So, I'm starting to brainstrom some ideas for an Iron Heroes campaign setting that I will be running sometime in the indefinite future. You guys are all welcome to toss any suggestions or ideas into the mix.
The basic idea stems from the very little bit of a suggested setting included inthe Iron Heroes rulebook... The Swordlands. For those who don't have the book, or are too lazy to look it up, here's a synopsis:
There was once a group of powerful beings who had control of untold magical power called the Masters. They had floating cities and all that sort of super-magic jazz. Humanity was essentially ensalved by the Masters. A few humans, the First, were "enhanced" by the masters to be stronger, faster, smarter, better than ordinary humans, they too could wield magic to a lesser degree and acted as overseers for the Masters over their human brethren.
Eventually a magical war broke out amongst the Masters that devastated the world and killed all the Masters. The world was thrust into a deep, dark age in which the remaining humans, sometimes led by one of the First, carved new kingdoms out of the resultant chaos. Monstrous survivors, originally created by the Masters solely to wage war, still roam the vast wildernesses, still riddled with the ruins of the Master's glorious empire, between small pockets of returning civilation.
Got all that?
So what I'm going to do, is take that idea, and turn it into a mythical alternate Earth setting. The setting is centered on Europe and the Mediterranean Sea during an analogue of the Dark Ages. Atlantis will take the role of the Masters, with the sinking of Atlantis equating, historically, to the fall of the Roman Empire. The Mythical Heroes of Antiquity (Jason, Beowulf, Arthur and such...) are substitutes for the First.
The world is just beginning to claw it's way out of the magical holocaust induced dark age it is currently suffereing from. Many of the surviving civilizations are former provinces and colonies of the Atlantean Empire, and have managed to hang on to small bits and piences of Atlantean culture, knowledge, technology or magic, if even in a greatly reduced capacity.
So that's where I'm starting from...