Geography and Demographics of Granbretan

During the great war Granbretan was harder hit than mainland Europe, with most major cities directly targeted by nuclear weapons. The defence grid intercepted many of the attacks of London, but most of the regions were destroyed and the winds carried the fallout west.

In the aftermath most of the countries nuclear facilities (power stations, AWE etc) collapsed creating secondary fallout and the London bubble was separated from the rest of the country by a high radiation zone stretching from the ghosts of Portsmouth / Southampton to Birmingham, with hot spots around Oxford, Cambridge and Peterborough. This division in effect separated the wreckage of the country into 6-8 different proto states, where some survivors managed to retain some form of centralised authority, which later developed into kingdoms.

After a decade of nuclear winters, the effects of climate change resumed with the carbon of the industrial age locked into the system. As sea levels rose 20m or more London became inundated and the city became a city of islands, built on old London and older London, divided by canals and waterways, as the Thames estuary evolved into a delta of rivers and islands which have become docks and factories in the age of empire.

500-600 years later the climate has stabilised, sea levels have dropped to 5-6m above the 2000AD baseline and the earth is cooling. The southern coast line has reverted to that of the pre-Roman times, and most of the east of England has become swamp and fenland once more, inhabited by degenerate survivors as mutations developed in the shadow of sizewell. The population of mad Granbretan, before the expansion to the continent is around 2.4 million.

During the war Wales was heavily irradiated, both by direct unshielded strikes on the southern cities, and the fallout from Birmingham, Liverpool etc. The region was equally hard hit by the winters and radiation sunk deep into the groundwater making the area effectively uninhabitable. Edinburgh and Glasgow were destroyed and the highlands of Scotland became entirely uninhabited during the nuclear winters, but have been repopulated from the south.

The southwest survived relatively unscathed east of Portsmouth (which was annihilated). The Midlands from Birmingham to Leeds and Liverpool were turned into a plane of glass. Survivors in Cumbria centered on Kendal, but living in the shadow of Sellafield, in Northumbria on Jedburgh, and in Scotland on Fort William, and the Orkneys. Much of the Irish sea was ravaged by tidal waves, and heavy fallout, the fish remain poison and the Islands of Mann uninhabited.

The central wastelands that once dividing the population centres of the southeast and the southwest are heavily forested with mutated trees and strange tales. The plans of glass of the midlands remain wasted, and strange creatures live below the surface. The regions of Wales are still uninhabitable, and the population of Granbretan is centered in Londres, the southwest and the northern principalities of what was Scotland.

The radioactive fallout from the war decayed to safe levels within a generation, but the broken edifices of nuclear power stations remain hot. The biological terrors were more persistence and the millennium has been one of recurring plagues and infections as humanity developed new immunities the hard way. 

Finally the population of Granbretan has grown exponentially with the continental empire, and the legions of slaves driven to London to work in factories to build a new industrial revolution, albeit it hamstrung by the lack of resources of the ancients and much of the nations agricultural land. This revolution is fueled by endless war, and the country cannot survive peace...

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Assumption 99% of population wiped out, in war, famines, nuclear winter, plagues etc and an agricultural dark age where food scare for 100-150 year, so recovery starts around 2200AD from a baseline of 600K. Expectation is would recover to feudal society levels (say 1.2 million) within 300 years, perhaps 2-3 setbacks (great plagues wiping out ⅓ of the population), so stabilized at 1.2 million by 2700AD then enter expansion phase akin to the late middle ages / early renaissance (akin to 1500AD) to reach 2.4million by 2900AD with ⅓ of the country uninhabitable for various reasons.

Origins of the Tragic Millenium

As the western world, and so called democracies declined in the early 21st century, tensions between the decadent American hegemony and the rising Chinese dictatorships escalated into a series of resource wars in Africa, India and South America reminiscent of the cold war of the 20th century.

The collapse of global trade, and the dramatic impacts of climate change exasperated the divide between the have and the have nots, leading to mass migrations and the colonisation of militarised buffer zones between nations, patrolled by drones, scourging the people of north Africa, Mexico, the middle east and central Asia.

The discovery of interplanar physics, and the manipulation of relationships between structures and energy forms in the 2050’s created a revolution in technology too late to stop the great war breaking out in 2064. The resultant nuclear and biological holocaust annhilated north America and east Asia, and ravaged Europe, Russia and the Indian sub continent. In the aftermath the plagues and refugee hordes spread destruction across the globe sparing few from what would become the tragic millennium.

A thousand years of warfare, or terrifying new technologies, mutant and machine armies, and scientists weakening the boundaries between planes, finally left humanity struggling in the dark ages. As sea levels continued to rise, and the great deserts of the Amazon, the tropics and the Sahara drowned and buried cities and civilisations, the populations of earth (human and otherwise) declined to less than a 100 millions souls, divided by the great wastes.

Europe survived the worst of the mass destruction of the great war, and as the radiation decayed, the earth cooled and the seas receded, human civilisation recovered to the level of semi feudal societies similar to the those of the 10th / 11th century, but with access to terrifying weapons and technologies of the tragic millennium, without the wherewithal to fully understand those technologies that are now akin to magic. This is the setting for the sage of the Runestaff.