Let’s make a setting Veeky Forums

10,000 years ago the world was covered in eternal winter. And yet still there are survivors who cling to life in this miserable hellscape.

The sun... has been gone for 10000 years. The cold unforgiving skies are illuminated by pinpricks of stars and wide bands of aurora borealis. Haunting green and blue light, shining down day and night - not that these words have much meaning - everywhere people still survive.

Wood can be mined from ice and dried to be burned. All major human settlements are in ice caves. Food is mostly Leviathan blubber.

Some asshat swapped the core of the earth with the sun 10000 years ago, and since FANTASY, the sun was small and orbited the earth. In it's place is the LARGEST chunk of high quality metals imaginable, and it's HOT in the earth

Legends tell of mountains of warmth, and great green bubbles in the bosoms of these mountains, full of plants and animals seen nowhere else.

>get your past/present tense right
these survivors are sustained by mystical hotsprings dotted across the world. These hotsprings grant longer life, so long as you continue to drink from them, but draw strange and dangerous creatures from time to time.

So it's set in Minnesota?

It's too bad, too. If only conventional flight was possible in the freezing storms, you could be the richest man in the lands. The "sun", sometimes called "Ingot", can be seen day and night as an imposing black mass shrouded in aurora borealis.

No living creature flies. It is too cold. Thing that do fly, aren't alive. And the last thing you'd want is to come in contact with them.

...

A relic of ages gone by, a giant sphere made of small ropes sits, somehow preserved in the ruins of what looks like a small temple dedicated to it.

Remnants of the signage have been translated to "The Biggest", and a fierce theological debate rages on what it means or is supposed to portray.

People from the region try to make a pilgrimage to it at least once in their lives.

*cough cough*

There are things that move out in the wastes, remnants of the old world's mystifying sorcery. They are few in number now, but a single one of these beasts can destroy an entire settlement with ease.

They pulse with an eerie light from a multitude of eyes, their innards letting out a buzzing whine as the time-ravaged beasts prowl. The only thing they seem to fear are other beasts of different designs and patterns.

Occasionally the dead body of a beast is found, sometimes millennia old, sometimes centuries, sometimes only days and still smoking. Inside, a trove of metals and strange artifacts can be found, but even dead they can still be dangerous as lingering by all but the oldest will make you sicken and eventually die.

>Let’s throw a curveball.

White and Silver Dragonborn have risen over the years into a very large minority across the world for their capacity to withstand the cold. Often they are informally refered to as “the pearls”. There are many ‘white supremicist’ pearl colonies who live further north then anyone else and seek to destroy other dragonborn species for being abomonations.

There are living things that do fly, but due to the stuffiness of academics they're not classified as living things. only water and ground creatures are considered alive. Chickens are a source of much debate naturally

The only major settlements in the waste are centered around "Sunshards," magical burning pieces of molten metal the provide heat, for a time. Until the birth of a prophet can predict the site of the next fall.

Some say that we all come from one place. The Heart of Iron. A giant city, bigger than any encampment in these frozen lands, shielded by walls of iron and gold. Many lives ago, we were exiled from it, left to wander the ice. Or perhaps the Heart knew its end, and let us find our own fates?

>I'm not saying it's a colony spaceship stranded on Pluto, but it's a colony spaceship stranded on Pluto, with wizards.

While the ice sheets at the north and the south of the world have advanced, the oceans have remained liquid, heated by thermal vents and the warmth of the sun at the core.

Underwater civilizations went through a dark age as their raiding of the surface came to a stop, but are currently going through a golden age of culture and trade. The weight of the glaciers has depressed the land, and once-rich coastal cities are now submerged, some are now even colonized by various aquatic races.

They have mostly forgotten the surface's world former glory, relegating the distant past to mere myths and legends, and see only the squalor of the survivors. They barely pay attention to fishermen or other surface ships, alternating between hunting or saving the ships out of amusement or boredom.

One of the dominant life forms of the planet are giant crabs, which can effortlessly break through the ice of the still-liquid oceans and large lakes and wander the frozen wastes. They're oddly pacifistic, and merchant caravans often try to set up shop on their shells. These are of limited success, as while the crabs do tend to patrol the same long, winding paths, they're not very good insulators, save for the absolute largest

The shamanistic Riverfolk scoff at the "Heart of Iron" story that those who huddle around the sunshards tell each other.

Their oral traditions stretches back to the day when the sun was lost and the Ingot took its place, and their history clearly tells of the day 5000 years ago that the Heart of Iron fell from the sky, and a generation later a new people appeared.

The Riverfolk distrust the Fallen Iron people, feeling that they are alien intruders to the world. The Riverfolk are not alone in this sentiment.

The fallen Iron people seem human, but have a near inhuman resistant to cold, speak a strange tongue, have a fondness for a drink that looks like water but is very much not, and tend to march under flags consisting of some combination of white, blue and red

Unusual ice that never melts but can steal the fading heat of the freshly dead can be made into legendary weapons

The Order of the Sun was originally a knightly order of the Ljosalfar, dedicated to leading troops against the Dokkalfar. With the loss of the sun and the freezing of the world, the Ljosalfar have nearly died out while the Dokkalfar are more numerous and prosperous.

The Ljosalfar Kingdom is long dead, but the Order of the Sun remains on an eternal crusade to restore the sun. Their standards have fallen over the years, halted only by the long-lived Alfar who founded it. The Order now has members from every race imaginable, but its poor resources and dedication to their quest are more the butt of jokes than an admired force.

The Order of the Sun blames the loss of the sun on the Dokkalfar King, whom they name "Light Stealer". This leads to hostility to individual Dokkalfar, but not always.

>can't tell if Russian Upper Midwest American

Early tales of the Fallen Iron People include strong powers and warlike abilities that were comparable to the Sun Era. This allowed the Fallen Iron People to invade, conquer, and eventually end up on top of many major settlements, bringing them greater power than their numbers would allow.

As the stories continue, the powers appear less and less, with the last one being about 3000 years ago. Today, the Fallen Iron People are no more powerful than any other race, aside from their control of settlements and numbers.

General Slav was the intention

Vampires can wander during the day thanks to no proper sun up but now they cant touch the ground, they live on fancy kite-houses.

All vampires wear ridiculous 80's style platform shoes

>ignoring the rest of the thread for a moment.

Nobody remembers what struck the earth and brought about the winter eternal. Only that with the smothering of the sun came a poison, a sickness of the earth that twists what few beasts that remain. Toxic snow hardens upon them and liquid poison oozes from cursed flesh until glossy sheets of brittle envenomed crystal crack and splinter into ferocious protection. Shard-beasts dominate the screaming dark, maddened and savage they prowl the frozen bones of old forests and stalk the bones of older, long-dead ice crabs.

Man was not spared the poisoned snows. Many died to the wasting sickness or lost themselves to fever madness. Those few who survived, and who carried the spark of power found themselves transformed. Shorn of their gaudy gifts and now empowered with a parasitic dependence on the poison that had murdered the world. These Tainted men and women exercise a measure of influence over the shard-beasts, it was they who first tamed the great crabs and showed us how to build upon their backs. They chart the screaming dark, guiding we survivors to pure grounds. In secret they feast upon the poison, where the great storms ruin our land they guide us elsewhere, and when the earth is clean once more it is they who return us.

The Fraternal Seers of Coal light great ceremonial furnaces to fight back the snow. Filled with religious fervor, they believe that with enough fuel, the winter will be finally overcome and the curse, lifted. But how does on get coal on a frozen ice ball? Oh, there are ways.

With the sun now being inside the world, mountains are constant volcanos heated by the sun. These places shine through the nightmare of eternal cold. There are many, many hot springs, everywhere in the world from the size of Great Lakes to mere oversized puddles these places are vital to the survival of civilization settlements and force every race together.

Ingot is the black iron core of the world. It was swapped with the sun which is the cause of the big mess that everyone is currently in.

White the infamous “pearls” make up an incredible force, “white supremmicist” is a catch all term for any creature who supports the idea of a cold world Most of the underwater world likes how things currently are.

The oder of the sun and the white supremicists are locked in eternal struggle to discover and harness the which is beloved to be the cause of the sun/world’s core mixup it has seemingly disapeered from the world since.

>discover and harness the

Find and wield whatever great powers surely reside in ‘the heart of iron’

The coal kings are an underground confederation of dwarven city-states. Their "crops" consist of thermo- and radiotrophic fungus growing alongside channels of lava. Their wealth is not the pretty gold, but the vital coal coveted far and wide.

The most dangerous creatures to roam the land in the Days Of Winter Eternal are The Frost Things.

Known by many names across the surviving cultures of this world, these frigid nightmares are amongst the prime cause for the annihilation of many settlements over the long years following the removal of The Sun. Not 'Alive' in any sense of the term, these voids of pure chilling Oblivion desire only one thing; To snuff out all warmth and light, and to truly bring about a Winter everlasting. The fact that few can directly oppose them and hope to survive does not bolster confidence in ost who would strive to face them.