Chronicles of the Dusk War

The Prime is gone, destroyed at last. The gods and their play things destroyed common reality, and most of them cower in their pocket dimensions. There is hope, but…


This is a high-level concept for a game setting, made for squad-based tactical grid combat. It serves as a “kitchen sink” approach to thematic genre tropes.

The idea is: there was a reality, and then our world advances enough to create new ones. Between the worlds are “Shimmers”, barriers created from “transitive properties” of the connecting worlds.


Your band of folks are survivors in a War that ended reality. Most believe it involved gods, but no one seems to know how, or what the gods are, or really anything else. You exist in a Shimmer, a community tucked away between worlds.

Yours isn’t the best life, but from what you hear, it’s far from the worst. Though travel is difficult, a decent amount of caravans visit your Shimmer on their route, and with their essential goods to trade they freely share gossip. There is some freaky stuff out there.

This is a consolidation of my notes. It is the setting I created that borrowed a lot from D&D4, but as a justification for the content. They converted all content in the catalog to this modern system, and it made no sense. And then they hadn’t quite figured out how to let players chew on reasonable numbers (as they were planning on a computer to do it for ya), so the combat system needs way more simplification. But the game doesn’t really have any systems for acting as a different person, so we benefit from that for squad-based control.

@tim and I used to kinda almost play 4e that way: we’d both produce a party and fight it out. From the numbers that was not how the game was meant to be played, so eventually we just created “monster encounters” (recall: you get an XP budget and all that to “buy” creatures) and fought those against each other. Which answered questions like: who would win in a fight between Goblins and Kobolds? And it was great fun!

But what I ultimately want is a lighter WarHammer setting and game. I want to put together a party to fight as quickly as grabbing some cards, and I want a setting that doesn’t give me nightmares, while still exploring the anxiety of the age (whereas D&D was made by white guys interpreting historical conflict, I’m going for a “hey, notice reality seems to be ripping apart? Let’s explore!”).

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