this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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The Canyonlands Community RPG Setting

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The Canyonlands is custom fantasy steampunk setting that can be used with any system, but is meant to be played with OpenD6.

This community is for both world building, and play by post.

The basics of the setting are a Canyon 20,000Km long north to south, 1000Km wide east to west, and 20km deep.

Each side of the Canyon is terraced into 5 distinct layers, with 4km tall cliffs at the boundary of each layer.

The cliffs of the Canyon are riddled with caves, both natural and carved, but strange magics in the rock twist size and distance. A short journey into the depths may take you to the opposite side of the world, or to a cave a kilometer to the north.

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The Structure of the Canyon (ttrpg.network)
submitted 1 month ago by chaogomu@ttrpg.network to c/Canyonlands@ttrpg.network
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The Canyon stretches north to south 20,000km, with a width of 1000km and a depth of 20km.

The Canyon exists on an Earth sized spherical world, but leaving the Canyon is quite impossible, as explained later.

At the center, is a 200km wide 2km deep sea that stretches the length of the Canyon from the frozen south to the frozen north. The Low Sea has a shore line that averages 1km wide before meeting a 2km cliff face. The Low Cliff. As the very center of the Low Sea is the cloud wall. An upwelling of warm fog that turns to clouds, that then move east or west as weather systems and storms.

There are sections of the Low Cliff that have sloughed into the sea, creating the Low Shore, and slopes up to the First Terrace, the Green Hell.

The Low Shore is dotted with cities, but since these cities almost never see the sun through the thick clouds and constant rain, they are not a popular place to live for most sentient races.

The Green Hell stretches 100km on either side of the Low Sea and is generally heavily forested. With Tropical Rainforests, Swamps, and deep dark woodlands further north and south. The weather is usually raining or snowing, depending on latitude. Strange magics cause the plants and beasts of this level to grow much larger than normal. The sun rarely peaks through the cloud cover.

A 4km tall cliff separates the First Terrace from the Second.

The Second Terrace, or the Emerald Hills, is mostly rolling hills and grasslands, with some light forests. It receives less rain than the First Terrace, but enough for crops and temperate forests to flourish. This is the level where most sentient species live.

Looking out from the Emerald Hills over the edge of the cliff, all you see is a rolling sea of clouds.

Moving outward and upward again is the Arid Steppe. This grass and scrubland is almost free of trees, and boasts year round sun.

100km inland and another 4km upward is the beginning of the Frozen wastes. Oddly, there are ancient evergreen forests dotted about.

And the final layer, if it can be called a layer at all, is the Airless Void. Nothing lives here, nothing can live here.

Forgive the rough map, it's just there to give a sense of structure.

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[–] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As a note here, 1000km is the distance between New York City and Indianapolis, or Paris and Vienna.

This means that the world holds as many as 40 Canyons. Some of these Canyons will be at different tech levels, and have slightly different magic density. The Structure, however, is identical between all Canyons.

Travel between different Canyons is normally impossible. The top of each Canyon is an airless, and magicless void. While caves into the walls are non-Euclidean. There are some notable Trade routes carved into the walls, tunnels that reliably connect different cities, but most of the tunnels will loop back into the same Canyon, albeit in a random location relative to the start.

It's said that the caves have an infinite depth, and yet somewhere, somehow, they connect to anywhere. The trick is in finding the route.

Oddly, most of those who wander into a cave, come back out again in their Home Canyon, even if they somehow stumbled into another, The next time they enter the caves, they'll likely end up home, or at least somewhere in their home Canyon. Children born within the walls have the even greater ability to reliably find their home within the caves, with no more than a week of randomly wandering the caves.

This is purely a storytelling mechanic to allow a GM to let players play in different sandboxes, while still bringing them home at the end of the day.

[–] Goofy@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Truly a fascinating concept and world that I'd love to explore with my players. Might be stealing this is the future.

[–] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's why I'm putting it together.

I'll have more posts on the History, and Religions, and then move on to the various Sentient Races. Then I'll start doing Kingdom Maps.

For a spoiler of each;

the History goes back to the earliest settlers coming out of the walls, no races are known to be native to the Canyonlands.

The gods of the Canyonlands are all Ascended Mortals. These gods often rule a territory or maybe even just a single city, within their domain, they are extremely powerful, but are no more knowledgeable about the world or its past than anyone else. There are powerful deities, known up and down the canyon, and none of them know more about the world than the average scholar.

As to Sentient Races, aside from Humans, and every flavor of Elf, Dwarf, Orc, etc., there are also Crab People who are in a constant war against the things that lurk below.

There are tiny communities of every race you want in your world, but humans outnumber everyone else several times over.

[–] chaogomu@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 month ago

Fun fact, the horizon on Earth is easily calculated as the square root of your height in meters, multiplied by 13.

Standing at the water's edge of the Low Shore, you'll never see the Horizon, it's covered by clouds and rain... But it would be a hair less than 5km for the average sized adult human.

Standing on the edge of the Green Hell terrace and looking out, The Horizon is 161km out, which is not far enough to see the opposite shore line, but the Horizon is again blocked by clouds and rain, particularly the cloud wall at 100km out.

Standing on the edge of the Emerald Hills Terrace, the horizon is roughly 280km out, once again in the Low Sea.

From the Arid Steppe it's 360km out, once again in that same region of the Low Sea.

From the Frozen Wastes, the Horizon is roughly 430km out, which puts it in the Low Sea.

And Finally, if you could stand on the Airless Wastes, the Horizon would be just over 500km out, nearly at the center of the Low Sea, but still just barely blocked by the Cloud Wall, just like every Terrace below.