The Era After Lore Guide
Introduction
The Era After is a non-canon universe set hundreds of years after an apocalypse has devastated the world of Vitubia, brought on by the sudden unexplained disappearance of all chuubas (making chuubanite worthless in the process).
This guide is meant to explain the overall look of the world and setting so that people who want to read wish or write stories/lore in the timeline can have a better grasp on the background knowledge.
Anyone who wishes to write a story taking place in The Era After is free to do so! People representing their generals know more about their lore than I do (I'm still going through the already-made lore docs) and I personally wouldn't mind at all to see their take on it (though I highly recommend reading the rest of this guide first).
Culture, religion and language
By the start of The Era After, the world of Vitubia has become almost unrecognizable from its former self. In the chaos which followed the apocalypse, many libraries, texts and other repositories of information had been buried deep or destroyed. Those who lived through the calamity could only tell stories of the world before to their children, with the hopes that they would pass them on to their children, and so on.
However, humans are flawed. When conveying long bits of information to others, they tend to forget certain details, misremember others, and even sometimes add in new ones. As seen in the game of telephone, these errors tend to stack up as the messages are further passed on, leading to a distorted result at the end.
The passing down of tradition and culture over generations is no different. After hundreds of years of change, details and stories about the past have strayed from the truth. Capital cities become lost palaces of ancient legend. Alliances between nations turn into pantheons of goddesses. Simple customs transform into entire moral codes, and what were originally mere jests about chuubas become serious rituals of appeasement.
This principle, in a way, also affects language itself. As the world population became much more isolated, sound changes would begin to propagate throughout the land. The few languages of the land gradually split into many. Writing a changing language, however, can be difficult, so I recommend not stressing too much about it if you don't want to represent that.
Political state of the world
While the exact type of authority from place to place (assuming there even is any authority, which often isn't present in many remote areas) greatly varies, the trend is that the time of great nations has long been over. In its place, splintered and shattered societies come and go, build up and fall apart, and feud among themselves for whatever purpose one is willing to shed blood for.
Man's ambition to dominate and conquer, however, remains untempered. Very slowly (as in, in terms of decades and centuries), authority is beginning to be restored and centralized in the world, but it will be many many years before anything rivaling the nations of old ever forms again.
Some of the more common types of government in the Era After are as follows:
Tribal government:
Led by some chief or shaman, small tribes dot and fill the lands of Vitubia, being especially present in less-developed areas. Tribes are often named after some sort of ancient place, goddess, or geographical feature, which may be incorporated into their tribal religion. While some tribes are static and sedentary, many tribes are nomadic in nature; these types of tribes tend to join together and split apart frequently, making it hard to create any definite list of them.
Small corpos:
Scattered throughout the world are self-proclaimed "idol corporations", which hold small to medium sized patches of territory and administrate them directly. The exact purpose and structure of their administration differ from corpo to corpo, but in general they are not as free market capitalistic as their pre-apocalypse predecessors; instead, they operate more as a mix between a theocracy and a consumerist state. The objects of the population's worship are typically their "very own idols", who are often just mortal figureheads compared to the ones of the past which ruled entire nations. It is very important to note that these idols are recruited from the local population. They have no connection to the realms beyond the physical, and thus no chuubanite is activated. The idols of the Era After are not real idols, but rather pale shadows and imitations of the missing goddesses from so long ago, attempting to fill a gap which cannot be fixed.
Independent villages:
With the fall of the sovereign state which they once resided in, many villages and hamlets in the countryside have turned to themselves for governance, opting to take matters into their own hands rather than wait for somebody to remember them. Isolated from the outside world save for some wandering traders passing by, many inhabitants of these settlements live their lives from start to finish within the village borders, unwilling to brave the dangerous and unknown outside world that lies beyond the comforting walls and/or guard posts of their birthplace.
Rump remnant states:
Some cultures have resisted the natural course of fragmentation throughout the ages, an impressive feat that only the most stable of them could manage. This, however, does not mean their nation has survived unscathed. The influence and expanse of these cultures have significantly declined, akin to IRL states such as the late Byzantine Empire. In addition, their now chuuba-less governments may have undergone radical changes from their pre-apocalypse times, distancing them from the traditions of old which once defined them.
These are just a few examples of types of government in the Era After. There are many more that could possibly exist in the world, so get creative!
Schizos
I think a clarification is needed about schizos here. While one might interpret post-apocalyptic Vitubia as a planet totally dominated and ruled by schizos, I do not interpret it that way at all.
Imagine if all chuubas IRL disappeared at once, with no drama. /vt/ would be overrun with schizos at first, but in time, over years as the news fade away, many if not most schizos would get bored and leave. I think something like this would happen in Vitubia.
Schizos of the Era After remain distinct from normal humans (perhaps they could even be treated as a closely related species like Neanderthals), but in general schizos have mellowed out from what they once were. Some schizos may keep together and establish their own secular nations, while others may assimilate into the culture they were previously influencing/infiltrating and interbreed.
Make no mistake, the schizos are still more insane than regular humans, and in the northern wastelands, many of the far-gone schizos continue their life of madness (anti-chuubanite is still a thing), but overall, the power and influence of schizos have greatly decreased. In addition, trolls are still around and dangerous (though maybe in lesser numbers).
The Rrats, once a tool of destruction, have weakened into a simple local communication link between minds. Now that there are no chuubas, the main purpose of Rrats is for the most part a relic one.
Technology
In the original /vtwbg/ lore, the level of technology in the land of Vitubia tends to vary depending on the general, but I imagine centuries of knowledge degradation, rapid change and global loss of order would cause technology around the world to regress to at least a certain degree.
As a general guideline, most places would have the technology of the Early Middle Ages with some relatively modern influence. For example, if a nation had made concrete before the apocalypse, their descendants may know how to make a primitive version of it. The knowledge of how to refine and improve the concrete, however, would have to be independently rediscovered. The influence of modern tech shouldn't go too far - it is plausible someone can reinvent the cannon, but personal firearms are in my opinion much too implausible.
Some exceptions (such as /nasa/ and /nasfaqg/) can apply to this guideline, but I recommend that at least some level of technological setback should happen no matter what.
What happened to the chuubas? Will they ever come back?
I won't say why the chuubas actually disappeared, because it's better that way. Religions in the Era After which believe that the gods and goddesses at one point lived among their people (as opposed to always having been in their own place) give different explanations on why that isn't the case anymore, such as battles killing their mortal shells or their ancestors having sinned to the point where the gods abandoned them.
"Canonically" (as canon as you can get in a non-canon timeline), the chuubas do not return (or at least do not return for a long, long, long while). This doesn't mean that you can't write a story about them returning, I myself am curious about that! It just means that it would be a non-canon story in an already non-canon universe - and there's nothing wrong with that.