Young earth

Both work in my humble opinion.
With Early Earth you have Conan the Barbarian and Dying Earth has Cugel the Clever (Eyes of the Overlord is an amazing book. Jack Vance was a genius!).

Dying World

Typically my settings are either dying world, or young world after a dying world when the cycle begins anew.

Young Earth! The mutations are still fresh, you can invent your own magic, find new young gods and godlings who donknow what they're doing, the few immortals are still fucking around in the mortal realms and even the dimensions haven't stabilized yet, so weird new worlds are cojoined and ready for plunder.

I'm slightly more partial to dying, although both are excellent for different reasons.

In the ancient settings you have myths, ancient powers long forgotten, races gone extinct, ruins and lost civilizations with untold treasure.
The world has a lot more lore already established, with histories, cursed locations and mystic organizations founded countless years ago. With gosts and other lingering dead from past wars and grudges, as well as many other scars a magical world would gain over time.
Can be anything from high magic to extremely low magic.

Young worlds are far more vibrant and living, with great beasts and mystical creatures in vast untouched realms, flust of resources. What can and can't be done hasn't yet been established, and you are on a voyage of discovery and exploration, you don't know what to expect, the borders between worlds are weak, causing mystical and often nonsensical events that nobody can explain, there are realms of faeries, elves and sprites, seemingly beautiful and harmless, but often extremely dangerous.
Mostly very high magic, with airships and monsters the size of cities.

Where in an ancient world, you could find a treasure that gained maddening power through following an evil tyrant through thousands of years of slaughter, in a new world you would find a fruit that grants eternal youth, or a dragons horn that could pierce anything.

Dying young earth.

Are you a bad enough dude to save the planet from early onset leukemia?

[inarticulate Mok howling in background]

Hollow earth.

Who are you quoting?

>fuligin
>Having visible texture

A proper illustration of Severian would look like a pale floating torso surrounded by a featureless black blob, but everyone wants to go for the BDSM look so they draw his clothes as being made out of black leather or PVC.

Dying earth
Working great for my Grimwyrd game. Fey, demons, and elemental evil all vying for the corpse of the world.

Both.

No seriously. A cyclical world is far better. Ancient secrets buried under the new growth of virgin territory makes for great mysteries and a sense of exploration.

These, kinda.
The world is ancient and dying and ONLY YOU know how to find the secret ancient device to cast away the dark and build a new world upon the ashes of the old one.
But can you?
Should you?

>play a campaign in young earth
>sky-high magic, everything is fucking off the wall
>play 3.5 and let the caster supremacy flow through you
>second campaign is based entirely around your first party being the forces that shaped the world
>no more magic, fuck you
>various factions are all perversions of your first campaigns PC's ideals and shit
>their goals are extrapolations of what they thought your PC was attempting to do with his life

>not wanting to fight monsters beyond human ken with your magic circular saw.

How about an Aborted earth swords & sorcery setting? The gods realized their mistake shortly after mankind entered the scene, and have sent forth monsters and cataclysms to erase their error.

...I feel like this is shitposting, and yet I actually kinda like the idea.

Have you considered playing Dark Souls?

Dying earth all the way. Where are you supposed to adventure if there haven't been countless lost civilizations to build dungeons and crypts? Caves?
Get real.

Even so called young earth seems to have it's fair share of elder races and lost civilizations.

It's just they tend to be thousands of years old rather than millions.

Your gf becomes ill and falls into a deep coma and these people think that she is dead and want to take her away to their temple so that her corpse could be eaten by their corpse-eating god as it is tradition.

What do.

Hang a sign around her neck that says "I ATEN'T DEAD"

That depends. Are there any convenient necromancers available, and do they know how to keep their hands to themselves?

I would purge the cultists with Blazing Promethium in Zarus's blessed name, obviously.

Inbetween, in the crux and turning point where the cycle of history turns and after the Earth is Dying but before it is reborn and Young again.

Untold aeons pass between so that no mortal can truly know the Earth is cyclic

Why not both?
A dying world giving birth to a new one. Tons of archaeotech together with tribes just getting a foothold in this newly blooming world.

Pretty cool desu fampaitchi

Since I'm a faglord, I'm personally a fan of the kind of world my homebrew is.

Cockblock an evil wizard and explain the situation to the Charnel God, from what I hear he's actually a pretty reasonable guy.

I prefer Dying Earth but they're both good.

Why not a Dead Earth, where nothing but the haunted echoes of long lost heroes and villains to hint at how it came to be?

I think I'd update my journal.

Dying earth, because fuck the Druids, and the Elves..they've had it too good for too long.

I've never read the book and probably never will. My total knowledge of the setting can be summed up in a single paragraph and I still got that reference.

I like the map though.

Any video games like this? I don't have a group atm

dying earth

Bump

I picked a New Earth that's made of the patchwork parts of a million dead earths from timelines erased in a cataclysm. So it's both dying and young.

It's slowly turning into New Heaven as well.

Dark Souls is literally this.

Isn't Dark Souls just a perpetual cycle of the dead/dark, and an increasingly short and weak cycle of fire, ending with it being usurped by the darkness and turned into an eternal eclipse?

Sounds lovecraftian, but how soon is soon in the blink of a gods eye? Are we Stone aged men fighting agents of the regretful gods, or are we a technological modern society with weapons the gods did not expect mortals to craft?

Yup, it is. But the one you tread upon is but the ruins of a dead world, inhabited by ghosts, undead and unearthed demons from ancient ages.

What if both? What if you live in a doomed and abandoned timeline with a half-finished earth, spitting and roiling with primordial power that's slowly leaking out into nothing after being cast aside as unsuitable? Could be the stage for the birth of godslayers and doomed men escaping their fate to something beyond.

So now that the world that achieved a deadlock of fire and darkness in paradox harmony under the eternal eclipse, what happens? Does it just become a nightmare world of undying once-human horrors roaming around until entropy eats it all away?

I had a whole time line set after the fall of the great kobold civilizations, after their dragon bio weapons inherited their mantle as the masters of magic and wisdom, the elven nations crafted in turn by the dragons show the first signs of splintering between those who chose the shining lives in the floating pyramid oasis, and those who dare live in the dark tombs of their ancestors as the humans slowly learn to forge steel on their own, and powerful wizards suddenly make the template the elves were crafted from suddenly worth the notice of other races

Dead world

Young Earth has a higher chance of dinosaurs, amd dinosaurs>ancient dead civilizations.

But dead earth has an equal chance of UNDEAD dinosaurs, and ancient civilizations rising for a final apocalypse.

Someone puts it back to it's original state, a grey world where immortal dragons roam and time has no meaning.

Dying earth inherently appeals to me because of the potential for tragedy and the themes implied, it also heavily depends on the terms of the dying earth. Dying earths caused by decadent culture feel weak because the problem seems like it can solve itself after a few generations, dying earths caused by lack of resources or some absolute irreversible change like the sun going massive or even just a vague "the flames are fading" idea really get me going.

Young earth is cool (for me) only when it comes off the heels of a dying earth and the conflict is served up as a "Old vs New" dealie or an age of rediscovery where those who have lived in the darkness are coming to understand the true scope and depth of their ancient forgotten heritage leading to an era of rapid uncontrolled technological and cultural advancement.

Currently cooking up a dying world setting.

The characters believe the world has been cursed and forsaken by the gods. The world is cold and desolate, magic is fading, etc.

In reality, they planet is a failed terraforming project. The sun is entering it's red giant phase. The "gods" are just ancient satalietes in orbit. Magic is the failing remnants of ultra advanced tech, etc.

Everyone lives in a massive facility they believe was the city of the gods, but in actuality is the base of a space elevator. The places is a dilapidated shit hole, but is the only places people can really survive.

I suppose if I had to pick, I would say dying. Not because I like missing gods or magic fading, but more just from having a bunch of cool stuff that happened in the past for players to discover.

I haven't played Dark Souls, but I have a friend who is a fan, and told me a bit of the lore. I liked the idea of an undead world, and rolled the idea around in my head of what visiting a planet suffused by necromantic energy would be like -- where much of the population could be undying for one reason or another, and blood carried special magical properties that anyone could use.

I mean, we often talk about games where you visit other worlds, but how many times do we come up with a world where your very existence is substantially different?

Dying earth doesn't necessarily mean the world has to have passed through a futuristic technological age to get there. It could simply be the end-times of a pseudo-medieval fantasy world. Just take a look at the setting of Dark Souls 1, for example.

that's a pretty awesome insight, thanks user

I like dying earth more. Lots of potential for ancient ruins and forgotten civilizations, etc. Picking over the bones of kingdoms long dead, unearthing ancient secrets best left forgotten, etc.

>Young Earth has a higher chance of dinosaurs, amd dinosaurs>ancient dead civilizations.
I see your post and raise.

>UNDEAD dinosaurs
if malazan has taught us anything, it's that undead dinosaurs will fuck your day right up

Dying earth, if only because one of the few books I have re-read several times, years apart, is Dark Is The Sun, and the world it portrays has always stuck with me.

I'd read that book.

Thats always the case, mix it up a bit

Maybe the aether winds of magic are like wine, and refine with age. A young earth would have simple and destructive magic, where a dying earth would have a huge range of very complex and subtle magic

Dying Earth, specifically William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land variation on the concept

Both. Dark Souls.

A Post-dying Young Earth.

Shit ended so hard so long ago we've gone back to being a young civilization again. Have the optimism and high-adventure of a Young Earth, with the looming realization that you're standing atop the corpse of a long-dead Earth, and that your world might end up just the same some day.

this.

Top taste m8.

That's half the pitch of a comic book I'm working on.

>Have the optimism and high-adventure of a Young Earth, with the looming realization that you're standing atop the corpse of a long-dead Earth, and that your world might end up just the same some day.

I know i'm a giant faggot, but i still want to run CATastrophe.

Would have been a great setting if it wasn't for those guys who were determined to keep it at the tension level of a G-rated children's cartoon.

So, Degenesis?

It's a general problem with Veeky Forums - there's abslutely NO middle ground and if you suggest there is, you get yelled at from both sides.

I was thinking The road to el dorado, Atlantis and Treasure planet level of seriousness. And i have a stable group now who i can subject to it once current campaign and two other games finish.

They both work.

Young Earth is better for a cheerful, positive setting, while a Dying Earth is better for a grimdark, violent, or lonely-feeling setting.
In terms of combat, yeah, Young Earth is better for sorcery and non-human creatures that are friendly and "Elder Creatures" without necessarily being Cthulu. While on the other hand, DE is probably better for "sword" combat, as people will have forgotten how to use magic and/or the "polluted blood" that can't use magic is now the more common breed of human. Sorcery can be more of a hidden, underground thing than the universal thing that it tends to be in YE settings.

Personally I think DE is more interesting for long, political setting, whereas YE can be better for a self-contained story that isn't predictably grimdark.

If people in the setting are still wearing gas masks and collecting car parts then it's not a Young Earth, is it?

I'm talking bronze-age city states worshiping a mindbogglingly tall tower they don't know how to enter, which the part later discovers is actually a space elevator, the entrance of which is buried miles underground (it used to be ground level).

Well, in this one you get more or less everything. Primitive tribes, feudal society, renaissance and a few pockets of modern technology.

But I get what you mean. I think Engel is kind of what you describe, but I never got into that, so I can't say for certain.

CATastrophe always had a great vibe of hidden menace to me. Like, where did the cat girls come from? We're they sex toys from the old, dead world that escaped and reproduced? You could do a lot of very tragic Rats of NIMH type stuff in that setting and still have room for lighthearted adventures and shenanigans.

Bonus points if the cat women are programmed to act like anime girls on a genetic level. It's not a cutesy act they put on--they literally have NO choice but to be adorable, nyan-ing busty waifu material. I can imagine that really fucking with the heads of some players.

Its a beautiful book except for the author purposefulyl writing in a fucked up manner to seem fantastic, and having a super heavy foot fetish.

>Its a beautiful book except for the author purposefulyl writing in a fucked up manner to seem fantastic, and having a super heavy foot fetish.
lol wut

...

>

You know how the Titanomachy was the end of one pantheon (and age) and the beginning of another?
So a young earth that was until recently a dying earth.

I
>STILL
ATEN'T DEAD

Not going to lie, I think that was one of the most badass things ever written.

It's a fucking chore to get through but worth it if you do.

Or just listen to the youtube audio of it.

It's over a century old now so no copyright sticks and the whole thing is on YouTube.

You know, something to consider is what's killing the world. What if too much magic (read: too many wizards) dicking around with reality is what's wrong? That might be a good idea for a high-magic dying world setting

Dying Earth is best earth. History lost to ages going back thousands of years.

A post-collapse young earth. Conan had this and it was fucking rad.

there's a rewritten version out there that's less archaic and more readable

William Hope Hodgson intentionally wrote The Night Land in a manner that was archaic even at the time of it's publication(like the kind that someone prior to the Revolutionary War would have used), which makes it kinda a pain in the ass to read, there's a more modern rewrite available though that fixes this

>You know, something to consider is what's killing the world. What if too much magic (read: too many wizards) dicking around with reality is what's wrong? That might be a good idea for a high-magic dying world setting
Dark Sun

Technically a high-psionics setting, but there are level 20 wizards as well.

Goddamn, I love Zothique. Unhinged, pulpy goodness.

Bump

>sex toys
>waifu material

Nah. That's dull and dumb. There are ways to include sinister stuff without making it... that. And it's much more fun to have ADVENTURE! with tragic/melancholic undertones than GMing an Adventure of Brain Damaged Brigade. Although that could be fun too, i mean, i GM'd Shadowrun more than once.

Introduce them to some 12 bore theology.