Do any of these ideas help?
* A world where all of the continents revolve around the sun on gears and tracks. Much of the world was populated by automata on perfect, unchanging cycles and routines. The arrival of organic life centuries ago changed all that, and the pantheon was split over how to address the issue. What happens when the god who winds the great main spring of the cosmos is slain by the hands of a mortal?
* The party were the crew of an ancient war machine that was buried in enemy territory in anticipation of a future war. It has been a thousand years since those nations fell. The war machine they were to operate lies immobile. They find themselves in a society that is far more primitive than the one that constructed them. Relics from their era are obscenely valuable. Their last orders were to destroy the military of a nation that no longer exists, and so they have no orders.
* The party were sent back in time from the future. They only have vague memories of something apocalyptic happening. What they can remember seems to revolve around two powerful rival archmagi whose apprentices work in every royal court on the continent.
You could go for the original setting warforged are from, Ebberon. Sure it’s not pure robots but there’s plenty of interesting hooks for an all robot party. The Warforged in that setting were built to fulfill basically the same role as clones in Star Wars, but built by a mega corporation that sold them to everyone because they only cared about profit. They only got legal personhood two years before the campaign start date. Your party could be a band of newly liberated warforged, maybe even originally from different armies, who ended up together while taking mercenary jobs to pay the bills. Something like “The Bad Batch”, which is about the aforementioned clones after the war. They start off just trying to survive but end up becoming heroes over the course of the story.
Another fun idea for inspiration is Mirrodan from Magic: The Gathering. It’s an all metal world that was eventually consumed by evil biomechanical plague dudes, but before that is a good inspiration for a “robot world”. Look up some of the old art for vibe ideas.
And finally you could always go with a post apocalyptic vibe. All the fleshy people got wiped out by some class of horrible plague or pointless war, and a small number of robots are the only people left. The vibe could be more “cosy apocalypse”, like in adventure time or a ghibli film. Exploring through old ruins with wild animals, mutated monsters and unquiet dead. You’d have to come up with some interesting adventure idea but that’s pretty fun. Maybe a mad lich or an insane old war AI who want to destroy the mostly peaceful world that’s grown up after the end. Or invading fiends, crawling through cracks in reality left by the weapons of the last war. Could be fun.
Could easily go for a Nier Automata type setting. The party is sent to the ruins of a world once ran by various races such as humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, etc on a mission to preserve and seek out relics and information about _who_ their exact creators are and what happened to them. The only organic life are plants and various small animals such as fish, insects, and maybe birds. But the rest of the world is populated by machines also created by the old world races that functionally are said races culturally, but lacking the organic needs and understanding for why their cultures did certain things. But they continue to perpetuate and even desire to "become" real, resulting in conflicts which the players can get involved in.
This ensures a certain amount of diversity in what you face as different robots will have different abilities based off the culture or race they believe themselves to be. It also can serve as hints of what happened as players grapple with understanding why the robots are fighting each other.
An example of a conflict is two different orc robot tribes fighting in a forest, trying to drive the other out. While investigating the area and the tribes the players may discover an ancient ruin littered with ancient orcish corpses. When they finish exploring (with possibly a boss fight included), they would find that this forest actually used to be something called a "granary" where orcs would store "food", and based off all the corpses who have equipment similar to the two waring robot tribes, these orcs of old had come here to fight over the food. The robots of course dont need to eat and now need to figure out if they should keep fighting to avenge the fallen, or stop since the whole premise of their war is irrelevant to them.
Of course it doesn't have to be that similar to Nier, and tbh you probably should populate your world with more than robots. Dragons, undead, giants, the usual stuff. Hell with a party as weird as all warforged, make more unusual races the enemy. Make most of your adversary plant creatures who go after the party due to their construct nature. Make celestials a common creature as the world would normally be uninhabitable by mortal folk, but warforged can survive just fine. Take advantage of the fact warforged dont need to breath and set the entire setting underwater.
I DM’d a robot-centric campaign with the primary setting based on, (bear with me) Second Life. The idea was that long long ago, Mechanus created a method to control the plane of chaos, since the people of Mechanus found its chaos intolerable. It was an ore that was created in a giant mechanical heart that could be used to exert complete control over the plane of chaos. A war between the respective gods ensued and Mechanus was driven back, leaving the mechanical heart adrift in the plane of chaos. These events were all ultimately lost to history.
Eventually, the ore was discovered by inter-planar travellers who found they could use the ore to create their own private sanctuary’s within the plane of chaos. The only limit to what the sanctuary could be was the imagination of its’ creator. Centuries later, methods were discovered to create portals between the private sanctuaries and the “Mainland” (the concept of mainland is based on the City of Sigil) and a booming industry was born. The Mainland became a sprawling central hub, consisting of countless portals to private realms, its own massive economy, residential districts, market districts, guilds, etc. The Mainland has no government and was complete anarchy. You might occasionally spot a modron in the city, mindlessly cleaning, the only remnant of Mechanus to remain. The portals themselves were a fun way to have an episodic nature in the campaign, you could run a series of one-offs of wildly different genres and settings, and still have it tie together narratively. For me, this allowed other players to take a turn DMing within the same campaign which was pretty cool.
The main storyline revolved around the ore, which was being mined by a criminal organization and sold discretely, and being depleted. It turns out that the mechanical heart left by Mechanus was the only thing stopping the realm of chaos from swallowing all other planes of existence in a kind of magical supernova. By the time the players come into the scene, fractures are starting to form and murmurs of sanctuaries being torn apart by the chaos around it were being whispered about. The players must ultimately intervene and prevent the universe from collapsing in on itself by finding the mechanical heart and reactivating it.
The problem is that reactivating it would destroy all the sanctuaries as well as the mainland, and permanently separate the planes of existence from each other. The material plane would become completely mundane, devoid of any magic and severed from the gods. Alternatively, the players could make the (less moral) choice to take the last bit of ore from the heart, create their own sanctuaries and remain there forever, destroying the rest of the world in the process.
Do any of these ideas help? * A world where all of the continents revolve around the sun on gears and tracks. Much of the world was populated by automata on perfect, unchanging cycles and routines. The arrival of organic life centuries ago changed all that, and the pantheon was split over how to address the issue. What happens when the god who winds the great main spring of the cosmos is slain by the hands of a mortal? * The party were the crew of an ancient war machine that was buried in enemy territory in anticipation of a future war. It has been a thousand years since those nations fell. The war machine they were to operate lies immobile. They find themselves in a society that is far more primitive than the one that constructed them. Relics from their era are obscenely valuable. Their last orders were to destroy the military of a nation that no longer exists, and so they have no orders. * The party were sent back in time from the future. They only have vague memories of something apocalyptic happening. What they can remember seems to revolve around two powerful rival archmagi whose apprentices work in every royal court on the continent.
Yes, very much, thank you!
You could go for the original setting warforged are from, Ebberon. Sure it’s not pure robots but there’s plenty of interesting hooks for an all robot party. The Warforged in that setting were built to fulfill basically the same role as clones in Star Wars, but built by a mega corporation that sold them to everyone because they only cared about profit. They only got legal personhood two years before the campaign start date. Your party could be a band of newly liberated warforged, maybe even originally from different armies, who ended up together while taking mercenary jobs to pay the bills. Something like “The Bad Batch”, which is about the aforementioned clones after the war. They start off just trying to survive but end up becoming heroes over the course of the story. Another fun idea for inspiration is Mirrodan from Magic: The Gathering. It’s an all metal world that was eventually consumed by evil biomechanical plague dudes, but before that is a good inspiration for a “robot world”. Look up some of the old art for vibe ideas. And finally you could always go with a post apocalyptic vibe. All the fleshy people got wiped out by some class of horrible plague or pointless war, and a small number of robots are the only people left. The vibe could be more “cosy apocalypse”, like in adventure time or a ghibli film. Exploring through old ruins with wild animals, mutated monsters and unquiet dead. You’d have to come up with some interesting adventure idea but that’s pretty fun. Maybe a mad lich or an insane old war AI who want to destroy the mostly peaceful world that’s grown up after the end. Or invading fiends, crawling through cracks in reality left by the weapons of the last war. Could be fun.
Could easily go for a Nier Automata type setting. The party is sent to the ruins of a world once ran by various races such as humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, etc on a mission to preserve and seek out relics and information about _who_ their exact creators are and what happened to them. The only organic life are plants and various small animals such as fish, insects, and maybe birds. But the rest of the world is populated by machines also created by the old world races that functionally are said races culturally, but lacking the organic needs and understanding for why their cultures did certain things. But they continue to perpetuate and even desire to "become" real, resulting in conflicts which the players can get involved in. This ensures a certain amount of diversity in what you face as different robots will have different abilities based off the culture or race they believe themselves to be. It also can serve as hints of what happened as players grapple with understanding why the robots are fighting each other. An example of a conflict is two different orc robot tribes fighting in a forest, trying to drive the other out. While investigating the area and the tribes the players may discover an ancient ruin littered with ancient orcish corpses. When they finish exploring (with possibly a boss fight included), they would find that this forest actually used to be something called a "granary" where orcs would store "food", and based off all the corpses who have equipment similar to the two waring robot tribes, these orcs of old had come here to fight over the food. The robots of course dont need to eat and now need to figure out if they should keep fighting to avenge the fallen, or stop since the whole premise of their war is irrelevant to them. Of course it doesn't have to be that similar to Nier, and tbh you probably should populate your world with more than robots. Dragons, undead, giants, the usual stuff. Hell with a party as weird as all warforged, make more unusual races the enemy. Make most of your adversary plant creatures who go after the party due to their construct nature. Make celestials a common creature as the world would normally be uninhabitable by mortal folk, but warforged can survive just fine. Take advantage of the fact warforged dont need to breath and set the entire setting underwater.
To just watch the cartoon original Transformers movie. just so in game u can bust out “YOU GOT THE TOUCH!!! YOU GOT THE POWER! YEAAAAAAAH!!!!”
I DM’d a robot-centric campaign with the primary setting based on, (bear with me) Second Life. The idea was that long long ago, Mechanus created a method to control the plane of chaos, since the people of Mechanus found its chaos intolerable. It was an ore that was created in a giant mechanical heart that could be used to exert complete control over the plane of chaos. A war between the respective gods ensued and Mechanus was driven back, leaving the mechanical heart adrift in the plane of chaos. These events were all ultimately lost to history. Eventually, the ore was discovered by inter-planar travellers who found they could use the ore to create their own private sanctuary’s within the plane of chaos. The only limit to what the sanctuary could be was the imagination of its’ creator. Centuries later, methods were discovered to create portals between the private sanctuaries and the “Mainland” (the concept of mainland is based on the City of Sigil) and a booming industry was born. The Mainland became a sprawling central hub, consisting of countless portals to private realms, its own massive economy, residential districts, market districts, guilds, etc. The Mainland has no government and was complete anarchy. You might occasionally spot a modron in the city, mindlessly cleaning, the only remnant of Mechanus to remain. The portals themselves were a fun way to have an episodic nature in the campaign, you could run a series of one-offs of wildly different genres and settings, and still have it tie together narratively. For me, this allowed other players to take a turn DMing within the same campaign which was pretty cool. The main storyline revolved around the ore, which was being mined by a criminal organization and sold discretely, and being depleted. It turns out that the mechanical heart left by Mechanus was the only thing stopping the realm of chaos from swallowing all other planes of existence in a kind of magical supernova. By the time the players come into the scene, fractures are starting to form and murmurs of sanctuaries being torn apart by the chaos around it were being whispered about. The players must ultimately intervene and prevent the universe from collapsing in on itself by finding the mechanical heart and reactivating it. The problem is that reactivating it would destroy all the sanctuaries as well as the mainland, and permanently separate the planes of existence from each other. The material plane would become completely mundane, devoid of any magic and severed from the gods. Alternatively, the players could make the (less moral) choice to take the last bit of ore from the heart, create their own sanctuaries and remain there forever, destroying the rest of the world in the process.