How would you do an after the apocalypse fantasy world?

By defeating the necromancer.

pretty much yeah. you're always adventurers picking through the ancient ruins of a long-dead superciv for shinies.

lore always ends up being 'the world was really cool and shiny and magical, and then some asshole ruined it for the rest of us in an orgy of acid lava volcanos, transdimensional hellspiders, and angry triple dragons'

bonus points if it was really earth all along.

What I did:
>Normal mode Earth setting
>Unknown event (to the players) breaks reality
>New physics means combustion engines don't work, cordite and some other explosives burn but don't explode
>Since people start to change physically, since people think that it's random others that you're changing to reflect your true self.
>Some people develop magical talents, innately or through religious devotion,
Game takes place either months/years/decades after the large scale societal collapse.

but not many bonus points. it's a surprisingly common secret reveal.

...

Have it go over another apocalypse, repeat a couple times, get halflings with rings 3000 years after the second or fifth armaggedon.

Read Prince of Nothing 6 times, describe every single act as both world ending and pointless, laugh at players when they realize they rolled characters only to suffer meaninglessly, drink self to sleep when they quit after two hours.

but we've got ancient ruins in this world without an apocalypse. Unless you count the Huns or the Sea People and such as an apocalypse.

The ~1170 collapse was apocalyptic. The trade routes through the Mediterranean and staggering amount of records were lost. It was cultural reset button in a lot of ways for the Levant, Egypt, Greece, and Persia, and its effects were felt from Britain to China.

The combination of natural disasters, disease, and unchecked foreign migration, however makes for a great storytelling environment.

I kinda like Zelda BotW

I did something with a campaign that has since been called "The Fae Campaign" Long time ago.

>nWoD setting
Basically the Faen creatures from Celtic mythology decided that human beings were creating wonderous inventions and were getting to a crucial tipping point to where we might be dangerous to them.

So they decided to bring us to heel by staging a three part invasion of our world

-Take out all top brass leadership. Since they can appear of out portals pretty much anywhere this was easy. Just pop out, shadow creature crawls into their mouths while they sleep and they suffocate.

-Take out modernized military support structure. Fuel depots, munitions depots, communications arrays, etc. They sent in elementalists to just burn and earthquake everything out of existence

-Remove food stores. This was easy. There are limitless creatures of the faen realm since it is technically infinite. So they just unleashed hordes of starving fantasy creatures on crops and farms.

Then came the actual invasion.
They brought humanity to its knees but it didn't turn out exactly as they thought it would.

They forgot our nukes, which after humans reverse engineered portals were dropped wholesale all over the faen realm, particularly their timeless strongholds.

The "post apocalyptic fantasy" element comes in after.
Earth is a scarred battlefield with fortified pockets of humanity left since things like concrete, asphalt and plastic were more or less immune to magical influence.

The space between cities became hellish fantasy areas filled with monstrous plants and all sorts of nasty creatures that Guillermo del Toro would love.

Primary quests were going out and finding lost munitions stores, army bases, libraries, and factories.

The actual Faen war was my favorite part. Humans were getting destroyed by things like the rapidly growing thornvines that were basically like living barb wire and Faen had no fucking clue what to do with fighter jets or artillery aside from just throw more creatures at them in the hopes the humans would eventually run out of ammo. Which they did.

I think of something a BBEGugh would do and act as though it played out without heroes to stop it.

>BBEGugh
The memes have gone too far

crossbreed Eador and Elric's world

I'd make it a western, but instead of cowboys there's wizards.

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.

I mean there is a bunch of ways. In mine the dungeons ate the sun.

Like this.

>A small village can barely survive
>Crops often die, starvation, winters are hard
>Villagers seek the aid of a nearby clan of elves/fair folk
>The fair folk offer to help the villagers in exchange for favors
>these favors start as small but eccentric gestures (tying a yellow ribbon to the a tree in the forest with a lock of a young maidens hair) but start to become serious (sacrificing that maidens firstborn child)
>The villagers turn against the fair folk and tell them their help is no longer needed since after multiple bountiful harvests they can now trade or pay for any help they might need.
>The fair folk insulted leave the world of men to live in their forest but first curse the villagers to never be able to till their own grain or be able to enter their forest again.
>Some time passes
>Some members of the fair folk decided that enough time has passed and that the villagers may be desperate enough now to beg them for their help
>Fair folk being long lived are not very good at accurately measuring the passage of time.
>A small group of the fair folk emerge from their forest to find themselves not on the edge of a small farming village but in the vast shadows of the ruins of an enormous megacity, starscrapers and arcologies blocking out the sky the streets littered with the rusted remains of flying cars, flickering neon lights and LED displays clinging to life despite centuries of neglect advertising timeshares and homesteads on interstellar colonies, designer label augmentations for the rich and fashionable, and propaganda for war efforts against rebel factions.
>It has actually been thousands of years since the fair folk forever changed the villagers way of life and left them with no choice but to take their first step on a journey that ultimately led them to world conquest and later ruination of much a region of the galaxy about 30 cubic lightyears in size.

>Shortly after reentering the world an ancient sentinel awakened by the presence of unauthorized magical beings in a human settlement springs to attack and launches a salvo of fusion bombs onto the forest annihilating the trees and destroying the fairy circles connecting the world of the fair folk to this one before shuddering to a a final stop the last of its power finally leaving it nothing but an inert pile of scrap on a cracked plasteel road.
>The fair folk explorers just barely able to survive the blast with a well timed magical barrier.
>the humans are long gone but their twisted mutated, genetically and cybernetically augmented posthuman progeny are not, as are the various races they had created in the image of their long extinct neighbors and uplifted beast races they created to serve them.
>Left with no way back the company of fair folk are left with no choice but to journey across the devastated radioactive postcyberpunk wasteland that is the world and find another intact forest and fairy circle if such a thing still exists to make it back home.
>Standing in their way are all the technological wonders of the starving villagers they took advantage of.

Etrian Odyssey

>How would you do an after the apocalypse fantasy world?

I'd just blatantly rip off Outland from world of warcraft:

-The world was torn apart by irate magical forces and is now reduced to a series of floating, loosely joined, 'shards' or landmasses that gravitate and float together in the vacuum of space.
-*They're close enough and follow predictable enough 'orbits' that allow people to skip or cross onto other neighboring ones once they get close enough in their cycles. You can also just fly across.

-Life is hard in this land of extremes: the outer shards are hot, dry, inhospitable wastelands with thin atmosphere and very little water, while the interior is defined by more humid, high competition, green spaces rife with extremely aggressive peoples and lifeforms all competing for limited resources. There are no oceans or seas; they were drained when the world cracked and either drifted off or were evaporated- leaving the interior very 'damp' and constantly raining and the only water sources consistently left to be landlocked lakes and seasonal rivers.

-Many of the worlds fantasy races are either extinct or have fled: too slow to adapt to such a drastic change or having seen the writing on the wall and fled to other more fertile worlds & planes via technology or magic. The few peoples that remain are tough, adaptable, survivors in a broken world- some have even evolved and aren't recognizable from their precursor species.
-*Worse yet, it is a godless realm where prayers and clerics go unanswered- it's pantheon having long cast off this dead scrap of a world.

-All that said, it is not an entirely hopeless world: people have made sanctuaries, they have adapted, life still persists even in the harshest conditions, and obscure, unpopular, weak & forgotten gods come drifting in- tantalized by this abandoned world.

DM did a continuation game after the previous one failed to avert the world being destroyed more or less. Was pretty bleak but kind of cool I guess, just a wasteland with some magical elements.