Introducing the Lakelands: A Post-Apocalypse / Cosmic Horror Setting
For a few years now I've been picking away at a ttrpg setting in private, between other things and as the mood strikes - but no longer. It's time to share my work, very much in progress as it may be. Please let me introduce the Lakelands, a post-apocalyptic / cosmic horror setting.
Welcome to the Lakelands!
In the second quarter of the 21st century, somewhere in the middle of the continental United States, someone opened a door to another world and let in the alien powers called the Unbound. Wherever the Unbound went, seeking novelty and worship, reality buckled and warped under their uncanny weight. Strange new creatures and peoples flourished. Occult phenomena arose. Things began to fall apart.
Now, about 90 years after the Arrival, much of North America is either uninhabitable or ruled over by one Unbound or another. In the area around the Great Lakes, however, life goes on…
The Lakelands is a region of farmland, timberland, wetland, and urban ruin sometime in the early 22nd century, occupying what is now southern Ontario and parts of Michigan and upstate New York. There is no central government; the Lakelands is instead a patchwork of micronations, independent villages, and lawless wilds.
The cities are abandoned ruins, lost to the psychic emanations and occult phenomena that now occur when populations get too dense. Warlords demand tribute or battle for territory, while brigands roam the byways. And even stranger threats have emerged: belligerent hellpigs, hungry bat-creatures from the Bruce Peninsula, telepathic wolfdogs who terrorize humans, cnidarian parasites that puppet their hosts like zombies, spectral manifestations of mortal fears and desires, and enormous swans that dominate the skies like bright white dragons. And, still, the Unbound creep north.
Various inhabitants face these challenges and make this region their home, mingling in towns and crossroads, building their own communities, or living a life on the open road:
- mundane humans, most often descendants of those who lived in North America before the Arrival, still trying to make ends meet, but sometimes African, Asian, or European missionaries, mercenaries, and relief workers pursuing an agenda in this changing land;
- new hominids, diminutive folk with four distinct cultures who might be prehistoric humans brought from the past or new-made non-Homo sapiens humans – no one knows;
- mould nymphs, fungal colonies that have taken semi-human shape, and half-nymphs, humans who have had organs and limbs replaced by those same funguses;
- geminites, an offshoot of humanity that are always born as dicephalic twins, designed in a lab for some unknown purpose;
- aliens brought to Earth, like amazons, short parthenogenetic people who somewhat resemble velvet worms, and drakemantids, tall pet-loving insectoids;
- and various others, rare and remarkable.
Many communities and microstates dot this fearsome world, some struggling and others thriving:
- scavenger colonies skirt the urban ruins, braving their terrors for pre-Arrival relics;
- new hominid communes mine nickel and salt in the subterranean dark or harvest crops from the fields surrounding their sod houses;
- theatre towns like Five Stages, Drayton, and Sinjack are centres of culture, hosting one of the region’s most popular forms of entertainment;
- imperial city-states like New Guelph and Rochester dream of conquest;
- train towns are built in decaying railroad cars left on the tracks;
- and occult dystopias are ruled by idols, egregores, or the spectre-possessed.
Who will you be in this bucolic landscape, monstrous and strange? What terrors will you face? What wonders will you find? And most important of all, what kind of world, what kind of future, will you help build?
Tone and Tensions
Both Fantastic and Grounded
The Unbound bring a supernatural horror apocalypse into North America, with many fantastical elements: monstrous beasts, mad science, occult powers, ghosts and spectres, eldritch ruins, and extraterrestrials. These fantastical elements are fundamental parts of any Lakelands game. Despite all this, games in this setting should stay reasonably grounded. How would communities really develop in an environment like this? What lives would people really lead? This is not a Mad Max or a Gamma World setting, though it might borrow from both; the ideal tone is both fantastic and grounded, together.1
Gritty But Not Cynical
The Lakelands combines two genres, post-apocalyptic fiction and cosmic horror, that tend toward cynicism and despair. This setting grapples with despair but eschews cynicism. Characters in this setting care about more than survival, power, and their personal obsessions, or at least most of them do. Games in this setting will look squarely at the loss and cruelty of apocalypse, and the existential terrors of cosmic horror, and will nonetheless continually affirm that kindness, respect, knowledge, art, tradition, humour, community, and love are all still possible and all still matter.
Brass Tacks
Before I close out this introduction, I think there are a few more things to discuss.
The first is a matter of housekeeping: you can now find a page at the top of this blog, alongside "My Character Sheet" and "The Party," an index for all posts about the Lakelands. Like all my Pages, it is subject to continual revision.
The second is a matter of nomenclature: "the Lakelands" more accurately names a specific region within the setting than it names the setting as a whole. I have yet to come up with a name for the entire setting, one that captures the genres and tensions I've described above. When I have finally figured out what I should name each part of this project, I will update the index page accordingly.
The third is a matter of intention: originally I wanted to publish this project as a setting guide using Fate Core as the underlying system, and that is still a long-term goal. But I'm not making nearly the progress I'd like and I think there's a real risk of the Lakelands languishing in the obscurity of executive dysfunction. For now the Lakelands will be a project I work on semi-publicly, in blog posts as well as more private notebooks – but the day may come when I have enough together that I might publish it as a setting guide. I make no promises, but that is still my goal.
The fourth is a matter of posture: everything I write here about the Lakelands is provisional. It is all subject to change. "Canon" is an oft-misunderstood concept, and one of these days I might write about that, but in the meantime I can tell you that I do not mean for there to be any canonical Lakelands texts quite yet. Any future campaign guides or adventures that I publish for this project will be my intended Lakelands canon; the posts on this blog will only ever be provisional, a work in progress and subject to revision.
The fifth is a matter of credit: the preview picture for this post is owned by Vadim Morozov on Unsplash (19 July 2021). I am not using it, or any other photograph, to illustrate this post because it is surprisingly hard to find a public domain or free-to-license image that evokes the kind of post-apocalypse I'm going for: verdant, inhabited, and weird.
The sixth is a matter of licensing: any posts on this blog that pertain to the Lakelands I license as Creative Commons, specifically CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, unless stated otherwise in the post itself.
I wrote this draft before first encountering Seedling Games's "Grounded Fantasy," despite the very similar language. I don't think what I'm doing here is quite what they are calling "grounded fantasy," though there's a lot of similarity. The main differences are mostly of genre, not ethos.↩