From Introduction:
The Ancients were, as anyone left alive in this world knows, the Gods who once ruled the earth. Theirs was a time of great knowledge and industry, where technology knew no bounds, and where the world was populated with more people than there were grains of sand. It was a world filled with beauty and great things, where disease was almost unknown and sadness completely extinct.
But something happened. No one really knows what – not anymore, anyway. They call it the “Fall”, because that’s what it was. Somehow, somewhere, the Gods forgot themselves and fell. Maybe they soared so high that, like a towering spire, they grew too lofty and collapsed under their own might. Perhaps they took for granted all that beauty and became jaded to perfection, and sought only to undo what they had done. Who knows? But it happened. In one fell swoop, all the nations of the world, all it’s people, became upset with one another and without so much as thinking brought a terrible end to what had once been.
And so it came to pass. Their weapons were great, their destruction complete. They unleashed on the world a plague of fiery bombs, mighty missiles, and armies of robots. Diseases, their effects forgotten for generations, were brought out from hiding and released on the masses. Men, women, and children died by the millions. Chemicals, poisonous not only to man but the very earth and air, came to taint even the fabric of the planet. And then, the great clouds of red fire came to burn away what was left, erasing every last vestige of the Ancients’ presence on the world. Entire cities were blasted into oblivion; nation-states smudged like smoky vapor in the burning wind, or buried under the dust that had once been the bodies of so many billions of humankind.
But life did not die there. Somehow...people survived. Like rats hiding under a smoldering furnace, life escaped ultimate destruction. No one can know who they were, or what horrors they faced in their time – it was far too long ago for anyone to truly know. But they lived, they persisted, and they gave birth to the men of what is now known as the Twisted Earth, the unraveling ruined world that is DARWIN’S WORLD.
This book, Denizens Of The Twisted Earth, puts forward information on these survivors, and the pseudo-societies they have come to resurrect. Denizens Of The Twisted Earth is an important addition to the basic rules that embellishes upon the basic framework of the Twisted Earth and it’s rumored inhabitants. It is also a major sourcebook for the wind-swept and desolate setting of DARWIN’S WORLD, a lost planet of dead dreams and dwindling life.
Within these pages you will find a much more in-depth look at the deserts, ruined cities, and wilderness of the world; as well as the numerous struggling communities, factions, and postapocalyptic cultures that vie violently for it’s control.
Also within these pages are a number of prestige classes meant to spark interest and creativity in the minds of players and referees alike.