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The gist of Qud's setting is a mesa covered in jungle on the edge of a massive desert, set in the post-post-post-post apocalyptic Middle East. There's lots of high tech artifacts and ancient architecture scattered around, but in the current age of Qud's history there are no countries or kingdoms, everyone is either a nomad, travelling band, or settled down in a small settlement (of various kinds).
Qud's denizens are comprised of several primary races; mutated humans with a plethora of different abilities, bipedal camel merchants, goatfolk, albino bears covered in quills, robots, sentient plant life, and finally truekin, or non-mutated humans. Right now only Mutants and Truekin are playable without mods.
There's also tons of lore in the game. Some of it is generated randomly, like Qud's history of past rulers, the Sultans. Then there's also static lore that remains the same each run, some of it about Qud, some of it about places that aren't Qud, and then some of it about space and world ending scenarios.
I suggest you look up some videos ... search for videos titled .. Lets Play Caves of Qud
In addition, not only the setting but also the game mechanism is sci-fi style. Of course that doesn't mean everything is strictly scientific, but it's more than just an RPG with sci-fi appearance.
My canned explanation for all my non-roguelike gamer friends who'll never play it, when they ask what the fsck I'm even talking about when this game comes up, is that it takes place in the far future's far future. The setting actually takes such a foreground that I tell my friends that Qud is effectively the main character of the game, and the story is getting to know Qud piece by rust-stained piece.
Basically, it's post-apocalyptic in that sense where "the apocalypse" was so far in the past nobody even knows about it anymore, and the world is completely transformed by what, to the player, is obviously human artifice but which isn't obvious to anyone without that point of past reference.
The world is teeming with transgenic, often sentient life-forms (and technologically sentience-graded inanimate objects of various provenances), mutated espers with spacetime vortices in their brains, and rampant, degraded robots. The geography of Qud is a vast mesa entangled in overgrown jungle, ensnared and ancient ruins, dominated to its north by greater mountains that feed its arterial rivers Svy, Opal, and Yonth, and by a cyclopean space-elevator called the Spindle; vast sterile tracts known as the Deathlands where organic life cannot thrive are in its southeast, moved only by ancient lunatic machines; and to the west, in the protective shade of Qud's mesa, shallow marshes rim the Great Salt Desert, a vast crackled basin that once housed a large ocean, howling and hollow, bleached and sallowed by hyper-saline crust and parched electric by the diamond salt sun.
There are conclaves of scholars and tinkers who know more about technology and history than anyone else, but most people in this world are just surviving. The cultures of Qud stand between fulfilling the needs of the present (farmers, merchants, monks, marauders) and a fascination with the chromaic splendours of a mesmerising, murky prehistory when the world was peopled by the near mythical Eaters of Earth (hints of our far-future, hyper-advanced descendants).
The geology of the world is honeycombed with arcologies; when the "apocalypse" struck, the Eaters retreated into sealed and domed worlds. But the situation outside only progressed from bad to worse, and the arcologies went from shelters to socieities, and then, one-by-one, began to fail. Technologies broke down, seals were breached, custodial AIs became unreliable, long hermetically isolated cultures imploded. The machines stopped. Famine, pestilence, conquest, and death visited the arcologies almost all in time, seeing them from isolated worlds-upon-worlds into thousands of kilometres of gleaming mass graves, the titular Caves of Qud. These sparkle with technology beyond compare in the historical welter of the surface; wealth beyond measure.
Only a handful of arcologies near to Qud survived, and all those did so by opening themselves to the outside world eventually. Imagine the mouse utopia experiments playing out a thousand thousand times and a handful of them surviving. Their inhabitants (who are also playable) call themselves the True Kin, and are most like the Eaters physically, had the Eaters been entombed together in microcosm for thousands of years, mutating culturally into highly metastable caste systems.
Unlike the Mutated Human type of player character, the True Kin have access to advanced cybernetics (since their genotype is close enough to that of the Eaters that the species-keyed nanocybernetics are still compatible with them), making them decidedly more grounded in their play style than the Mutanted Humans with their psychic brain lasers, photosynthetic green skin, and ability to transcend spacetime in order to cannibalistically devour their parallel universe twin for sustenance when lost in the desert.
Yeah it's a pretty good old world, Qud.
The music is also really well done, excellent atmosphere. I feel like it evokes exactly the same feelings I get from reading the story bits and dialog. It's really poetic and beautiful. And so is the randomly generated stuff, which is often also hilarious.
If you like the setting, this might just be a roguelike you'll be sticking to for many many hours. And I hope you like roguelikes, because this one is true to the definition.
100% agree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQS3IaR1NVU