Setting Overview: Iapheia
It occurred to me the other day that I've never actually written up a basic overview of the prospective campaign setting I've been brewing since mid-2023. So here's that.
Summary
Iapheia (ya-FEY-a) is a post-apocalyptic modern fantasy campaign setting inspired by the art, culture, and politics of Europe between the World Wars.
To mangle the overused Gramsci quote, the old world is freshly dead, blown apart by divine artillery and poisoned by necromantic radiation, and several new ones are struggling to be born. A decade-long war between two fossilised superpowers has recently ended with a whimpering white peace, leaving the continent of Iapheia in physical and psychic ruin. Many of its smaller nations, caught in the middle where the violence was at its worst, have collapsed.
Today, Central Iapheia is atomised. City-states, either wholly without higher government or overseen by sickly figureheads, have become the primary unit of civilisation. The space between them is a mess of crumbling infrastructure, ruined towns and cities, ravaged countryside, bandits, cults, monsters, and other miscellaneous adventure fodder.
Politically, Iapheia is closer to the 20s than the 30s. Plenty of people have rejected the old order in favour of exciting new visions of society, but those visions haven't yet had time to solidify and draw battlelines. Political sectarianism, social experiments, and mutant fringe ideologies are the norm, which translates to plenty of weird, dysfunctional governments (and probably some sane ones too, but they're not as interesting for gaming purposes).
When the world feels so new, alien, and unstable, plenty of people get left behind, and some of those outcasts become adventurers. Archetypal Iapheian PCs are itinerant and opportunistic, with no allegiance to any particular city or order. To borrow a phrase from Wyndham Lewis, they are primitive mercenaries in the modern era. Swords become rifles, fireballs become uranic shells, but "the trade", as some pretentious adventurers call it, is immortal.
Themes
Nations, as they were once understood, are dead. The two superpowers that began the Tribulation War are still holding together, but the rest of Iapheia has no serious political units larger than a city-state and a few satellite towns. A few countries still technically exist, but in name only - their borders are meaningless and their governments lack the power to enforce anything. Some cities band together into loose leagues, but they tend to be short-lived. Beyond their walls, much of Iapheia has reverted to effective terra nullius.
The war is over, but the violence continues. In the cities, street skirmishes and riots are facts of life, and openly carrying weapons is the norm in some of the meaner boroughs. The countryside is no less violent - banditry and warlordism are rampant, and the remnant horrors of the Tribulation War stalk the forests, valleys, and ruins.
Travel is difficult. Motor vehicles have limited range and few opportunities to refuel, trains rely on poorly maintained railroads, overland flight is still in its infancy, and all travellers are threatened by bandits. Those who must travel do so on horseback, and ideally in well-armed groups. Communication, however, is surprisingly smooth if you have the kit - cheap, reliable long-distance radio was one of the few wartime innovations that trickled down to the general public.
Humans are the real monsters. Less glibly, with a few rare exceptions, anything in Iapheia that might be considered a "monster" is a result of human activity, intentional or otherwise. Mutant super soldiers, engineered warbeasts, platoons of feral undead, battle-angels called and bound through forbidden uranics, spirits slithering in through weeping wounds in the firmament... to say nothing of plain old unaugmented humans, which can do plenty of damage with nothing more than third-hand small arms and poor impulse control.
Ideology is everything, and the lines between art, politics, and faith have become blurred. Being an ardent Twelfth Wayer or Perspectivist is just as much a political alignment as communism or liberalism. Artistic movements have militias. Pure theocracy has made a comeback in some cities. Belief systems are, to many, far more important than national, ethnic, or class identities.
Arts and entertainment are flourishing. Art is an invaluable tool for understanding the maddening new world, and a much-needed balm for the constant anxiety and anomie. Some lucky artists find fame and fortune, but it's precarious. A surprising number of adventurers are artists left behind by the ever-shifting cultural zeitgeist.
Crunch
Still ironing this out. A basic GLOG framework, most likely, but with a few tweaks.
I think I'm going HP-less. They don't feel right for a setting with ubiquitous, effective firearms. I'll probably use some variant of the Pain system I spitballed about a few years back (yes, that's my old blog).
Classes will be reframed as "talents" or "foci", and most will only have one or two templates each.
The "big magic" used in the Tribulation War, known as uranics, is industrial and ruinously expensive. Uranic artifacts with juice left in them are more often enemies or dangerous treasure items than useable tools. Player-accessible magic is subtler and less flashy - I've been bouncing around a threshold-based system for a while which I think would work well here.
Inspirations and Touchpoints
I'm casting a broad net here, mixing period-appropriate and anachronistic stuff freely. Hopefully it makes some kind of sense.
Literature: Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It Can't Happen Here. 1930s magazine SF. Really, though, the spirit of Iapheia lives far more in pamphlets, journals, and manifestos than in novels or short stories.
Visual art: Here's the good stuff. Neue Sachlichkeit, Constructivism, De Stijl, Italian Futurism - anything that stresses dynamism, instability, and literal or metaphysical violence. Francis Bacon. William Blake. Surrealism rhymes with the weirder edges of Iapheian politics. The Vorticists deserve special mention; they're pre-WW1, but Helen Saunders' early work and the delightfully scrappy Vorticist journal Blast were two of the biggest inspirations for this setting.
Music: Uptempo swing jazz. Shostakovich. Schoenberg. Aphex Twin. Kurt Weill. Everything Everything, especially Arc and Get to Heaven. Cardiacs. The OFF soundtrack (the original, not the 2025 remake).
Theatre: Brecht. Antonin Artaud. The Isherwood / Auden collaborations, especially On the Frontier.
Film and TV: Metropolis, obviously. Cabaret, obviously. Pan's Labyrinth, possibly. I am not a Cinema Understander, so apologies for the basicness of this list.
Tabletop: Electric Bastionland. The Country. Never Going Home. Skirmish wargames in general - Mordheim is a surprisingly good fit vibes-wise despite the vastly different setting.
What Next?
Iunno. Maybe I'll dip back into this setting for Glåugust, which I'm doing for the first time this year. In any event, it feels good to get it down coherently.