Dragonmech is set in a world where the moon is quite literally falling apart, resulting in regular meteor showers across the planet's surface. Lunar magic has started finding its way onto the planet below, along with lunar creatures including lunar dragons, which only vaguely resemble their terrestrial counterparts. Built to combat these new threats are the DragonMechs, specially designed for combat with large creatures. Also created were the city-mechs, huge mobile cities that can support not only a large population, but its own ecology.
The main continent in the setting is Highpoint, an unusually altitudinous continent broken into several levels of elevation, with the lowest area of it being a desert that is knee-deep in seawater for half of Highpoint's 250-odd day calendar. A major feature is the "Endless" River, which runs through a large section of the continent and, in fact, runs for about half its length through the Underdark, and serves as the most important trade route on the continent. The Endless river exits the underground as a large waterfall from the side of a cliff. Highpoint's largest city, Edge, is actually built on this cliff and around this waterfall, and a thriving local economy is in large part based on the transport of people and goods up and down the cliff. Trade in Edge is so lucrative that even the drow have a trading enclave there, and all its members are under strict orders to be civil and polite to everyone who comes to do business.
Factions
While in many d20 campaigns, there are inevitable tensions between the races, in DragonMech these tensions are magnified to levels of almost xenophobia. One of the defining characteristics of this setting is then it is NOT humanocentric; the single most successful and powerful core race of the planet is in fact the Dwarves.
Dwarves: Many other campaigns characterize the dwarves as a dying breed, a race for whom many of their ancient and legendary strongholds have been overrun, with little hope of recovery. But in this campaign, while they have suffered disastrously from refugee invasions, their innovation has in fact made them able to rebound dramatically, catapulting them into a level of political and social power rarely seen. As the creators of a technology that is capable of reversing the fortunes of those living in this world, they control the largest and arguably the safest sections of open land in the world of Highpoint. They also control the most city mechs; the five city mechs of Nedderpik, Durgen-lok, Lokag, Thuron, and Goria form the core of their military might, as well as the centers of their political power. Together with Duerok, arguably the core of Dwarven civilization that remains underground, these five city mechs form the Stenian Confederacy.
Elves: The Elves have their part in this world as well, but their role is in fact emotionally similar to that of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings – that their time is passing and their way of life all but gone. This theme is more nihilistically represented in DragonMech for, unlike in Tolkien's work, these Elves have nowhere to go. Rather than their powers fading from them, instead their homelands have been shattered and ruined by the Lunar Rain, their ancestral homelands and forests all but eradicated. All that remains are a few animated mechs serving as repositories for hastily salvaged elven libraries, and the sole Elven City Mech (not to mention the single most powerful construction in Highpoint) known as Tannanliel.
Tannanliel cannot be adequately explained without first describing Tannan himself, for it was formed by a pact between the archmage Tannan and the overwhelmed native deities. As a result, its awesome might is being powered by a constant drain on Tannan's life force, costing him roughly a year of his life for each week he operates it. Although he is an elf, with an elf's life span, he still remains mortal, and his time is rapidly running out. The L'arile Nation, last hope of the elves, rests on Tannanliel, which itself is dependent on Tannan himself. Tannan has kept the knowledge of the city mech's price to himself, a fact that is costing him dearly on a personal level.
The tragic error of Tannanliel is that all of the remaining real power of the Elves resides in its single form; and that single form can only be one place at a time. While it remains a mighty protector it is incapable of prosecuting the total war needed to drive back and destroy the lunar invaders, and though none are aware of it, all the lunar invaders need do to eliminate it is to wait for Tannan to die.
Humans: The rising power of Highpoint, the Legion is headed by a single, massively charismatic figure by the name of Shar Thizdic. Through his personal magnetism and shrewd political maneuverings he united the scattered nomadic humans of the plains to form a powerful nation that is solely for humans. Through the forced labor of enslaved dwarven coglayers, he created the first of two citymechs currently operative, known as Rebirth.
Whether the result of shoddy construction, or deliberate sabotage (referred to by its believers as the One Flaw), Rebirth was something of a disaster. Plagued with failures and poor efficiency on a daily basis, Rebirth remains a citymech, and is still a powerful force in its own right. As the first human Citymech, Shar Thizdic seats himself as ruler here, a symbolic gesture of leadership. Because of its problems, Rebirth is generally acknowledged to be the weakest of all existing citymechs, and was originally discounted by dwarves and elves alike. But human engineers, learning from their work assisting the captured dwarves, and from their own works afterward, have caused an uproar amongst the other nations, with their subsequent construction of the second human citymech, Haven.
Haven is a significant improvement over Rebirth, and a massive undertaking whose scale is greater than all other citymechs save Tannanliel itself. Already it has proven its power in battles against lunar monstrosities including the terrifyingly powerful lunar dragons, and some doubt has been assayed over the outcome of any battles between it and one of the dwarven citymechs. But the real panic being levelled against the human nation is that Shar Thizdic has plans for five more citymechs. Many in Highpoint are wondering what power the human nations will wield by the time the final citymech has been built, and support is growing amongst both elves and dwarves to deal with the Legion in general, and Shar Thizdic in specific, on a permanent basis.
Their mistrust and paranoia are in fact founded on good reason. Shar Thizdic is very much prohuman, a stance caused by the fend-for-yourself mentality that gripped the races during the early parts of the lunar rain. He holds no actual malicious intent against elves, gnomes, and dwarves, but because they did not compassionately aid humans during the early, and most intense, part of the crisis when the plains-nomads humans had no shelter at all, he does not aid them, and if he builds his five more city mechs like he plans to, they each will need a substantial territory to roam—territory which is held by the elves and the dwarves. Non humans are third class citizens in Legion territory, and are never permitted aboard Legion citymechs. His habit of casual betrayal, enslavement, and murder- however well he has managed to hide most of the proof- may well be the downfall of the only hope that humans in highpoint truly have, should the other races of Highpoint decide to finally take action and eliminate him as a threat for once and all.
