Weird Revisited: The Conquered Setting

One of the dangers of writing a long-lasting blog, is that you sometimes can't remember what you wrote about versus what you just thought about writing. I wrote two posts on a "Conquered Setting"--one in 2020 and one over a year later in 2021--because I forgot I did it. Here's the first one again.

 

It's widely understood that the D&D is generically post-apocalyptic, but seldom is this fact exploited other than the existence of dungeons and treasures, or possibly some science fantasy stuff in old school games. I think more could be done with that idea.

Maybe the apocalypse involved conquest? This could have been a long time ago, explaining a decline in technology (if you wanted to have a decline in technology) or maybe some degree of pseudo-Medievalism is enforced by the conquerors. (This is the case in Divide And Rule by L. Spraque de Camp, and The Tripods series by John Christopher.) The technology level could be more mixed due to temporal proximity to the apocalyptic event like in Killraven (Thundarr appears to be close, though canonically it's been 2000 years!) Another possibility is a society that was not really that advanced when it got conquered, like Lord of the Rings if Sauron won or there was some sort of faerie apocalypse.

There are at least couple interesting elements to this sort of setup. One, is it would set up a world where humans weren't the dominant culture, which would be fairly novel for D&D. Too, it would provide background for PC adventures beyond just treasure hunting. Vance's Planet of Adventure would be instructive with this last part.