I need some more reasons to desert the surface and hole up underground in a fantasy setting. The more unharmed (ruining cities permitted) the surface stays, the better.
An ice age could work, but makes all biomes uniformly freezing.
Undead apocalypse could do it, but they have so much potential as underground tomb hazards.
Dragons or other powerful entity enforcing it, works, but a bit boring.
Magic radiation.
Magical plague that only becomes active in direct sunlight and only affects sapient races. Probably unleashed by the Drow who didn't expect everyone to up a d invade them in response. No one is sure if the plague is still active centuries later.
All birds turn into Zombie birds, attack in hordes and start picking off the world's population city by city, village by village.
Surface is perfectly fine and completely normal, people just up and decided they wanted to live unnaground. Because seriously, fuck the sun. Just fuck that noise.
Yes, the sun is evil, trust me on that.
We're going underground. Your emperor commands it!
I'd play a setting where the holy city of the sun god was lost to a demon attack, and as punishment for their sin, all of mankind was cursed to be burned by the sun until it is reclaimed.
PCs must DEUS VULT as hard as they possibly can
That one prison colony from Chronicles of Riddick.
Pelor is very upset.
To steal a setting: Civil War of some kind, losers get forced underground into the mines for eternity.
Up on the surface, civilization wanes and disappears because it's a utopia with nothing to struggle against. People just stop waking up because there's no reason to.
Really depends on what you're after, and the amount of years you need these things to occur within.
Why is it important that the surface remain mostly unharmed? What is the significance of being underground? Etc.
I'm just assuming he wants a fantasy Metro 2033 game
No one really knows what caused it. They just called it "The Doom". It started travelers finding small villages and townships deserted. Seers attempting to scry the fate of the vanished would go blind or mad.
Eventually large keeps and cities began to be struck. The only survivors were those living or working underground. Night guards would emerge from the dungeons of a castle seeking their relief, only to find the castle and surrounding country side empty of all human life. Vagrants sleeping in cellars and sewers would awaken to find they were the only inhabitants remaining in the city. Small groups of travelers never seemed to suffer the same fate, but whole armies vanished from the field.
It still happens when ever we try to resettle the surface, so the wise go deep underground. Hunting parties may brave the surface, but they do so in small numbers and they stay on the move. All pray The Doom does not find them, but some never return.
We Metro: Eberron now.
A generic demon invasion would suffice for that. Just state that a devious wizard corrupted them to feed off sunlight (the source of all Goodly things) to explain why they can't delve too deep underground.
That's a hefty setup. What's the pay-off?
>players decide to camp out on the surface
>GM tells them they die
>players ask what they died to
It's a bit of an issue. By the sound of things, OP wants players to return to the surface. Otherwise your typical radioactive apocalypse would be reason enough to stay underground.
Turns out there's a mcguffin that seems to allow people to walk on the surface. It might be true, it might not. Maybe The Doom has passed and no one has noticed. Maybe it's supposed to be safe in a far away area and maybe civilization could be rebuilt if a gang of manly men could make their way there and map it out/make sure it's safe.
40 years ago, a terrible sorceror began work on a ritual that would beckon the Hell Moon, and unleash demonic hordes upon the earth. A great alliance of heroes assembled from all corners of the globe, to put an end to the sorceror's plans and save the world.
They failed. The Hell Moon rose, the demon tide descended, and a blackness fell upon the world.
40 years ago, your ancestors shut fast the doors to your home: Sunpeak, one of many dwarven strongholds delved in the roots of the Green Mountains. You have lived in the comforting darkness all your life, safe from the terrors of the surface. With vast mines for minerals, mushroom farms for food and lumber, underground lakes and rivers for water, and the deep roads for trade between the underhomes, it seems that your people need never concern themselves with the surface again.
But there is a saying: "one can fence themselves in, but one cannot fence the world out." The evil that grips the land above is now seeping down to your land below. Monsters have been sighted on the deep roads. Poison runs in the groundwater. Underhomes have gone silent, no visitor ever returning. A plague festers in the south, while an empire rises in the west, both set to conquer all the underworld.
And a visitor has come to your humble home, from the outside. An elf - the first overworlder to set foot in Sunpeak for almost half a century, and the first elf to set foot in any underhome for a thousand years. She comes offering hope: a means to cast down the Hell Moon forever, end the reign of the demon kings, and return the world to mortal hands once more.
Many roads lay before you, none of them smooth. Whichever road you choose to walk, choose carefully. For the earth that has long been a shelter to your people, may yet become their tomb.
This is fine.
Sold. Grabbing axe and helm as we speak.
Everyone on the surface got raptured, either being vaporized by god or going to heaven.
Those underground are the hedonists, sinners, and those who thought to escape judgement, whether because they would or because they had assumed they'd fail.
>Biological war released a plague on the surface, forcing people underground where they slowly developed an immunity through minimal exposure, surface has not been visited since because of superstition, until now
>Alien species used to harvest surface beings, eventually most moved underground and aliens moved on thinking they overharvested the planet into total extinction
>100+ years after they forced most races underground the surface race was cursed with a lack of will to live, they just gave up and died
>A long time ago people awoke from stasis underground with no memory of why they were there or that an aboveground world even existed
>There is little breathable air aboveground, people moved downward where the oxygen is more plentiful
The sun went out.
DRRR FORGOT PIC
Did it leave a note saying when it would be back?
I want huge underground political clusterfuck of a dysfunctional state that is forced to somehow make due and expand into monster infested old delvings.
I also kind of want a ruin littered overworld for expeditions. And to house some factions waiting to get underground. Also trying to work in something like a threeway siege. Dwarves underground with many others already in and living under their banner. Huge clog of people at the gates. Orc Horde and hobgoblin empire siegeing them and each other. Simultaneously both attackers somehow hold onto positions in the underground government and diplomats are working overtime.
I basically need to shove the powers that be together with some urgency, but not have them threatened by immediate destruction or starvation when congested at the surface. Keeping the varied environments above ground would be the cherry on top.
My go to is creeping ice age, but I'm just not feeling it 100% because it ultimately makes above ground so samey.
Everything beneath the open sky is being watched. They flee to escape its gaze.
This could actually work.
Were cursed by the gods of day and night, thus both sunlight and moonlight hurt them.
So they make these huge expeditions on new moons, and the days before and after.
The surface world had been deemed too dangerous to live in since the Great Oozening of the 3rd age.
Gels and slimes of all kind slither across the surface, most of them attempting to dissolve any life that comes to the surface.
There are rumors that there are whole cities and populations perfectly preserved in a rare variety of Ooze.
hyperactive flora
angry ghosts that possess you and make you jump from heights
fungus industrial revolution, all population centers migrated to be closer to the material
space pirates attacking anything that isn't hidden
collective amnesia, the way back to the surface has been lost, and nobody remembers why everyone did go underground in the first place (it was a Pied Piper of Hamelin thing)
Super killer kudzu covering most of the surface? Could whither in some places only to grow back when new nutrition comes nearby (players).
That's pretty cool. Strange alien godlike being started appearing and humanity is just completely unequipped to deal with it. I'm picturing huge tentacles hanging down through the clouds, huge eyes staring on cloudless nights. They don't need to be everywhere always either, so OP gets his pristine surface and small groups of survivors that didn't escape.
Humanity needs to hide from the Sun because if she sees them, she will kill them. To make matters worse, her sister the Moon has agreed to help her out despite being more or less sympathetic to humans.
Up to you what Humans did to piss the Sun off that badly.
I like this because it reminds me of an alternate version of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," where the Morlocks are the heroes of the story.
I like this, it feels very mythic. Jolly good user!
Evil dictator ruling an army of monsters is keeping mankind under ground to protect them from an evil god that will kill them if their population rises past a certain point.
ROW ROW
ROW YOUR BOAT
GENTLY DOWN THE THREAD!
Due to overwhelming Jewisjws control of the media, banking and politics, our intrepid, blond and blue eyed handsome computer expert and his loyal beautiful girlfriend who is a great cook and homemaker decided to bootstrap and move underground.
As expected, the Polphesy came true and the surface world died in an orgy of NTR and unchecked abortions. Our hero dutifully pumped his now legally wedded wife who dutifully produced 13 children. Our hero trained these children in the ways of European swordfighting, Japanese honorable bushido and katana slicing and proper AR-15 usage and maintainence. He also tought them the teachings of The Way of The Invisible Hand and the tales of the Shrugging Atlas.
These 13 Warriors now set out to recolonize the surface world. The journey continues.
The idea is that small groups do fine, unless killed by other things. Only large groups and permanent settlements attract it's attention.
The "evil sun" is actually deadly solar radiation that began slowly killing everything once the planet's magnetic shield began to weaken. Creatures that spend too much time above get sick or go mad.
This also means that compasses don't work so navigation for expeditions is all the more dangerous.
10/10
Can you run this game please?
>the tales of the Shrugging Atlas.
Ok, that was worth reading.
So the sun god, in an effort to force humans to reclaim the city (which I assume is above ground), seriously hampers aNY effort to take back the city by burning the humans sent to march on the city to battle the demon horde?
That just sounds like poor planning. Like seriously bad.
Or do you mean like just severe sunburn? Because even that is a huge hindrance.
I mean, unless the whole army could carry parasols. But just the manufacturing and resource costs alone would set back an entirely underground society who can only raid the surface for materials at night.
Best course of action is to undermine the thing. And darken the skies with smoke for the final push.
There is an African word: "mazuku", it means "evil wind" -- it's associated with active volcanos, and when a volcano is awakening, there is a tremendous buildup of carbon dioxide that gets released into the bottom of lakes and descends down mountainsides. An entire village of 1700 people died to a silent onrush of CO2 some years ago. Suffocated in the open air in broad daylight. Stuff is known to gather in the bottom of ditches and depressions and kill small children who wander through, and no one knew why until volcanologists visited and demonstrated smoke would sit on top of the CO2 layer, showing them exactly where it is.
In Pennsylvania, there's that town that was completely abandoned when the coal mines underground caught fire.
Of course, there's always radiation. But why would humanity abandon without word or warning? There's always that primal fear of "things in the sky" that we all have in the back of our brains. Maybe the sky started filling with UFOs and people started disappearing. People had to go underground fast.
The atmosphere getting ruined.
MERRILY MERRILY MERRILY
Congratulations on making an interesting idea as boring as humanly possible.
'TIL FASCISM IS DEAD
Ah yes, African, that singular language of great history.
Angry spirits/elementals. I thought the mmo FFXIV did a decent job of this.
>I need some more reasons to desert the surface and hole up underground in a fantasy setting. The more unharmed (ruining cities permitted) the surface stays, the better.
All the people on the surface were reduced to orange juice just like in that one anime.
>Slave race (or just slave people)
>forced to live underground for generations (mining, keep morale low)
>above ground race rule over them
>Below ground race naturally adapt to underground over generations
>Above ground race suddenly stop showing up
>Underground folks slowly develop their own culture/governments
>Nobody goes up top, superstisions/stigmas
>After years of of government talk, and a shift in leadership they decide to finally lead an expedition
>Above ground is now just ruins and remenants
Something like this? Too tired to flesh it out.
Through some magic/science shenanigans the inhabitants are made to react contrarily to gravity and fall upward. They move underground and live in upside down, unederground cities.
If the whole world was affected the effect could have been reversed and now people are coming back.
If it affected only one kingdom the PCs could venture into the caves under the ruins and have to fight the crazy underground inhabitants who walk on the ceiling of the caves and fall upward.
Maybe it's been Wrath of God for some misdeeds of humanity? They've been cast off the surface and are burned by the sun now so they'd have to move by night to achieve anything topside
The surface world is a sphere arounda sun, going underground is your settings equivalent of Space Travel
trying to make a setting with this idea.
>In Pennsylvania, there's that town that was completely abandoned when the coal mines underground caught fire
Centralia, PA. Better known to most colloquially as Silent Hill.