any survivors had to move closer toward the poles which were uninhabited while the middle part of the planet became an unhabitable desert or was immersed underwater.

Good idea. I could place the industrialized nations near the equator. That should take care of most high technology. Deserts are really good in buring ruins.

Also the temperature could have gone down again so that big parts of the deserts became inhabitable again, but the ruins are still buried deep under them.
That should give the PCs enough dungeons to explore.

 

[Gnarlo]

Well, the way it happened last time was that the Overlords used a temporal stasis to place everyone in a state of suspended animation while the seedships simple released the nano-hoard to destroy all evidence of civilization higher than the neolithic. Once the physical evidence was taken care of, the nanos then swarmed into all the suspended bodies to do a little neural re-wiring. Sure, nearly 99% of the population died from either the temporal stress or the side effects of the nano lobotomies, but that was considered not just acceptable losses but required to bring the population down to sustainable neolithic levels. The nano's quickly broke down the rejects anyhoo.

Strangely, the Overlords couldn't bring themselves to destroy the Sphinx, and had it transmogrified into sandstone. Susceptibility to flattery was always their weak point.

 

[LostSoul]

My problem is finding an event which explains how a whole world forgets their advanced society and removes all evidence of it. I don't think that the virus alone is enough to do that.

Just advance the timeline a few thousand years. People can forget a lot in that time. Everyone just looks at the crumbled remains of cities and wonders what the hell created them (couldn't have been people).

Don't tell the players, either. Just describe the ruined towers rising out of the ground like some blasted skeleton. A buried city would have a lot of dungeons. Think about the PCs travelling between buildings in the New York subway system.

Goblins could be people who decided to live in caves and mutated a lot.

 

[Goblyns Hoard]

Bacteria eating metal and other tech already exist.... there's one that will eat it's way through your CD collection if it got near it. Bioremediation is the term for the degradation of pollutants and toxins by biological processes, and there are a lot of people around the world trying to find ways of safely "eating" oil spills with abcteria - without letting those bacteria into the oil reserves and thus screwing over our wonderful petroleum-based economy. The other big one is the biodegradation of toluene compounds using bacteria - specifically Tri-Nitro-Toluene which is a majour contaminant of old weapons dumps. Given what you've said about the viruses you want the biotech level would certainly stretch to these as well. So with those two released any 'artifacts' of tech that survived no longer function - no explosives or oil left.

As to the radiation - it fades pretty quickly. Afterall Hiroshima is a fully operative city now with only the remains of the after-effects, and no long term background radiation problems. After the blast the stuff goes fairly quickly. So even if you seriously up the kilo-tonnage of your weapons (which you don't need to do) give the world 4-500 years and your radiation shouldn't be a problem unless every square inch of the world was saturated. Even then it's just a matter of which individuals were lucky enough to have survived. And if some undeveloped areas weren't bombed (real world example - the Sahara) then you've got pockets of populations to survive and start again.

Whimisical's desert idea is also good - not only will the desert's bury remnants - but sand blasting is wonderful at destroying things as well, particularly over a few hundred years. And a post-nuke world could have massive storms raging which wiped the surface clean. Plus you can really play up an egyptian tomb/archaeology feel for your players if you want.

 

[Hand of Evil]

The Wobble: the planet axis and crust shift. This event does take place in real life and it as been thought that it strenghtens the magnetic field. It is a fast shift, taking only about 48 hours but the shear destruction would be short term. The strenghten of the magnetic field could be used to expain psionic powers and mass memory loss.