Hey all, I'm building/running a campagin right now that has what I think is a really interesting premise that I don't have the expertise to flesh out as fully as I'd like. There is a lot of home-town building and reclaiming hostile land and restoring lost technologies to make life easier for the cities of the world.

I've hand-waved races as just reskinning everything as human. For example, a player could mechanically play as an orc but narratively they're a big strong human. I don't like dealing with the awkwardness of saying "civilized races" or something similar.

The premise is this: Humanity is on the back foot after a golden age of steam-arcana-punk advancements. A thousand (or more) years ago the best and brightest of humanity built a machine to escape the plane to search out the gods, who themselves left the world to pursue higher existance.In this vacuum, monsters began to besiege humanity. The devices and tech/magic left behind by the ascended humans were enough to keep the monsters at bay. Humanity grew complacent with their technologies and once they fell into disrepair, the monsters prevailed and humanity was thrown out of cities and had to adapt to a nomadic, humanistic lifestyle.

About 10 years before the start of the campagin, a group of heroes somehow gathered enough power to create footholds within the cities that allowed people to settle them. Now, humanity is finally able to start rebuilding and shifting from a nomadic lifestyle to permanant settlements. This comes with its own problems, especially politically.

I have a "What really happened" document outlying the creation of the world and the shifting of the Ages, but as time does, the myths and legends of various cultures are a little off. The afterlife is especially interesting to me, and is linked with the overwhelming scourge of monsters.

The villiage/town the players find themselves in have a stable food source in rice fields, but everything is done by hand. No animals of labor, only a surplus of sheep left over from the nomadic times.

The expertise I lack is in homesteading and the layouts of modern useful buildings. My players have encountered their first issue, which is a contaminated water supply. This lead them upstream to an ancient dam; inside this dam they'll find an broken advanced magical water filtration system that essentially copies samples of water as it passes through a 'filter'. For example, if the sample was potable water with, say, flouride in it, any lake water passing through the filter would be potable water with flouride in it. It also has hydro-electric-magical capabilities but they're way far off from making that usable. I'm trying to think of steam/arcane punk buildings and technological advances that a ruined city would have. I have a few, but I was hoping for someone to point out obvious things that I've missed.

Also I have no idea what the layout of a useful dam would be. If anyone has blueprints beyond what some youtube tours of a dam provides, I'm fully accepting them.

I'm also not great at actually writing things down that I think of, so any questions someone has would be nice for me to flesh out the world. If it sounds interesting to you, I can share the master document that outlines the religion and afterlife in more detail.

Thanks!

If you're looking just for examples of buildings that might contain things the players might need to quest after, I'd think hospitals, museums, laboratories, temples, prisons, granaries/warehouses, libraries, universities,  airship ports, etc would be plenty ripe for exploration. Though maybe for some fun exploration on the player's part, maybe they don't necessarily go in knowing that the ruin they're exploring used to be a hospital, instead some of the ruins they just discover "hey, all these beds lining these wards, I think this used to be a hospital!"

As far as "homesteading", I wouldn't worry about it too much beyond what your players can do to help in their capacity as adventurers and explorers. Think resources the town can't get for themselves: they need to repair the wall around town, but the only metal strong enough to hold is part of a museum piece in bandit territory. Or, we have a ton of wood but little food, could the adventurers find a way through the wilderness to the next settlement and convince them to trade food with us? Focus on tangible goals for the players and they'll see the town grow and change organically, rather than i dunno developing a random number generator to tell you how crops are going or how often you get raided by bandits. Focus on content for the players.

As far as getting blueprints for a hydroelectric dam, I don't think you necessarily need to go that hard. I'd just approach it as dungeon design. Take its original function into account, describe rooms with banks of what look like arcane focus arrays and magitek computer terminals and whatnot, and also take into account its present use (if any). Has a wyvern made its nest at the top, leaving bones and desiccated carcasses strewn about the once-pristine facility? Has a clan of goblins taken up residence, converting the main reactor into a temple, worshipping it? Then, consider, how has the structure of the dam physically changed over the millenia? Passageways collapsed? Floors with gaping chasms in the middle? Areas where leaking magical energy has created strange hazards or traps? Once you factor in all those potential changes,  it shouldn't too closely resemble the original blueprint anyways, so I'd just focus on designing the dungeon. Cause really, that's what most dungeons are anyways: strongholds from ages past now changed from their original purpose and full of strange new dangers. 

I can't help on the specifics of the dam, but a thought for creating a salvage framework could be to have a "global" way of assigning a tech-level to different sites and buildings. The tech level would indicate something about what type of salvageable components could be retrieved in such an area. 

Depending on your level of detail, you could then create roll tables for salvage components that can ultimately be combined to (re-)establish certain aspects of infrastructure for a city. 

 I did have hospitals, but mostly because the God of Constitution was really into helping humanity perfect their health.

The city they find themselves in did specialize in food production and outsourcing to other places, but I had always thought of their method of transportation as some kind of subway tunnel system; airship docks are something I should have considered. Magical granaries would be awesome as well, with laboratories focusing on crop growth.

I had an ancient cult ruin deep into the mountains that were dedicated to shielding themselves from the Wisdom/ All-seeing god. I think it's fun to give them a lot of conflicting information on the deities. I have plans for the discovery of fan-fic type religious documents that I think will be fun.

I had plans to give stat blocks to the different factions and have them roll on their projects to see how the town was doing, then the players could figure out how to enforce or cover the other factions. Or debilitate them, if it were politically advantageous. I was also inspired by A Quiet Year for world-building but really lite about it, with projects having statuses until completion. Also the book "How to Invent Everything" by Ryan North was a big inspiration for this type of civilization building. Very fun read and great for getting milestones for technology.

I was planning on loosely outlining the dam and throwing in those types of hazards to fit. I just don't have a great grasp on what a dam is like, hence the blueprints.

I'm a big fan of the salvaging idea, too. I'll definitely incorporate that.