Mutant (Gryningsvärlden)

Gryningsvärlden (The Dawn World) is a fictitious, postapocalyptic Scandinavia where humans with varying degrees of mutation and mutated animals try to create a new civilization. The current civilization has been destroyed - CBRN warfare or comet impacts are implied - by unknown causes and world has changed a great deal. It's uncertain when this happened, but a time period of at least 700 years has passed. The remains from our civilization consist of overgrown ruiins and inhabitable "Zones" covering the large cities of now ancient times, Stockholm is covered by the "Muskö Zone" and Malmö is covered by "Möken".

A small population of humans survived the apocalypse by living in subterranean enclaves for generations. The enclaves seem to have been at war at some point, it is unclear when the the enclave societies broke apart and forced the humans to return to the surface. While struggling to survive among all sorts of mutated plant- and wildlife a lot of the knowledge from the enclaves were soon lost. The time before the enclave humans started to form bigger societies is described as a dark age. At the time of Gryningsvärlden a functional polity has existed in mid-sweden - Pyrisamfundet (Community of Pyri) - for close to two hundred years. The Pyrisamfund covers the northern parts of Götaland (the southern part of Sweden of today) and the western parts of Svealand (the middle part of Sweden of today), the population is roughly half a million beings. The three major cities are the capital, Hindenburg (close to the city Västerås of today), Pirit (Jönköping) and Nordholmia (Mora). The neighbouring countries of Pyri, except the many citystates like Göborg (north of Göteborg) and Moss (west of Oslo), are Ulvriket (the Wolf Realm, Denmark), Gotland and Ålänningarna (Ålanders, from the island of Åland).

One of the central ideas in the Gryningsvärld of Mutant is that both the apocalypse and the flight from the enclaves is part of the mythology rather than common knowledge. The humans of Mutant Scandinavia view the past with a mixture of ancestor worship and technological fascination, where found ancient gizmos, be it plastic cutlery, plasma rifles or tanks, are very rare. The technology level of Gryningsvärlden is at the level of the late 19th century. Steam power, and to some extent also the combustion engine, is mastered, and mass production of breechloaded firearms has started. The sole survivors of the ancient times that could possibly have knowledge of the past are the few robots that wanders confused in the new world, but they have erased their old memories to make place for new ones and have little to tell, and the few - if any - humans that have lived trhrough cryo-sleep (frozen condition). Writing in, e.g., ancient swedish can be hard to translate for contemporaries.