Gonna be pretty busy for the next two days so probably wont post anything until Friday night. Until then, here's some history:
In omni adversitate fortunę, infelicissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem
In all adverse fortune the worst pain is to have been happy
-Boetius
Long ago, in the time before your grandparents or before, all the world was Readers. Readers in those days didn't just sit in judgement of the commonfolk or count their money in tall towers. Readers worked in the fields themselves but did so with cunning machines. The old machines that we find in the ruins were built by Reader hands. Readers had books and even computers in which they could learn to do anything. The Readers built the houses that stand even to this day. They used chemistry to make the tar roads between the cities and used science to make the bridges across the rivers. Every Reader had an automobile to travel the roads or even flew through the air in a plane. In those days the houses were new and did not leak, the roads had no gaps and the bridges were safe and free of rust.
Then came the Forgetting Illness. You were born into it but in the time of the Readers it spread from person to person like the flu. People who had read all their life no longer could. Children no longer learned to read. The schoolhouses used to be full of children who read but instead there were classes where they listened. Then there were no classes at all for the children could just learn from their elders or ask the Readers what they needed to know. There weren't enough Readers to take care of the machines that grew the food. People came from the cities to the countryside in search of food and learned how to grow food with their hands and became the commonfolk in the country. Those who can farm can eat. There weren't enough Readers to take care of the machines that build the houses and the cities so the commonfolk learned to repair what they had. There weren't Readers to make medicine for everyone so the commonfolk learned to heal themselves without the medicine.
In the time of the Readers there was one law everywhere. The Readers picked a good person to be President and protect everyone. If something went wrong or someone did something evil the President would write a letter to the distant city and tell them to fix the problem. They would take the letter in an airplane to the city. If someone broke the law the president would send his agents in an airplane to catch them just like a mayor sends his police. Without Readers there is nobody to be an agent and the President cant write a letter to fix every problem. The city might not have a Reader who knows how to fix that problem. There aren't airplanes to take the Presidents letters anymore.
In your parents time people in the far away lands stopped listening to the president. They had collected taxes in the presidents name but the president didn't protect them from bandits or give them food. The richest Readers in the far away lands called themselves governors and started acting like a president themselves. The president had many soldiers in those days but the soldiers couldn't travel to the far away lands to enforce the president's letters. Without the governors the president couldn't pay the soldiers anymore and he started negotiating with warlords instead. We used to have a new president every eight years but that stopped when the many governors left. We might have a president for a few months or someone might be president until they die. For a while there were presidents and governors but the mayors didn't like paying taxes to the governors and many of them wouldn't. Sometimes the governors had soldiers to make the mayor keep paying taxes and sometimes the mayor would become like a governor themself. Either way the commonfolk kept paying taxes to whichever Reader was in charge to keep away the bandits and build a wall around the city. Sometimes there isn't even a Reader at all, the commonfolk chased them all out of town. It's hard to run a town without anyone to write down how many people and things there are.
There are governors and mayors and bandits and generals and peasants and commissioners and CEOs all over the place. For decades they have been fighting each other and nothing seems to change. The past few years you've been living in what's left of the United States. It's smaller then it's ever been. The President's law only reaches from the White House in Annapolis to Philadelphia in the north and Richmond in the south. There were four different presidents in the three years. The came to an end when a Reader named Carter cut a deal with the bandit queen Alexa from the Appalachian mountains.
Alexa made Carter the president and kept him that way for the past five years but Alexa's men dont follow Carter's laws. The common folk have no one to protect them against the bandits but Carter keeps saying on the radio that things are getting better soon. He's been gathering Readers from far away cities. He signed a big treaty with the Vice Presidents in Boston and Portland, the President in Yucatan and the Prime Minister in Havanna. But for now the bandits still raid, commonfolk still till the soil with their hands and the old world crumbles bit by bit.
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Topic: Interest check: post apocolyptic setting using magic free DnD ruleset (Read 1458 times)