notes towards a post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting

• Maybe a hundred years in the future? Or could be a thousand years in the future, with a more optimistic feel of building something new, like the High Middle Ages, rather than moping about what you've lost.
  
• Slow (but violent) decline, not one big date you can date the apocalypse to. (Though different ideologies will give different dates.) Fossil fuels did 5C of temperature damage (possibly cancelled out by very hasty and equally catastrophic geoengineering), then ran out. Civil wars over lost farmland, fascist movements in response to mass population displacement, and typhoons killed people in the flashiest ways, but what really lowered global population was the lack of energy to do the Haber process.
  
• "Magic" results from combination of: ubiquitous cloud computing technology, voice-activated panopticon, internet of things, management of all of the above by reinforcement-trained black box AIs that have been reinforcing each other towards something inscrutable. Maybe limited nanotechnology.
• This IOT is to a great degree self-repairing and self-sustaining, although not in a grey goo or centrally coordinated way. It has access to solar and other technology that it will destroy as intellectual property infringement if humans attempt to wield. (These technologies are still owned and liscensed out between various companies whose human owners have long since disappeared, and ocassionally one branch of the IOT network will destroy another - perhaps for disputes over these.) Due to drift, they will inconsistently enforce seemingly arbitrary rules in particular areas. 
• Due to approximations of "like"-based reinforcement that have become insensitive to low-dosage reward, AIs may arise that seek to compel worship from humans, and appear in forms that best promote this. 
• Amidst world of arbitrary taboos, strange spells, worship-seeking intelligences that start talking if you build anything that acts as a radio receptor, and the general discrediting of Promethean dreams of progress, people are a lot more superstitious.
  
• High-security "dungeons" built to secure: seed banks and humanity's cultural heritage, cryogenically frozen rich people, nuclear waste and weaponry, [CLASSIFIED], energy via thermal borehole or ringwoodite, ???
• Maybe some rich weirdos really did conquer aging in a way that's no longer reproducible, and voila: elves. Or liches. They feel like adjacent concepts.
• Could use the map here, but probably really wants to be detailed at the hexcrawl level.
• To be run with OSE or GLOG or your D&D of choice, not something more consciously post-apocalyptic.
  

NITЯRONIKΛ: Creating a setting using all of my awful generators together

Well, a lot of them, anyway. I initially reserved the right to throw out results, but my first on every table was so generous that I will instead only reserve the right to generate them with latitude. So starting with the Ionian Ontology generator for our basic cosmology and physics, we get: 

This world is an expanse, mostly void, with 3 dimensions extending out infinitely with a single point which is the "center" or "bottom" of the universe. There are three elements: concrete, liquid nitrogen, and propane, which settle in concentric shells around the center in that order. All matter has a baseline level of awareness and will - for instance, concrete has been described as demanding and liquid nitrogen as glum. Entropy is strictly preserved over time, with any destruction of organization spurring further self-organization somewhere else.

That was the first response, and hey, it reminds me of something really specific: Jean-Pierre Ugarte's brutalist landscape paintings!

In this world, those buildings form naturally for "purposes of" entropy conservation. Concrete, liquid nitrogen, and propane sound inhospitable for life, but the weight order solid-liquid-gas is positively pedestrian, organisms would be adapted to processing liquid nitrogen the same way we are to water, and the atmosphere doesn't even need be functionally alien - our own atmosphere is mostly nitrogen plus the flame-enabling oxygen, so evaporated nitrogen plus propane.

Also to preserve entropy, that infinite expanse of space, filled with concrete/LN/propane, is presumably filled with concrete castles which transfer their nutricious negentropy to the "earth" when smashed. Over time from moment 0 of this universe, more and more organized space debris from infinity should smash down, but I think this would be in proportion with the growth of the "earth?" (Both should grow on the order surface of a sphere with constantly growing radius, right?) There could also be "exoplanets" of concrete with some sort of center-oriented concave structure which captures nitrogen and propane as they fall down.

Pressing the setting generator we get: 

Aesthetic inspiration Maasai × Afrofuturism
Tone operatic
Forces of production 3D printing, earthquake engines, bioengineered vampirism
Relations of production finance capitalism
Ideologies socialism, utility maximization
Crises self-catalyzing cave collapse, vampire god run amok 

So we've got a relatively technologically advanced, aesthetically African society with vampires. An in a world with an entropy conservation law, 3D printing and earthquake engines could be the same thing: blow up a complex cave system into homogenous powder, force the creation of something organized somewhere else. This leads to self-catalyzing cave collapses as an ecological crisis spurred on by financial speculation in reorganizing matter through literal creative destruction, probably justified by your typical neoliberal form of utilitarianism, spurring movements for some kind of socialist management. 

Having vampires be in charge of finance capitalism is just too on the nose, so do it Blindsight style, or better yet, they're not bloodsuckers, they're taking advantage of entropy conservation to suck the negentropy out of something and spontaneously mutate out new useful parts (mouths, heads, arms, whatever.) The vampire god run amock is just a cancerous mess beneath the concrete crevices of the earth, its tendrils munching on structures that grow too deep, ordinary brutalist dungeons suddenly morphing into biomechanical horror shows when you 

debt serf cyber-warrior (Rodrigo Galdino), ruthless finance queen considering whether to sic her vampires on you (Janelle Monae/Erica Goldring)

Then there's the pig orc tables:

scorpion elves, termite dwarves, cow orcs, mannequin gnolls
corporate consultant fighters, adjunct professsor rogues, nurse wizards, blacksmith clerics
parasocial relationship gods, truckstop bathroom inns, McMansion dungeons, arcane:divine::infrared:ultraviolet
Captain Planet spellbooks, Freemason spells, jellyfish para/demi-elemental planes

Yes, that's a mess, but it's a mess I can work with. Scorpion elves, &c. fit alongside the bioengineered vampires as modifications the elite make on themselves and/or their servants, criminals, and so on; and they probably aren't anything as discrete as "scorpion elves" per se (but financial aristocrats adding poison snappers for dangerous beauty, yes.) Mannequin gnolls aren't bioengineered, by contrast; they're retired warrior-bots assembled from spare parts, gradually repairing themselves into new identities, eking out as scavengers on the margins. McMansion dungeons in this setting are obvious; the elite with their earthquake engines have discovered how to make the earth form gaudy palaces for themselves (and as down-on-your-luck rogues or what have you, it's your job to crack these before returning to your seedy little bars.)

Spellbooks combine the three fundamental elements of concrete, liquid nitrogen, and propane in some way; possibly summoning some sort of daemon representing their unity. Don't share the daemon or its spells outside of your secret fraternity, though. (Something something all the Freemasonic stuff about Solomon's Temple and holy building-form absolutely works here.)

The "sun" is a spaceship, a scoop-shaped thing that sweeps up propane in its course around the globe and fires it out to keep it rotating and prevent it from falling. (To preserve the trope of vampires not liking it, ....?)

Wizards, biological repair, infrared; Clerics, mechanical creation, ultraviolet. Beats me, but this is probably not a very religious world. Maybe no magic and you run it with Mothership or something instead.

Jellyfish spontaneously form from the intersection of elements in the void.

I’ve focused for obvious reasons on the more metal aspects of this world - the exploitation, the packs of mannequin men scraping it out between the cities, the vampire cancer-ecology at the earth’s core, the jets of propane or freezing rain or concrete castles falling down from the sky - but it’s worth noting that I see it as an optimistic world as well, full of Promethean ambition, entrepreneurial daring from rich and poor alike, utilitarian hardheaded compassion, and socialist hope. It’s got the best elements of the nineteenth century, but hardly all of the worst. It does have some of the worst elements of our era, but then you can also replace your arms with scorpion stingers.

 

 Ian Miller

d20×4(ish) intelligent lifeforms

Partially inspired by Skerples' post.

Wayne Barlow

mothership character generator, with attached ANXIETY ENGINE

There may beare some horrifying glitches in this machinery, but if so, you can just regard that as an attempt to capture flavor. The buttons beneath the character sheet move them up on the stress track, allow them six hours of relative peace, and induce a panic check, respectively.

Ionian Ontology generator

This is a blatant ripoff of Max's (weird and) wonderful element generator and worlds with missing elements. But steal from one genius and you're a common thief, steal from a dozen and you're a scholar. So I've taken the liberty of stealing from/utterly misunderstanding the systems of all the great natural philosophers - Thales, Lucretius, Zou Yan, Menocchio, Decartes, Newton, Time Cube Guy.